MachineMachine /stream

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I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but…

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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,…

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Attempts to provide a taxonomy of game genres founder on the lack of consistent criteria, and usually have to be arbitrarily assigned. Connecting ‘shooters’ into a lineage suggests scrolling shooters…

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For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron…

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What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled…

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Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend…

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The historians of 2061 will want to study the birth of the world wide web. How on earth will they know where to start? Today, historians have to piece together…

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[ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues…

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R. Gerald Nelson’s DDDDoomed essay has been making the rounds lately and it sparked a healthy amount of curiosity and note-taking on my part that I felt I wanted to…

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In preparing paintings for the exhibition, the head of oil painting conservation noticed usual things about some of them, prompting her to X-ray, among others, 'A view of Pickersgill Harbour,…

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Download the bbc.closing.sites.archive.torrent file On Monday 24th January 2011 the BBC announced that it would be restructuring its online department - with 360 job losses and the deletion of 200…

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This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period…

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Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that…

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then maybe we should let dump.fm do the talking. The image-based chat service is the brainchild of Ryder Ripps and the result…

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Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.

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Scientists today who study polar sea ice conditions rely on satellite records reaching back to 1979. But soon, data scientists hope to extend the look back by another decade or…

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There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic. Back…

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Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be…

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Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod…

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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…

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From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of…

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In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient…

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A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard: 39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was…

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Researchers working in Japan say they might have the breakthrough archivists are praying for - a sealed permanent memory bank that will be easily readable now and far into the…

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For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount…

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Fantastic meat landscapes and animals made of machinery