MachineMachine /stream

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The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era…

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Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

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It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong,…

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A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

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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,…

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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,…

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Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes…

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There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’,…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance,…

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In Delete, Mayer-Schönberger traces the history of such external memories – cave paintings, scrolls, photographic slides, diaries – and their importance to the flourishing of human knowledge. "Since the early…

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Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

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You, like me, probably have a mirror face. It’s close to my “photo face,” but it’s a separate beast. My face contorts itself not because it will be recorded for…

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The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit…

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You can satisfy your low-brow GIF cravings on sites like 4chan or the countless GIF-glorifying Tumblrs like GIF Party and Fuck Yeah GIFs. A step above is the image-based chat…

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Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

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Archaeologists and other scientists report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that excavations show hunter-gatherers were living at the Buttermilk Creek site and making projectile points, blades, choppers and…

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Maybe you’re young enough to remember Blue’s Clues, or old enough to have a little one hanging on the mystery-solving adventures of Steve and Blue as you read this. If,…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…

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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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I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not…