MachineMachine /stream

Ant Superhighway

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:31:00 -0700

Raising Neanderthals

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:35:00 -0700

In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside El Sidrön cave, a research team including Lalueza-Fox excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.

Lalueza-Fox does not plan to sequence the entire genome of the El Sidrön Neanderthals. He is interested in specific genes. “I choose genes…

Stefania Rotolo Goldrake Live Appearance Tilt 1979

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:02:00 -0700

Seen in a new light, Giotto's Florentine masterpieces

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:45:00 -0700

Restoration experts have used ultra violet rays to shine an astonishing new light on the work of one of the most important painters in the history of Western art.

The paintings of Giotto di Bondone in the Peruzzi Chapel in Florence's Santa Croce church are considered among the most important by the medieval artist who introduced a revolutionary emotional depth and degree of perspective in his painting.

The Peruzzi chapel, with its murals honouring John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, is thought to have inspired great painters in the Renaissance a century after…

Is "Science Fiction Humanism" A Contradiction In Terms?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:54:00 -0700

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity, and whether the universe will let us stay human.

It's easy to think of science fiction and humanism as going hand in hand: Science fiction is about, or else informed by, science, which is empirical and rejects "a priori" beliefs and superstitions. Both Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut served as honorary presidents of the American Humanist Association.

According to Wikipedia, other famous secular…

A taxonomy of GAMES / game types?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:39:00 -0700

Types of Games: I have come across various attempts to catalogue the possible varieties of stories that exist. The basic assumption being that all plots (narratives?) can be be boiled down to one among only a few types e.g. Hero leaves the kingdom; Hero steals fire, etc. I am looking for a similar classification system for GAMES, that is: how many fundamental types/kinds of game are there? Note: when I say 'game' I mean everything from checkers, through hide n' seek, pool and soccer up to and including Tower Defence, Super Mario or Halo. I know this might be…

Symphony in J flat

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:55:00 -0700

What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In the same way that languages share certain principles, Bohlen-Pierce takes advantage of fundamental properties that make our own musical system work. It makes some different basic assumptions, most notably by not using the octave. But it also makes use of analogous ways of creating harmony and chords. The result is music that sounds different, but not bad. “A different tuning system is almost like a different language,” said Ross…

The 'Basic' Plots in Literature

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:35:00 -0700

Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they?

A: People often say that there are only a certain number of basic plots in all of literature, and that any story is really just a variation on these plots. Depending on how detailed they want to make a "basic" plot, different writers have offered a variety of solutions. Here are some of the ones we’ve found:

1 Plot | 3 Plots | 7 Plots | 20 Plots | 36 Plots

Chtodelat? / What is to be done?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:10:00 -0700

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 (see full list of participants on the web site) with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.

Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. These newspapers are usually produced in the context of collective initiatives such as…

Nut Removed

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:13:00 -0700

Mr. Daniel posted a photo:

Seen in my local pub at Christmas. Poltical correctness or just insanity?

A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites: Robert Smithson

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:53:00 -0700

By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one…

An evolutionary biologist on religion: Spirit level

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:52:00 -0700

WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas Wade recalls the place where he first felt sanctity: Eton College chapel.

The “beauty of holiness” in a British private school is a far cry from the sort of religion that later came to interest him as a science journalist at Nature magazine and then the New York Times. To examine the roots of religion, he says, it is important to look at human beginnings. The…

I need your votes - I need your friend's votes! Ask your friends for a 3quarksdaily mouse click: bit.ly/aCy4x1 x

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:31:00 -0700

therourke: I need your votes - I need your friend's votes! Ask your friends for a 3quarksdaily mouse click: http://bit.ly/aCy4x1 x

/noise : Borrowed or Stolen

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 07:22:00 -0700

Podcast: 5th March 2010 / theme = Borrowed or Stolen

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Subscribe: via iTunes

James Tenney Collage #1 ("Blue Suede")

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:12:00 -0700

MachineMachine radio show tonight at 5pm, wiredradio.co.uk. The theme = "Borrowing or Stealing"

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:45:00 -0700

therourke: MachineMachine radio show tonight at 5pm, http://wiredradio.co.uk. The theme = "Borrowing or Stealing"

Your Reality is out of Date

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:14:00 -0700

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have…

Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:38:00 -0700

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 is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.

The force is human culture, broadly defined as any learned behavior, including technology. The evidence of its activity is the more surprising because culture has long seemed to play just the opposite role. Biologists have seen it as a shield that protects people from…

Incredible Journeys

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:17:00 -0700

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 neurons, is about 1 millionth the size of a human brain. Yet in the featureless deserts of Tunisia, this ant can venture over 100 meters from its nest to find food without becoming lost. Imagine randomly wandering 20 kilometers in the open desert, your tracks obliterated by the wind, then turning around and making a beeline to your starting point—and no GPS allowed! That’s the equivalent of what the desert…

Should We Clone Neanderthals?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:58:00 -0700

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 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative. The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert…