http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else. ]]> Fri, 24 Sep 2010 07:38:00 -0700 http://www.scribd.com/doc/38073480/J-G-Ballard-reviews-Chris-Marker-s-La-Jetee http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Dead-Now-What-/123759/ Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the capacity to act? Put differently, if someone chooses to immortalize me in lyric, will I get to sing along?

Extremely odd queries of this sort kept leaping to mind as I perused four recently released books about the afterlife. Two examine what science has to say about the possibility that we persevere even after our bodies have ceased to function. One amasses perceptions of heaven and hell… ]]> Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:29:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Youre-Dead-Now-What-/123759/ http://www.scaryforkids.com/who-goes-there-by-john-w-campbell/ Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written, and published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. The novella has twice been adapted as a motion picture: firstly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World and later in 1982 as The Thing. ]]> Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:46:00 -0700 http://www.scaryforkids.com/who-goes-there-by-john-w-campbell/ http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15124974 WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas Wade recalls the place where he first felt sanctity: Eton College chapel.

The “beauty of holiness” in a British private school is a far cry from the sort of religion that later came to interest him as a science journalist at Nature magazine and then the New York Times. To examine the roots of religion, he says, it is important to look at human beginnings. The… ]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:52:00 -0700 http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15124974