history items › MachineMachine /stream

Link How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

The story of Google’s algorithm begins with PageRank, the system invented in 1997 by cofounder Larry Page while he was a grad student at Stanford. Page’s now legendary insight was…

March 1 2010, 3:56am | Comments

Link Technologies of Culture: The Archive

"'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new…

February 24 2010, 7:38am | 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, 5:28am | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Avatar: We're Not in Kansas Anymore!

February 21 2010, 9:25pm | Comments

Link Open-Source A Movement in Search of a Philosophy

by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to…

February 19 2010, 6:37am | Comments

Link Time

(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)

February 10 2010, 12:33pm | Comments

Link Lunar Archaeology

In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports.…

January 29 2010, 1:33pm | Comments

Link Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of…

January 29 2010, 1:31pm | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily On Seeing (an Imitation)

January 24 2010, 9:04pm | Comments

Wikipedia 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…

January 8 2010, 9:51am | Comments

Link Divine Wilderness

PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the…

January 8 2010, 9:02am | Comments

Link When the Meganovel Shrank

It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place…

January 8 2010, 5:21am | Comments

Link The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication

by Bertolt Brecht In our society one can invent and perfect discoveries that still have to conquer their market and justify their existence; in other words discoveries that have not…

January 6 2010, 7:16am | Comments

Link Evidence of Everything Exploding

A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.

January 5 2010, 7:54am | Comments

Flickr Acoustic Prosthesis

December 17 2009, 3:55pm | Comments

Link The Outer Limits

In April 1965, a young researcher named Gordon Moore wrote a short article for the now-defunct Electronics Magazine pointing out that each year, the number of transistors that could be…

December 16 2009, 5:05pm | Comments

Link The Wall and the Books

by Jorge Luis Borges I read, in past days, that the man who ordered the construction of the nearly infinite Wall of China was that First Emperor, Shih Huang Ti,…

December 13 2009, 3:17pm | Comments

Link We have a message from another world

In the summer of 1899, whilst alone in his Colorado Springs laboratory working with his magnifying transmitter, the inimitable Nikola Tesla observed a series of unusual rhythmic signals which he…

December 11 2009, 4:11pm | Comments

Flickr Fool's Christmas

December 11 2009, 5:00am | Comments

Flickr Michael Unwrapped

December 8 2009, 4:17am | Comments

Link █░LAST░█░M░I░D░I░█ █░BACKGROUND░█

It is an internet radio, a cyberspace shuttle, and a kind of archive. LMB takes you on a journey through an almost forgotten web that is loud, colorful, often "personal",…

December 8 2009, 3:04am | Comments

Flickr First Prize (as a side of bacon)

December 5 2009, 3:48am | Comments

Link 1917 Anatomical Exploration of a Pig

Fold out, fold out again. Observe the organs: flank or groin, lumbar vertebrae, jejunum and deum

December 4 2009, 8:43am | Comments

Link French magazine reportedly confirms MJ's involvement with Sonic…

One of the longest running rumors of the video game community is the claim that Michael Jackson contributed to the soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to some degree --…

December 3 2009, 2:45pm | Comments

Flickr view over someplace sometime

November 23 2009, 7:16am | Comments

Link What happened to Second Life?

Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going. Once…

November 21 2009, 4:20am | Comments

Link This Is Not Your Grade School Solar System

Pick up a 30-year-old astronomy textbook and you will find more illustrations of planets than actual pictures; Pluto still holds onto its full planet status and exoplanets are theoretical. In…

November 19 2009, 3:46pm | Comments

Portfolio The Unveiled Divide

November 10 2009, 11:50am | Comments

Flickr you can't afford to be skinny

November 10 2009, 12:53am | Comments

Link IMG MGMT: Teen Image

IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist, Seth Price presents an essay challenging the traditional photo essay format. Ritualized Unknowing People keep trying to get…

November 5 2009, 2:06am | Comments

Link The Library in the New Age

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape?…

October 31 2009, 5:19am | Comments

Link Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger

Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover,…

October 30 2009, 6:20pm | Comments

Link On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of…

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over…

October 12 2009, 9:56am | 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

Writing from 3quarksdaily Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion

October 4 2009, 9:04pm | Comments

Link Is the Internet melting our brains?

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a…

September 28 2009, 9:01am | Comments

Link GOOD COPY BAD COPY

A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

September 14 2009, 3:17am | Comments

Link How to fake science, history and religion

One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: "It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of…

August 6 2009, 1:20pm | Comments

Link Adam Curtis: It Felt Like a Kiss -…

This is the whole of the experimental film, It Felt Like a Kiss. It was the basis of the show [Adam Curtis] did in Manchester with Punchdrunk. The show may…

July 27 2009, 5:52pm | Comments

Link The Art-Work of the Future

AS Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man. When Nature had developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously…

July 22 2009, 4:37pm | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

July 12 2009, 10:35pm | Comments

Link Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time…

This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can…

July 6 2009, 9:37am | Comments

Metafilter Behind the Mask - Michael Jackson's rarest recording? Michael Jackson penned and recorded lots of songs, many of which remain unreleased. Perhaps the most infamous, and rarest recording, is his version of Behind the Mask. Legend…

July 1 2009, 11:40am | Comments

Link Fifty Books for Our Times

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for…

June 29 2009, 4:43pm | Comments

Link Jamie Livingston's Polaroid of the Day

A collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131 There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where…

June 24 2009, 3:24pm | Comments

Link Michel Serres's Milieux

Mediation means that which stands, comes or moves between things otherwise separated or opposed. Serres’s work has never ceased to meditate upon mediation in every possible sense: as arbitration; moderation;…

June 23 2009, 2:38pm | Comments

Link Adam Curtis: It Felt Like a Kiss

It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional…

June 20 2009, 5:39am | Comments

Link Atlas Obscura

Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloguing all of the singular,…

June 16 2009, 3:14pm | Comments

Portfolio Seeing Centaurs

June 14 2009, 2:50pm | Comments

Link The extent of Darwin’s impact on 19th-century artists

It’s hard to exaggerate just how widely Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and the evolution of human kind traveled in the cultural milieu of his day, even in the age…

June 11 2009, 2:49am | Comments

Link How Nuclear Radiation Can Change Our Race

This is a remarkably uninformed article about what effect a huge nuclear war would have upon the human race. The author seems to think that the radiation would create a…

June 6 2009, 9:36am | Comments

Link Grumpy Gamer Stuff and Things and Monkey Island

About a year and a little more ago, as I began designing the uber-awesome DeathSpank at Hothead Games, I played all the way through The Secret of Monkey Island to…

June 6 2009, 9:31am | Comments

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