http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1451/thing-wikipedia Thing may refer to:

In philosophy:

* An object (philosophy), being, or entity
* Thing-in-itself (or noumenon), the reality that underlies perceptions, a term coined by Immanuel Kant

In history:

* Thing (assembly), also transliterated as ting or þing, a historical Germanic governing assembly
* Thing (listening device), a Soviet bug used during the Cold War for eavesdropping on the ambassador to the Soviet Union

In fiction:

* Thing (comics), a superhero in the Marvel Universe and member of the… ]]> Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:30:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1451/thing-wikipedia http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1172/the-game-mind-game There are three rules to The Game:

1. Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (Sometimes narrowed to: "Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game",[4] or alternatively, "You are always playing The Game.")
2. Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses.
3. Losses must be announced to at least one person[6] (either by using a statement such as "I lost The Game" or by alternative means). ]]> Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:11:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1172/the-game-mind-game http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1164/steganography Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning "covered or protected", and graphein (γράφειν) meaning "to write". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images,… ]]> Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:50:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1164/steganography http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/973/other The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is 'other' than the concept being considered. The term often means a person other than oneself, and is often capitalised. The Other is singled out as different. ]]> Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:48:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/973/other http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/962/coriolis-effect In physics, the Coriolis effect is an apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating reference frame. For example, consider two children on opposite sides of a spinning roundabout (carousel), who are throwing a ball to each other. From the children's point of view, the ball's path is curved sideways by the Coriolis effect. From the thrower's perspective, the deflection is to the right with anticlockwise carousel rotation (viewed from above). Deflection is to the left with clockwise rotation. Newton's laws of motion govern the motion of an object in an inertial frame of reference. When… ]]> Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:57:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/962/coriolis-effect http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/931/cargo-cult A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture through magical thinking and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors. Cargo cults developed primarily in remote parts of New Guinea and other Melanesian and Micronesian societies in the southwest Pacific Ocean, beginning with the first significant arrivals of Westerners in the 19th century. Similar behaviors have, however, also appeared… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:51:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/931/cargo-cult http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/886/deep-web The deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines. Mike Bergman, credited with coining the phrase,[1] has said that searching on the Internet today can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean; a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed. Most of the Web's information is buried far down on dynamically generated sites, and… ]]> Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:11:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/886/deep-web http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/846/profanity The original meaning of the adjective profane (Latin: "in front of", "outside the temple") referred to items not belonging to the church, e.g. "The fort is the oldest profane building in the town, but the local monastery is older, and is the oldest building," or "besides designing churches, he also designed many profane buildings". As a result, "profane" and "profanity" has therefore come to describe a word, expression, gesture, or other social behavior which is socially constructed or interpreted as insulting, rudeness, vulgarism, desecrating, or showing disrespect. Other words commonly used to describe profane language or its use include: cuss,… ]]> Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:12:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/846/profanity http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/840/recaptcha reCAPTCHA is a system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas. On September 16th, 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA.[2] reCAPTCHA is currently digitizing the archives of the New York Times.[3] Twenty years of The New York Times have been digitized and the project hopes to have the 110 other years done by 2010.[4] reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The subscribing websites (whose purposes are generally unrelated to the… ]]> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:52:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/840/recaptcha http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/737/petrichor Petrichor (pronounced /ˈpɛtrɨkər/; from Greek petros "stone" + ichor "the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology") is the name of the scent of rain on dry earth. The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature.[1] In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is adsorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing… ]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:36:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/737/petrichor http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/690/wikipedia-enters-a-new-chapter Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due – within the next week or so – to hit the mark of 3m articles in English. It's all a very long way from January 2001, when Wikipedia launched. Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved by 2007. It was not just the number of articles that grew, but also the number of people involved in creating them. During Wikipedia's first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007,… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:10:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/690/wikipedia-enters-a-new-chapter http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/691/oklo Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African state of Gabon. The discovery in September 1972 of several natural nuclear fission reactors in the uranium mines situated there has fired the imagination and aroused the curiosity of scientists. Gabon was a French colony when prospectors from the French nuclear energy commissariat (the industrial parts, which later became the COGEMA) discovered uranium in the remote region in 1956. France immediately opened mines operated by Comuf (Compagnie des Mines d'Uranium de Franceville) near Mounana village in order to exploit the vast mineral resources… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:07:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/691/oklo http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/615/postliterate-society A postliterate society is a hypothetical society wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary. Many advanced science-fiction societies are postliterate, for example in Dan Simmons' 2003 novel Ilium. Postliterate is markedly different from preliterate. A preliterate society has not yet discovered how to read and write; a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication. All information is either transmitted via sound or some other, more complex means. Postliteracy is sometimes considered a sign that a society… ]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:34:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/615/postliterate-society http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/685/collocation-wikipedia Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Collocation refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example which prepos ]]> Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:08:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/685/collocation-wikipedia