MachineMachine /stream - tagged with message http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Traces of humanity http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space

Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the earth that nobody particularly intended to leave anywhere. But much of what we’ve left in space is intentional. Some of it is symbolic artifacts intended for an audience of people here on Earth - the fallen astronaut, the American flag on the moon, a CD containing a list of over half a million people who wanted to send their names to a comet, courtesy of a NASA… ]]> Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:32:57 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ The Neolithic Age is over! http://032c.com/2011/the-neolithic-age-is-over/ Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the fifth century BC, and even the Neolithic age. For example, if there are no more peasants today, when did peasantry ­begin? In the Neolithic age. We can now say that in the year 2000, the Neolithic age is over. But who announced this in the news­papers? We didn’t read in any paper that “the Neolithic age is over”!

And we are equipped in our thinking for this… ]]> Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:36:11 -0700 http://032c.com/2011/the-neolithic-age-is-over/ James Gleick’s History of Information http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:41:08 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html How to Make Anything Signify Anything http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire. A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fuelled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of… ]]> Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:17:39 -0700 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php Rancière’s Ignoramus http://machinemachine.net/text/arts/rancieres-ignoramus

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her knowledge, sign by sign, word by word, with the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her language:

“From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that… ]]> Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:43:36 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/arts/rancieres-ignoramus A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/a-diatribe-from-the-remains-of-dr-fred-mccabe.html

by Daniel Rourke

About a month ago in handling the remains of one Dr. Fred McCabe I found rich notes of contemplation on the subject of information theory. It appears that Fred could have written an entire book on the intricacies of hidden data, encoded messages and deceptive methods of transmission. Instead his notes exist in the form of a cryptic assemblage of definitions and examples, arranged into what Dr. McCabe himself labelled a series of ‘moments’.

I offer these moments alongside some of the ten thousand images Dr. McCabe amassed in a separate, but intimately…

]]> Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/a-diatribe-from-the-remains-of-dr-fred-mccabe.html Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:44:00 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26