MachineMachine /stream

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Back in 1981, R.M. Hare, in his book Moral Thinking, featured a distinction that today I still find useful. Hare admitted that the distinction was not original with him, but…

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Now available for free online: The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel…

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It seems to me part of the problem is that the term "postmodernism" was always so muddy and abstract. To different people, it meant (at least) two different things. First…

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Video games have come a very long way since the 1980s... As Tom Bissell, a journalist, former Salon writer and lifelong gamer, explains in his new book, "Extra Lives: Why…

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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…

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Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly…

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Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of…

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Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only…

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Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page…

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The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout thinks future generations will consider itunes, youtube, and Kindle a more important cultural development than anything it distributes. He’s right to point out the…

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Dresden Codak's handy comic-chart of '42 Essential Third-Act Twists' for writers.

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For some reasons it seems to be anathema to say that there might be an intrinsic reason for the correlation between educational level and the rejection of religion: atheism takes…

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Technology so pervades our culture that it's sobering to consider how poorly we understand it. How do new tools and techniques arise? What principles guide their evolution? And how does…

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Though you’ll still have to do your writing using the old fashioned method — one word at a time — web applications and social media have made the process of…

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So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog…

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Not long ago mass media was about the only kind of culture there was. The lucky few creative works that made it into general circulation were what copyright law was…

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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…