MachineMachine /stream

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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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Berry’s book is less one specific philosophical argument of what software is and what code does, but consists of chapters that illuminate different ways one can approach software and software…

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So far, the WikiLeaks story has been represented as a struggle between WikiLeaks and the US empire: is the publishing of confidential US state documents an act in support of…

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Like a disowned half-brother the Neanderthals keep hammering on our door, forcing us to face inconvenient truths. In the nineteenth century, fossil remains of powerful, thickset, short-necked human-like creatures with…

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What do scientists think about seeing their fields of research pulverized by science fiction? We asked researchers from diverse fields to tell us whether any science fiction gets it right.…

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Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book…

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Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and…

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There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire),…

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A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not…

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The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction.…

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In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life…

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A lot of game critics you talk to will tell you that, after making a career of playing games, it takes a lot to impress them. But that's not exactly…

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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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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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Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the…

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After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard…

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By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a…

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This is the Only Level is a 2D platformer in which you have to guide a boldly unanimated elephant over a series of pits, some of which are filled with…

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Simon Faithfull's exhibition Gravity Sucks and his recent talk at the British Film Institute focuses largely around his examination of that most elementary of forces we experience. What Wikipedia calls…

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I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I…

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University for most of his life. His fanciful “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”…