MachineMachine / stream

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When the Internet was first starting to catch on in the 1980s, I was invited, as a representative of a large business consulting organization, to a day-long seminar explaining what…

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On a 5-acre plot in Great Falls, Virginia, less than a mile’s stroll through ex­urban scrub from the wide Potomac River, Alex Hawkinson has breathed life into a lifeless object.

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In the 1930s British Mathematician Alan Turing studied normal numbers. During World War 2 he cracked the Nazi Enigma code, and then laid the foundations for computing and artificial intelligence.…

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Good books transcend their times; bad books reflect them. One reads Madame Bovary for its sublime writing and exploration of the human condition in all its tortuous complexity.

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[This is the first of a series of posts which form a reading guide to Deleuze's Cinema I & II.

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I once premeditated making a study of Kafka’s precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a…

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The transistor revolutionized electronics and computing. Now, researchers have made a biological transistor from DNA that could be used to create living computers. A transistor is a device that controls…

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It’s often said that Jupiter — or any gas giant for that matter — is a failed star. This sentiment riles a lot of people, who bristle at the suggestion…

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Preparing a moka pot of coffee this morning, I decided to continue my reading of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The primary thrust of the book…

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In (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), Dylan Trigg confronts the remnants from the fallout of post-industrialism and postmodernism. Through a considered analysis of memory, place, and nostalgia, Trigg argues that…

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One of the thrills of attending a world premiere of contemporary art music is that the success of the pieces on the program is entirely uncertain.

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Like a lot of teenagers and 20-somethings, "Eric Draven" used to keep a Tumblr. The microblogging platform has a strong community aspect, and it's easy to find people who like…

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Science writer and blogger Carl Zimmer '87, a lecturer in Yale's Environmental Studies Program, answers questions submitted by the public via the Yale University Tumblr. The video with Zimmer, a…

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The first draft of the Neanderthal genome, published in 2010, came with some titillating news. It showed that some 50,000 years ago, these ancient hominids interbred with the ancestors of…

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As an ecologist of ice age giants, I long ago came to terms with the fact that I will never look my study organisms in the eye.

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If scientists can use genetic engineering to bring back the woolly mammoth, should they do it? How about the passenger pigeon? Or the western black rhino? Do we humans have…

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SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums.

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Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us. "Robotic exploration probably will always be the trail…

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A team of researchers led by Melba Ketchum, a Texas veterinarian, claims to have not only conclusively proven the existence of Bigfoot through genetic testing, but also that the mysterious…

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William Gibson? Anonymous? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: I work at Google, and a colleague of mine who leads our Search Education efforts pointed out your site as a great resource…

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As our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, an insidious set of boomerang effects, linking security doctrine in cities in the global North with those in the South, are…

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In his new book The Silence of Animals, the philosopher John Gray explores why human beings continue to use myth to give purpose to their lives. Drawing from the material…

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Most Americans may not be familiar with synthetic biology, but they may come to appreciate its advances someday soon. Synthetic biology focuses on creating technologies for designing and building biological…

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ENO: I loved that experiment. I'd love to do something like that again. ANDERSON: I would, too. I've always loved the Quiet Club [a series of ambient-style installations by Eno…

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“And your way, is it really YOUR way?,” Henry Miller famously asked. “Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,” Mark Twain consoled Helen…

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As our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, an insidious set of boomerang effects, linking security doctrine in cities in the global North with those in the South, is…

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Hilary Rose is a prominent feminist and sociologist and is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Steven Rose is a neurobiologist at the Open University and…

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Earlier this week, Teju Cole posted seven short stories about drones on his twitter account. Here they are, reprinted from The New Inquiry: 1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy…

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We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once…

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As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to…

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A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of…

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"In January 2011, I started to write about Byrne's artistic practice, fascinated by what I began to theorize as the parasitism of her provocative and ingenious artistic reversals of power…

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WILLIAM BURROUGHS and the TORSO MURDERER with Oliver Harris William Burroughs writes "...in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when…

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Though history will probably remember Richard Dawkins as the activist who spearheaded a new atheist movement, there is something far more famous and important that he invented — and few…

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Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book's editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify…

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A scientist believes he's close to perfecting the necessary technology to clone a Neanderthal - all he needs is a human woman to gestate it.

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Technological revolutions are far less obvious than political revolutions to the generations that live through them. This is true even as new tools, for better and worse, shift human history…

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I've poked fun at these lazy op-eds before and, indeed, it must be tempting to retreat into the safe conceptual territory of "The Internet is fake!" when a juicy story…