http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49723 Marclay assembled his edit in hour-long chunks, the 24-hour cycle giving him enormous scope, but also confining him to a minute-by-minute grid. “A 10.01 clip has to be within that minute, at 10.01,” he says. “But within that minute I can place it anywhere – a minute is long in film, or it can be very fast. Then, in between, I have these joints – scenes that are not time-specific, but have to relate to the previous clip and the next one and articulate those fragments and create a flow. What I put in those joints is very much personal… ]]> Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:57:00 -0700 http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49723 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/my-24-hours-of-watching-the-clock/article2330118/singlepage/#articlecontent It’s time. The winged chariot at my back, and all that. Taking a seat on one of the comfortable couches at the National Gallery in Ottawa, I mentally strap myself in. It’s time to take a time bath, to run a time marathon, by watching Christian Marclay’s 24-hour-long installation, The Clock, in a single sitting. The artist doesn’t actually recommend it, but an artwork of this size demands a big response. The piece is an exercise in surrendering oneself to controlled chance, a precisely edited jumble of visual material, classic films, forgotten mediocrities and television shows, without context or backstory,… ]]> Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:46:18 -0700 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/my-24-hours-of-watching-the-clock/article2330118/singlepage/#articlecontent http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers, which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, ... a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised.… ]]> Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:28:23 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses ]]> Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:35:21 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/01/nature-nurture-and-liberal-values-roger-scruton-jesse-prinz-david-eagleman-neuroscience/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/18/study-shows-that-kids-unlike-adults-think-technology-is-fundamentally-human/ With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds a heck of a lot better than answering true/false questions out of a booklet. Clearly there are tons of new and interesting ways to learn, and technology is, in many ways, responsible for this. Taking a deeper look at the stories the children created, the survey found that unlike many adults who see technology as separate from humanness, it seems that “kids tend to think of technology as fundamentally human:… ]]> Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:13:06 -0700 http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/01/18/study-shows-that-kids-unlike-adults-think-technology-is-fundamentally-human/ http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government. Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism. We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy. Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising… ]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:32:57 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/michael_nielsen_reinventing_discovery.php The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Nielsen argues that networked digital tools, such as discussion boards and online marketplaces, can make it easier for scientists to pool their data, share methodologies, and find far-flung collaborators. Even non-scientists are participating in large-scale citizen science projects. In Nielsen’s view, however, public policy has yet to catch up to technology. The digital environment will amplify our collective intelligence, but only if there are incentives for people… ]]> Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:41:40 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/michael_nielsen_reinventing_discovery.php http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/01/lars-von-triers-melancholia-a-discussion/ Lars von Trier’s latest has been overshadowed by the director’s ill-judged comments at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. This is a pity because, as Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large NINA POWER and editor ROB WHITE discuss (resuming a dialogue begun here in regard to von Trier’s Antichrist), Melancholia is a rich, fascinating, and radical work. ]]> Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:07:49 -0700 http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/01/lars-von-triers-melancholia-a-discussion/ http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/17/its-only-humanist/ To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been used in the past as a touchstone for artists who measure their own vision against an anthropocentric one. “Greek art had a purely human conception of beauty,” Apollinaire wrote in an essay about a 1912 exhibition of Cubist painting. “It took man as the measure of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we… ]]> Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:16:49 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/aug/17/its-only-humanist/ http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720 The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been… ]]> Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:24:04 -0700 http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world when we use our perceptual habits to explain events that we can’t perceive or easily understand. Rather than accept the complexity of a situation—say, that snarl of causal interactions in the cholesterol pathway—we persist in pretending that we’re staring at a blue ball and a red ball bouncing off each other. There’s a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world. ]]> Tue, 20 Dec 2011 05:31:52 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html "I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions eat more and grow bigger than their country cousins. At the National Institute on Aging, as at every major research center, the animals are grouped in plastic cages the size of large shoeboxes, topped with a wire lid and a food hopper that's never empty of pellets. This form of husbandry, known as ad libitum feeding, is cheap and convenient since animal technicians need only check the hoppers from… ]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:34:32 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27379 Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce ]]> Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:35:04 -0700 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27379 http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/25/computer-that-thinks-like-universe/g1FKng74ydOH2B802BPY3N/story.html For years, excitement about quantum computing has been growing among scientists and tech visionaries. Quantum computers, if they succeed, promise to make a whole new range of problems accessible to computers, from breaking difficult codes to unlocking complicated biological processes now out of reach for even the fastest machines. ]]> Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:10:21 -0700 http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/25/computer-that-thinks-like-universe/g1FKng74ydOH2B802BPY3N/story.html http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically) but are quiescent until adulthood - during metamorphosis, these neurons put on their game face and start to do real work in adulthood. B) Some neurons are useful in larval life and not in adult life, and basically die during metamorphosis. C) Some neurons are useful in both larval and adult life, but do different things - so they basically retract their projections during metamorphosis and make new ones… ]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:50:03 -0700 http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mpqu2/what_happens_to_a_caterpillars_brain_during http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka's obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw… ]]> Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:34:28 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/tom-mccarthy-desktop?mobile-redirect=false http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way. The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating… ]]> Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:53:57 -0700 http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. ]]> Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:53:13 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s day had begun to place much greater stress on the humanity of Christ, and would soon introduce a new feast day, Corpus Christi, into the calendar to encourage contemplation of his physical sufferings. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood. Indeed, the contemporary obsession with the marks of crucifixion may best… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:07:55 -0700 http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/the-mystery-of-the-five-wounds-ready-to-go/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/ As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his colleagues managed to extract some fragments of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil–by coincidence, the very first Neanderthal discovered in 1857. The DNA was of a special sort. Along with the bulk of our genes, which are located in the nucleus of our cells, we also carry bits of DNA in jellybean-shaped structures called mitochondria. Since there are hundreds of mitochondria in each cell, it’s easier to grab fragments of… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:09:18 -0700 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/