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• Tumblr Don’t be a Materialist, be a Heroic Materialist

  January 31 2012, 6:05am | Comments

• Link What Immanuel Kant got right about digital piracy

  It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied…

  January 30 2012, 5:28pm | Comments

• Twitter Links Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

  We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural…

  January 29 2012, 4:05am | Comments

• Twitter Links The God gap

  Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

  January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

• Metafilter John Frankenheimer's "Seconds" 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].

  January 22 2012, 4:21pm | Comments

• Twitter Links Freud: The last great Enlightenment thinker

  Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is…

  January 22 2012, 12:07pm | Comments

• Twitter Links Rereading Darwin

  The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.” Two centuries before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of…

  January 17 2012, 6:06pm | Comments

• Metafilter Alan Moore's Masks: A Face to Face Alan Moore and David Lloyd designed it 30 years ago. The V for Vendetta mask appropriated by Occupy protesters the world over. The Guardian recently asked Alan what…

  January 13 2012, 9:20am | Comments

• Link The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

  The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes…

  December 22 2011, 1:24pm | Comments

• Twitter Links What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011

  Genetic hints of extinct human lineages — and the benefits we might have received from having sex with them — were among the discoveries…

  December 20 2011, 6:53pm | Comments

• Twitter Links I Was Kim Jong Il's Cook

  The author, who writes under a pseudonym, is a Japanese sushi chef. In 1982, at the invitation of a Japanese-North Korean trading company, he…

  December 19 2011, 10:35am | Comments

• Twitter Links Never go with a cultist to a second location

  On HP Lovecraft: Alex Fitch talks to Alan Moore about his final graphic novel that isn’t part of the continuing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…

  December 18 2011, 3:05am | Comments

• Twitter Links Worth a new Mass?

  How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?

  December 8 2011, 8:06am | Comments

• Instapaper It Does Take a Village

  It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That…

  December 1 2011, 4:37am | Comments

• Link Tom McCarthy: My desktop

  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…

  November 27 2011, 10:34am | Comments

• Link VideoGames can't tell stories

  Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator.…

  November 24 2011, 3:53am | Comments

• Link The Mystery of the Five Wounds

  Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St.…

  November 21 2011, 1:07pm | Comments

• Link On A History of the World in 100…

  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,…

  November 14 2011, 7:59am | Comments

• Link Computing Machinery and Intelligence (by Alan Turing)

  I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as…

  October 31 2011, 6:53am | Comments

• Tumblr Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable...

  October 31 2011, 6:42am | Comments

• Twitter Links On Victor Tausk's 'The Influencing Machine'

  Influencing Machines are described by their troubled inventors as complex structures, constructed of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.” Sometimes…

  October 25 2011, 3:21am | Comments

• Twitter Links On Distributed Communications Networks

  Paul Baran (1962)

  October 23 2011, 3:08pm | Comments

• Link The Constraint Histories of Digital Games

  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…

  October 19 2011, 3:25am | Comments

• Link Music moved on after modernism, but whatever happened…

  The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage. At the…

  October 12 2011, 9:54am | Comments

• Twitter Links Delusions of Peace

  Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

  October 6 2011, 2:37am | Comments

• Link The Cyberspace Real (Between Perversion and Trauma)

  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,…

  September 30 2011, 7:33am | Comments

• Metafilter Crusoe film adaptations and *that* footprint Robinson Crusoe film adaptations. Which are the best ones? Also, that footprint... For a project I am working on, I want to isolate the moment in Robinson Crusoe…

  September 29 2011, 5:31am | Comments

• Twitter Links A History Of Violence

  Steven Pinker Edge Master Class

  September 29 2011, 2:52am | Comments

• Instapaper Which one of you is Jesus?

  In 1959, Dr Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist, received a research grant to bring together three psychotic, institutionalised patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in…

  September 27 2011, 12:17am | Comments

• Twitter Links How the refrigerator got its hum

  The "history of technology is a history of failed machines; of routes we didn’t take, not the ones we did"

  September 26 2011, 4:54am | Comments

• Link The ancient cloud

  The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all.…

  September 24 2011, 8:50am | Comments

• Link Steven Pinker on the History and decline (and…

  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,…

  September 20 2011, 3:05am | Comments

• Twitter Links Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum

  Postmodernism: Was this pre-digital phenomenon killed off by the Internet?

  September 17 2011, 2:03am | Comments

• Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

  Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

  August 30 2011, 9:08am | Comments

• Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

  Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

  August 18 2011, 1:48am | Comments

• Link Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history

  By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago.…

  August 15 2011, 2:45am | Comments

• Link Digital tendencies

  From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a…

  August 12 2011, 4:59am | Comments

• Link Humanism / After Humanism

  n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like…

  August 11 2011, 11:30am | Comments

• Link Accuracy takes power: one man's 3GHz quest to…

  Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from…

  August 11 2011, 4:25am | Comments

• Link Brute force or intelligence? The slow rise of…

  When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian…

  August 8 2011, 8:39am | Comments

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• Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island
• The Creators Project interview: Sing Glitchy Karaoke Over The Web
• Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean
• RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2
• Thoughts on art practice PhDs
• And There It Was
• “Everything on the Face of the Earth”
• Digital Autonomy

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• Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island
• GLTI.CH Karaoke IV: Where Will You Sing?
• Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean
• RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2
• Thoughts on art practice PhDs
• And There It Was
• “Everything on the Face of the Earth”
• The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF GIF GIF)