MachineMachine /stream

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What are some techniques you use to make glitch art?

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The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much…

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In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the…

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Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed…

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Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently…

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One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy table, to…

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Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us…

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Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be…

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If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of…

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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…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect.…

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A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard: 39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was…

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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?…

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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…

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Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien,…

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Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library.…

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Researchers working in Japan say they might have the breakthrough archivists are praying for - a sealed permanent memory bank that will be easily readable now and far into the…

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For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount…

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I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986.…

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The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is…