MachineMachine /stream

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Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages,…

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One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical…

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently…

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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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These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion,…

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A recent study provides intriguing information about the neural dynamics underlying behavioral changes associated with the development of new problem solving strategies. The research... supports the idea of "a-ha" moments…

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The genomes of most modern humans are 1–4% Neanderthal — a result of interbreeding with the close relatives that went extinct 30,000 years ago, according to work by an international…

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...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

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Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules: * Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. * Never…

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Two reports of chimpanzees tending their dead provide poignant examples of how humanity’s closest relatives grieve for the dead, a behavior once thought unique to humans. In one report, two…

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Archaic humans such as Neanderthals may be gone but they're not forgotten — at least not in the human genome. A genetic analysis of nearly 2,000 people from around the…

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This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings…

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The new species of hominid, the evolutionary branch of primates that includes humans, is to be revealed when the two-million-year-old skeleton of a child is unveiled this week. Scientists believe…

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For much of the past five million to seven million years over which humans have been evolving, multiple species of our forebears co-existed. But eventually the other lineages went extinct,…

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When the scientists tested the mind’s eye of MX, though, the difference was stark. The researchers gave all their subjects a standardized test called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.…

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A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War…

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A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Andrew…

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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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As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It…

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Some animals can instinctively solve navigational problems that have baffled humans for centuries. Now, researchers are uncovering how. The nervous system of the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, with around 100,000…

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

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by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to…

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Get sucked in

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Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about…

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The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is…

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by Bertolt Brecht In our society one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to conquer their market and justify their existence; in other words discoveries that have not…

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Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute…