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Twitter Links Did a Copying Mistake Build Man's Brain? | LiveScience

Did a Copying Mistake Build Man's Brain? : http://t.co/EmOiHNia #consciousness #error #mutation #evolution

May 5 2012, 5:10am | Comments

Twitter Links Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?

The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February…

April 20 2012, 7:36am | Comments

Twitter Links THEORY BEYOND THE CODES: Doing with Icons makes Symbols; or, Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface

Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts…

April 18 2012, 12:29am | Comments

Twitter Links Tumblr ❤ GIFs

What is it about small, repetitive moving images that everyone is so crazy about on Tumblr? Animated GIFs have been circling the web since…

April 14 2012, 8:37am | Comments

Twitter Links Google searches made by a 82 year old man = @oldmansearch : Existential twitter genius

Twitter, that endless and obscure runway of missives; the burden of proof that mankind is nearing the atonement of its vapidity and carelessness, has…

April 14 2012, 8:37am | Comments

Twitter Links Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

“Two revolutionary advances in information technology may bring the Turing test out of retirement,” wrote Robert French, a cognitive scientist at the French National…

April 14 2012, 8:37am | Comments

Twitter Links The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder

The New Aesthetic is an art movement obsessed with the otherness of computer vision and information processing. But Ian Bogost asks: why stop at…

April 14 2012, 8:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Large study shows little difference between human and robot essay graders

The differences, across a number of different brands of automated essay scoring software (AES) and essay types, were minute. “The results demonstrated that over…

April 13 2012, 7:30am | Comments

Twitter Links Just how big are porn sites?

"It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet" It is a truth universally…

April 10 2012, 8:06am | Comments

Twitter Links Journal of Digital Humanities

The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital…

April 9 2012, 4:24am | Comments

Twitter Links Buying the Body of Christ

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Twitter Links The Mastery of Non-Mastery

There are two types of anthropologists: One models himself on the scientist, treating the world as his laboratory, people as his raw data. He…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Twitter Links Rorschmap

Fractal, rorsch patterns in Google maps

April 7 2012, 4:04pm | Comments

Twitter Links Free Will and “Free Will” : How my view differs from Daniel Dennett's : Sam Harris

I have noticed that some readers continue to find my argument about the illusoriness of free will difficult to accept. Apart from religious believers…

April 7 2012, 4:04pm | Comments

Twitter Links Bespoke pets: Just press “print” | The Economist

Thanks to 3D printing, it will soon be possible to design and build household animals to order. GeneDupe’s Universal Pet Printer is loaded with…

April 5 2012, 3:02am | Comments

Twitter Links An Essay on the New Aesthetic

The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. If aesthetics could be hacked like…

April 5 2012, 3:02am | Comments

Twitter Links The Making of The Rings of Saturn

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was already in his fiftieth year, and his third decade of residence…

April 5 2012, 3:02am | Comments

Twitter Links Next What?

Technology is never a neutral tool. It is rather a socio-cultural dimension... Next Nature “refers to the nature produced by humans and their technology.”…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Twitter Links Should we clone Neanderthals?

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Twitter Links Daphne Koller: when machines are almost human

The world is entering an age of superabundant data. We’re spewing out masses of information: from credit card charges to consumer shopping patterns and…

April 4 2012, 1:42am | Comments

Twitter Links Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask

To most of us data mining goes something like this: tons of data is collected, then quant wizards work their arcane magic, and then…

April 3 2012, 2:33pm | Comments

Twitter Links Digging in the Gates: The Digital Socratic Shift

If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability…

April 3 2012, 12:26pm | Comments

Twitter Links Atheists as "Other": Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership - http://t.co/ePMMKhgW #PDF via @3qd

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits…

March 30 2012, 7:00am | Comments

Twitter Links Marx at 193

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an…

March 29 2012, 3:17pm | Comments

Twitter Links The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000 Recordings

A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s have been digitized…

March 29 2012, 12:50pm | Comments

Twitter Links Art in the Era of the Internet (and Why Open Education Matters)

During the late 1990s, when the internet first boomed, we talked a lot about creative destruction — about how old businesses would collapse, making…

March 29 2012, 1:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Bacteria Use ‘Chemical Twitter’ and ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ to Make Decisions

In life-threatening conditions, microbes use game theory to account for neighbors’ decisions and work out their best tactics for survival. New research presented at…

March 27 2012, 2:06pm | Comments

Twitter Links Oldest Alien Planets Found—Born at Dawn of Universe

Two huge planets found orbiting a star 375 light-years away are the oldest alien worlds yet discovered, scientists say. With an estimated age of…

March 27 2012, 2:05pm | Comments

Twitter Links Gamers Outdo Computers at Matching Up Disease Genes

An excellent example of distributed cognition. The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost…

March 27 2012, 7:58am | Comments

Twitter Links Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph and the dystopian sci-fi rut.

Should sci-fi be less dystopian and more upbeat? What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz,…

March 23 2012, 5:07am | Comments

Twitter Links Does It Matter Whether God Exists?

Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God…

March 23 2012, 1:51am | Comments

Twitter Links Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible" The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature.…

March 21 2012, 9:35am | Comments

Twitter Links The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values

The most influential contribution of the Enlightenment to modern thought, after its transformation of religious toleration from a negative to a positive value, was…

March 20 2012, 11:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language

"Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth,…

March 20 2012, 11:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Borges: The Task of Art

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links God and the New Physics by Paul Davies

This is not a book about God: it is a book about what was in 1983 the new physics , by a distinguished scientist…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links When independent thought flourishes

One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links This is what a week-long car crash looks like

"With a dramatic inevitability that reflects our own mortality, over the course of the month, the car is eventually destroyed,"

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links Interactive Fluid Dynamics Rendered in ASCII

March 17 2012, 4:54am | Comments

Twitter Links Makego iPhone app blurs boundaries between digital and physical play

Makego is another great example of the boundaries blurring between digital and physical play. The app was released in February 2012 by British artist…

March 16 2012, 11:14am | Comments

Twitter Links Arthur Schopenhauer on Noise

This aversion to noise I should explain as follows: If you cut up a large diamond into little bits, it will entirely lose the…

March 13 2012, 4:20am | Comments

Twitter Links Crazy Friend by Jonathan Lethem

Where Philip K. Dick had come from, for me, was my best friend’s Jake’s dad, Harry. Harry was younger than Jake’s mom, and when…

March 12 2012, 12:50am | Comments

Twitter Links Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?

Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most…

March 11 2012, 5:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Behold Wesley Crusher: Teenage F*** Machine, the Amazon Kindle's new hottest book

Over the past several days, a certain Star Trek: The Next Generation prose piece has ensnared the popular imagination the world over. It's a…

March 11 2012, 5:35am | Comments