http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/methods-for-studying-coincidences/ With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurrences a day and close to 100,000 such occurrences a year. Going from a year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5… ]]> Mon, 21 May 2012 10:44:39 -0700 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/methods-for-studying-coincidences/ http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic//an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic-beyond-the-beyond-wiredcom The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable : http://t.co/0uTYTcth ]]> Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:02:38 -0700 http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic//an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic-beyond-the-beyond-wiredcom http://m.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1/the-forgetting-pill-erases-painful-memories-forever-wired-magazine-wiredcom "In the very near future the act of remembering will become a choice." : http://t.co/L0ezh0nu #memory ]]> Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:21:22 -0700 http://m.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1/the-forgetting-pill-erases-painful-memories-forever-wired-magazine-wiredcom http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which had to do with the physical mysteries of everyday human experience. Rohrer spoke about his late grandfather, a colorful man who served as mayor of a small town in Ohio and left behind a legacy that soon turned into legends—the house he had built and the interstate whose path he had altered, forcing it to swerve around his town. (“It’s like my grandfather’s dogleg,” Rohrer said, putting up a… ]]> Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:03:46 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:43:51 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 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.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/miniature-horses/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29 The world’s smallest horse was born in late April on a farm in New Hampshire. Weighing in at 6 pounds at birth, Einstein appears to have beaten the previous record holder by three whole pounds.

But Einstein probably won’t hold his place in the Guinness Book of World Records forever, because there may be no limit to how tiny we can make our horses, said equine geneticist Samantha Brooks of Cornell University. But to get teacup horses will take many generations of breeding.

“In the last 50 years, breeders have made very good progress… ]]> Tue, 04 May 2010 02:41:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/miniature-horses/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/all/1 The story of Google’s algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page’s now legendary insight was to rate pages based on the number and importance of links that pointed to them — to use the collective intelligence of the Web itself to determine which sites were most relevant. It was a simple and powerful concept, and — as Google quickly became the most successful search engine on the Web — Page and cofounder Sergey Brin credited PageRank as their company’s fundamental innovation. But that wasn’t the… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:56:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/all/1 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world. The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired's IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to "delete unneeded files from the shared folders"—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we're good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those… ]]> Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:37:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_opensource_wired0616 Not long ago mass media was about the only kind of culture there was. The lucky few creative works that made it into general circulation were what copyright law was supposed to cultivate and protect. In the words of Harvard Law School intellectual law professor William Fisher, copyright "provides incentives for creative activities that otherwise would not occur." The dirty secret of mass media, though, was — and still is — that a great deal of it belongs to the companies that distribute it, rather than to the people who make it. That's begun to change as the internet rewrites… ]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:08:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_opensource_wired0616