MachineMachine /stream - tagged with time

Why Does Our Universe Have Three Dimensions?

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:35:56 -0700

So you know, why the universe has three dimensions http://t.co/ak3XQF8E

John Frankenheimer's "Seconds"

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:21:35 -0700

Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) is a disturbing film to watch. With its unresolved, horrific ending, it’s possibly one of the most depressing films ever made [SPOILER].

Cross-section of a tree played like a record on a turntable

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:54:06 -0700

Cross section of a tree played like a record on a turntable (via @boingboing) http://t.co/GRnvPszB

Rereading Darwin

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:06:23 -0700

The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.”) http://t.co/51DRe7oS #Darwin

a floating fire ant raft is pushed down on the surface of water

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:49:57 -0700

The Era of Networked Science

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:41:40 -0700

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…

Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:35:04 -0700

Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

On A History of the World in 100 Objects

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:59:54 -0700

Objects 101 by Roger Sandall What interests me here however is something else—the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, he is on record as saying that it is his museum’s duty to “preserve the universality of the marbles and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol.” They belong to mankind, they are part of the human heritage, and though the Greeks may wish to regard them as an integral part of their national identity, the Greeks, alas, must be seen here as the deluded victims…

Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality?

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:58:44 -0700

It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong, good from evil; if it wasn’t for religion, apologists say, then the world would fall into a Hobbesian state of nature where violence prevails and moral codes fail. To reinforce this contention, they point out that Stalin, Hitler and Mao were atheists to force an illogical causal connection between what they did and what they believed. One way to answer the question of if religion makes people and the world…

Is mental time travel what makes us human?

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The…

The Cyberspace Real (Between Perversion and Trauma)

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:33:41 -0700

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship":…

Meaning/time=? [e-flux on Coked-Out, Motherless Robots]

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:29:59 -0700

Are we moving too fast for meaning? That’s the argument put together by Franco Berardi in his essay Time, Acceleration, and Violence, published on e-flux. It’s the latest in an expanding body of “are we moving too fast for…?” thinking, with meaning-as-victim following truth-as-victim (Zygmunt Bauman), character-as-victim (Richard Sennett), and promiscuity-as-victim (Miquel Brown). But does it make any sense? From what I understand, Berardi’s argument is that among the many ills caused by capitalism’s constant acceleration is an “inflation of meaning.” The increased production of symbols – aided, one assumes, by greater productivity among symbol-creators – has had roughly the…

Steven Pinker on the History and decline (and myth of) Violence

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:05:16 -0700

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of…

The Artist is Present (a video game about waiting in line at a museum)

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:39:30 -0700

Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes we stare at a blank white wall and recite the Declaration of Independence under our breath, other times we watch Lost in Translation. Now we have a new option: We can play The Artist is Present, a game about waiting in line at New York's Museum of Modern Art created by Pippin Barr.

Unfortunately for us, the game's backstory is pretty entertaining. Contemporary artist Marina Abramović held…

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 04:21:33 -0700

Traces of humanity

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:32:57 -0700

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…

Michel Serres's Milieux

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:49:58 -0700

There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’, which means ‘in the middle of it’ or ‘in the middle of things’. Actually, in common use, the phrase might be more idiomatically rendered as ‘right in the middle’: though this is a bizarre-enough phrase in itself. If it is really right in the middle, dead centre, as we also sometimes say, then why does the word used to signify this seem to have a list, in etymologically leaning to…

In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:49:08 -0700

Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.

Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume any stable ground on which to base metaphysical claims or foundational political myths. At best, we are faced with temporary, contingent, and partial attempts at grounding. But if there is no stable ground available for our social lives and philosophical aspirations, the consequence must be a permanent, or at least intermittent state of free fall for subjects and objects alike. But why don’t we notice?

The Neolithic Age is over!

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:36:11 -0700

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…

Off-putting behaviour: On Writing and Procrastination

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 01:52:34 -0700

When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God's sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive day making backup files, defragmenting already tidy hard drives, emailing, watching grainy online movies of cats falling over, or playing virtual patience. (I once tried a more sophisticated computer game and, after many months, managed to advance my character by one level and put him into a loop of crouching, rocking and saying, "Oh, no.") Nevertheless, I could still burn away whole pre-Amstrad weekends in keeping busy, rather than writing.…