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Link The Arrow of Time (Debategraph)
The debate about the nature of time and its passage is a long and venerable one. The issues addressed by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides about whether time…

May 11 2012, 8:12am | Comments
Instapaper When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End?
It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up.…

April 29 2012, 2:07pm | Comments
Metafilter What is the Folk Web? I'm looking for 'Folk' Web Cultures. I am thinking of the recent take-down of Geocities, which seemed to refresh people's love of the naff, kitsch aesthetic it was…

April 4 2012, 6:41am | Comments
Twitter Links Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language
"Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth,…

March 20 2012, 11:20am | Comments
Twitter Links God and the New Physics by Paul Davies
This is not a book about God: it is a book about what was in 1983 the new physics , by a distinguished scientist…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments
Twitter Links When independent thought flourishes
One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on…

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments
Twitter Links Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart
Last year alone, the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours. Just a decade ago, computer professionals spoke of kilobytes…

March 11 2012, 4:12am | Comments
Link What Happened Between the Neanderthals and Us?
The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this,…

March 7 2012, 3:56pm | Comments
Twitter Links How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out
How did our species come to rule the planet? Rick Potts argues that environmental instability and disruption were decisive factors in the success of…

February 25 2012, 10:35am | Comments
Twitter Links Life after Papyrus: The Swerve
Books. They have an almost alarming corporeality. Stephen Greenblatt, esteemed Harvard professor and founder of New Historicism, tells us that between the eras of…

February 17 2012, 6:05am | Comments
Twitter Links Rereading Darwin
The Dangers of Extrapolation (“Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.” Two centuries before Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of…

January 17 2012, 6:06pm | Comments
Link What happens to a caterpillar's brain during metamorphosis?
Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life…

November 30 2011, 12:50pm | Comments
Twitter Links Threshold science
How walking through a doorway increases forgetting

November 2 2011, 6:51am | Comments
Twitter Links Delusions of Peace
Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

October 6 2011, 2:37am | Comments
Link On Science Transfer
“Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before.…

September 29 2011, 4:01am | Comments
Biblio The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

August 31 2011, 7:31am | Comments
Link New York - Empire of Evolution
Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but…

July 26 2011, 1:55pm | Comments
Link What's human? What's animal? And what of the…
Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

July 25 2011, 3:20pm | Comments
Link The Neolithic Age is over!
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,…

July 12 2011, 1:36am | Comments
Link Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept
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…

June 20 2011, 9:21am | Comments
Link Human influence comes of age
Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London…

May 11 2011, 11:27am | Comments
Link Capitalism's Dismal Future
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…

March 30 2011, 2:30am | Comments
Link The Men Who Stole the World
A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas,…

December 1 2010, 5:22am | Comments
Link Reclaiming the Imagination
Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient…

August 18 2010, 2:12am | Comments
Link Awe and the Machine
By the twentieth century, some cynicism had crept into descriptions of the newest machines. Writing about the impact of radio on his rural Maine community, E. B. White observed, "One…

August 2 2010, 4:03am | Comments
Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…
Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments
Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…
Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments
Link If Odysseus Had GPS
When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as…

March 21 2010, 12:54pm | Comments
Link Positions in Flux - Panel 3: Open Source…
The open source movement is driven by the idea of collective, process-based, sustainable production and improvement. In software development this strategy has already proven to be valid; however can this…

May 20 2009, 9:25am | Comments
Link Positions in Flux - Panel 2: New territories…
The panel New territories and cultures of the digital looked at the geographical shift that media culture currently undergoes. Europe, North America and Japan used to be at the forefront…

May 20 2009, 9:24am | Comments

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