death items › MachineMachine /stream

Twitter Links Is Chernobyl a Wild Kingdom or a Radioactive Den of Decay?

The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February…

April 20 2012, 7:36am | Comments

Twitter Links Buying the Body of Christ

“We’re proud to put our name on what will become the body of Jesus.” The wafers I bought were manufactured by the Cavanagh Company…

April 8 2012, 1:06am | Comments

Link Ways Machines Can Hurt You

Wandering the LA Convention Center at WESTEC - the ultimate manufacturing show from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers… wandering the amazing tools, waterjets, 3D printers, CNCs, microCNCs, robot arms, welding…

March 28 2012, 3:48am | Comments

Twitter Links Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

"What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible" The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature.…

March 21 2012, 9:35am | Comments

Twitter Links This is what a week-long car crash looks like

"With a dramatic inevitability that reflects our own mortality, over the course of the month, the car is eventually destroyed,"

March 19 2012, 4:25pm | Comments

Twitter Links Anatomy of Norbiton: labyrinthine

Some deaths are linear; others are labyrinthine. In some the journey of the soul is straight, direct, if necessarily troubled. Thus it crosses water,…

March 11 2012, 4:12am | Comments

Twitter Links The Body Counter: A statistician’s guide to mass atrocities

Traditionally, human rights work has been more akin to investigative reporting, but Ball is the most influential of a handful of people around the…

March 1 2012, 10:59am | 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 How did we forget about mutually assured destruction?

Fifty years ago this week the idea of mutually assured nuclear destruction was outlined in a major speech. But how did this frightening concept…

February 15 2012, 6:51am | Comments

Twitter Links Freud: The last great Enlightenment thinker

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is…

January 22 2012, 12:07pm | Comments

Twitter Links Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication

"A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population."

November 29 2011, 7:53am | Comments

Link The Scariest Zombies in Nature

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes…

October 29 2011, 4:45pm | Comments

Link Steven Pinker on the History and decline (and…

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,…

September 20 2011, 3:05am | Comments

Tumblr The Astronaut Suicides

September 6 2011, 4:53am | Comments

Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

August 30 2011, 9:08am | Comments

Link Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!)

Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975…

August 18 2011, 1:48am | Comments

Link How to fix horror, Part I: Stop trying…

My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that…

July 5 2011, 9:34am | Comments

Link Heaven for Atheists

It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re…

July 4 2011, 9:01am | Comments

Wikipedia Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth Risks to civilization, humans, and planet Earth are existential risks that could threaten humankind as a whole, have adverse consequences for the course of human civilization, or even…

June 26 2011, 11:00am | Comments

Link Three arguments against the singularity

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to…

June 23 2011, 2:48am | Comments

Wikipedia Experiments in the Revival of Organisms Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. It is available from the Prelinger…

June 15 2011, 9:12am | Comments

Link Georges Bataille Electronic Library

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

June 1 2011, 4:18pm | Comments

Link This will be the Century of Disasters

A half-mile wide twister tore through Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, killing nearly 100. The tornado was one of 68 reported across seven states this weekend. Unfortunately, this century will be…

May 25 2011, 3:52am | Comments

Link Views on Evolution, Intelligent Design Hinge on Death…

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for…

April 7 2011, 3:39am | Comments

Link John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality

How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace,…

January 9 2011, 4:38pm | Comments

Link The beastliness of modern art

Taxidermy (and the chemistry of the morgue) has been something close to a cult obsession with our contemporary gang. We get it, we get it, you often want to howl…

October 17 2010, 2:35pm | Comments

Link The beastliness of modern art

Taxidermy (and the chemistry of the morgue) has been something close to a cult obsession with our contemporary gang. We get it, we get it, you often want to howl…

October 17 2010, 2:35pm | Comments

Link Lords of the flies: the insect detectives

"So here," says Hall, with suitable drama, "they are: the Ruxton Maggots." Were it not for the maggots, it is pretty safe to say the case of Dr Buck Ruxton,…

September 23 2010, 1:29am | Comments

Link First Cannibals Ate Each Other for Extra Nutrition

The world's first known human cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs, concludes a new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago.…

August 30 2010, 10:11am | Comments

Link You're Dead. Now What?

Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the…

August 13 2010, 4:29am | Comments

Link Should This Be the Last Generation?

Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner…

June 10 2010, 2:45am | Comments

Link Chimpanzees Mourn Their Dead

Two reports of chimpanzees tending their dead provide poignant examples of how humanity’s closest relatives grieve for the dead, a behavior once thought unique to humans. In one report, two…

April 27 2010, 6:58am | Comments

Link Hands-on: Sleep Is Death

A lot of game critics you talk to will tell you that, after making a career of playing games, it takes a lot to impress them. But that's not exactly…

April 6 2010, 9:03am | Comments

Link Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on…

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal…

March 21 2010, 12:49pm | Comments

Metafilter Sacrifice, speech, writing and art Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers.…

February 24 2010, 6:28am | Comments

Link Into the Uncanny Valley

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in…

December 7 2009, 6:08pm | Comments

Link Posthumous Novels by Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace…

After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard…

October 8 2009, 9:05am | Comments

Link If zombies actually existed

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively. That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried…

August 22 2009, 7:03am | Comments

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