http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation-book-of-the-year-2011-our-annual-top-ten-list-of-p2p-books/2012/01/09/p2p-foundation-blog-archive-the-p2p-foundation-books-of-the-year-2011-our-annual-top-ten-list-of-p2p-books the ten best p2p books of 2011, our annual selection at the P2P Foundation, David Graeber's Debt is #1 http://t.co/RM8ZMuWh ]]> Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:36:05 -0700 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-p2p-foundation-book-of-the-year-2011-our-annual-top-ten-list-of-p2p-books/2012/01/09/p2p-foundation-blog-archive-the-p2p-foundation-books-of-the-year-2011-our-annual-top-ten-list-of-p2p-books http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/6243684487/man-is-not-cat-food In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group… ]]> Sun, 12 Jun 2011 08:12:05 -0700 http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/6243684487/man-is-not-cat-food http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/artificial-ape-technology-timothy-taylor There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire), sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind). Now, Timothy Taylor, reader in archaeology at the University of Bradford, makes a claim for technology in general and, in particular, the invention of the baby sling – not, as you may have thought, in the 1960s but more than 2m years ago.

All these theories and speculations are in truth complementary facets of an emerging Grand Universal Theory of… ]]> Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:20:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/artificial-ape-technology-timothy-taylor http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/06/losing-our-minds-to-the-web/ Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US (and will be published in Britain by Atlantic in September). It is an expanded version of an essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” printed in the Atlantic magazine in 2008, which struck a chord with several groups. Those worrying about Google’s growing hold on our culture felt Carr was justified in going after it (though there was little about the search giant in the article). Those concerned with the… ]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:50:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/06/losing-our-minds-to-the-web/ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/books/review/Galchen-t.html Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.

And problematic as well. More than any other 20th-century figure, Borges is the one designated — and often dismissed as — the Platonic… ]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:17:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/books/review/Galchen-t.html http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/06/20/tom_bissell_extra_lives_interview_ext2010/index.html Video games have come a very long way since the 1980s... As Tom Bissell, a journalist, former Salon writer and lifelong gamer, explains in his new book, "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter," the graphics, storytelling and interactivity of gaming have all made tremendous leaps forward in recent years, allowing players to intermingle with nuanced, fleshed-out digital characters in near-photo-realistic environments. Among the most notable recent examples is Rockstar's "Red Dead Redemption," a game the New York Times hailed as a "tour de force" for its ability to submerge players in a complex and believable world. In his book, Bissell… ]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:02:00 -0700 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/06/20/tom_bissell_extra_lives_interview_ext2010/index.html http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/ In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:11:00 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/the-book-is-dead-long-live-the-book/article1608823/ In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And lo, the end was nigh. And loudly did the literati bewail the Death of the Word. But then those clever girls revealed their true intent. Mere moments after the emergence of the so-called keitai novel, heralded worldwide as a revolutionary blow against the hoary tradition of the literary elites, this exciting new creature morphed like a perverse genie into plain old paperback form, where it now fights for shelf… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:13:00 -0700 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/the-book-is-dead-long-live-the-book/article1608823/ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL 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 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/how_we_read_an_investigation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ifbook+%28if%3Abook%29 A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms. What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through… ]]> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:55:00 -0700 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/how_we_read_an_investigation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ifbook+%28if%3Abook%29 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/10/whos-afraid-of-the-avant-garde/ There's a reason why we find it easier to "get" modern art than avant-garde music, and it's not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart... Arts & books Who’s afraid of the avant-garde? Philip Ball 21st October 2009 — Issue 164 Free entry There's a reason why we find it easier to "get" modern art than avant-garde music, and it's not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99) The writer… ]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:53:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/10/whos-afraid-of-the-avant-garde/ http://metaloca.com/london/review/ Reviews of major exhibitions currently open in London. A Meta-Space containing them all ]]> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:21:00 -0700 http://metaloca.com/london/review/ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6739960.ece One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false". Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of… ]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:20:00 -0700 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6739960.ece