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Wikipedia Betteridge's law of headlines Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after…

June 2 2013, 6:54am | Comments

GIFbites Giraffeical Interchange FormatA GIFbite made in homage…

May 22 2013, 6:21am | Comments

Wikipedia Otherkin Otherkin are a community of people who see themselves as partially or entirely non-human. They contend that they are, in spirit if not in body,[2] not human. This…

May 1 2013, 2:02pm | Comments

Link The Philosophy of Data - NYTimes.com

February 23 2013, 3:24am | Comments

Video

February 10 2013, 5:28am | Comments

Tumblr Why Do Sign Language Interpreters Look So Animated?

January 27 2013, 8:07am | Comments

Link A vested interest in palimpsest

The English language contains certain meaning-rich words that command attention and stir controversy. “Paradigm,” for instance: When Thomas Kuhn used it in 1966 to describe accepted scientific theories, and gave…

December 20 2012, 3:45am | Comments

Twitter Links Meaning as gloss

Frances Egan is a mind-bombing philosopher who wonders on explanatory frameworks of science, the fits and starts of mind evolution, the links between neuroscience…

November 14 2012, 4:39am | Comments

Twitter Links Why Do Sign Language Interpreters Look So Animated?

As New York City Mayor Bloomberg gave numerous televised addresses about the preparations the city was making for Hurricane Sandy, and then the storm’s…

November 11 2012, 1:02am | Comments

Metafilter The Library of Babel in 140 characters (or fewer) The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI,…

October 27 2012, 9:15am | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) "Our usage of the word ‘objectivity’ (French objectivite; German Objektivitdt) is hopelessly but..."

“Our usage of the word ‘objectivity’ (French objectivite; German Objektivitdt) is hopelessly but revealingly confused. It refers at once to metaphysics, to methods, and to morals. We slide effortlessly from statements about the ‘objective truth’ of a scientific…

October 24 2012, 5:33am | Comments

Twitter Links Rhetological Fallacies infographic

Errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking

September 20 2012, 3:48am | Comments

Portfolio Kipple and Things II: The Subject of Digital Detritus

August 25 2012, 10:00am | Comments

Link "Once upon a time" exhibition by Steve McQueen

In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of…

July 11 2012, 4:57am | Comments

Link War and Peace ebook readers find a surprise…

A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version…

June 15 2012, 5:23am | Comments

Link What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth"

“Look,” Thomas Kuhn said. The word was weighted with weariness, as if Kuhn was resigned to the fact that I would misinterpret him, but he was still going to try—no…

May 30 2012, 2:01am | Comments

Link A Thomasson is any kind of "useless and…

...according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing…

May 23 2012, 12:36am | Comments

Link At ROFLCon, watching memes go mainstream

What is ROFLCon? It's a biennial convention (this year was its third) held to celebrate and discuss internet memes and the celebrity that is often created alongside them. This year's…

May 8 2012, 2:17pm | Comments

Link Post-Digitalism and Contemporary Spanish Fiction

Postdigital literature is not centered in code, but in addressing a reality shaped by a mix of coded/uncoded reality – German Sierra (german_sierra)

April 30 2012, 10:48am | Comments

Link Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of…

RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided…

April 21 2012, 5:37am | Comments

Twitter Links THEORY BEYOND THE CODES: Doing with Icons makes Symbols; or, Jailbreaking the Perfect User Interface

Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts…

April 18 2012, 12:29am | 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 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

Link Culturomics: Have physicists discovered the evolutionary laws of…

Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper…

March 20 2012, 11:04am | Comments

Twitter Links Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?

Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most…

March 11 2012, 5:35am | Comments

Twitter Links Wired for Culture: How Language Enabled "Visual Theft," Sparked Innovation, and Helped Us Evolve

Much has been said about what makes us human and what it means to be human. Language, which we’ve previously seen co-evolved with music…

February 28 2012, 6:35am | Comments

Twitter Links How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet's Favorite Spambot

This is the story of Horse_ebooks, beloved online automaton, and how I tracked down its human master. Horse_ebooks is a Twitter spam bot originally…

February 26 2012, 9:21am | Comments

Twitter Links Who Coined Skronk, Krautrock & Hip-Hop? The Origins of Musical Genre Phraseology

Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names we call it by. There's a longstanding cliche that only the music business needs genre…

February 25 2012, 3:35pm | Comments

Twitter Links Adaptor vs. Adapter

Hi! I'd like to know what's the difference between "adaptor" and "adapter".

February 24 2012, 4:09pm | Comments

Twitter Links Digital tools 'to save languages'

Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages…

February 18 2012, 5:35pm | 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, 5:05am | Comments

Twitter Links E-books Can't Burn

E-books Can't Burn: Could it be that ebooks bring us closer to the Could it be the fact that the e-book thwarts our ability…

February 16 2012, 3:50pm | Comments

Link Roar so wildly: Spam, technology and language

This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an interlocutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of…

February 16 2012, 5:20am | Comments

Twitter Links On the trail of the wild and wonderful @Horse_ebooks

Horse_ebooks is having a moment. Of the accounts that follow me on Twitter, half are spambots. About 15% are companies or organizations whose social…

January 10 2012, 6:06am | Comments

Twitter Links All Language Is Murder

Americans love people who kill people. We don’t want to say it that way, and we don’t want to be killed ourselves (most of…

December 14 2011, 2:50am | Comments

Twitter Links Worth a new Mass?

How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?

December 8 2011, 7:06am | Comments

Link Is mental time travel what makes us human?

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional…

October 28 2011, 10:32am | Comments

Video

October 2 2011, 2:40pm | 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

Tumblr (Quote) Michel Serres, The Natural Contract

“Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take…

August 9 2011, 5:36am | Comments

Link Traces of humanity

What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the…

August 7 2011, 3:32pm | Comments

Link Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or…

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in…

July 25 2011, 2:46am | Comments

Link Michel Serres on the word 'human'

Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From…

July 6 2011, 3:15pm | Comments

Tumblr (Quote) Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

“All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.” - Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

July 4 2011, 11:02am | Comments

Link A Home Before the End of the World

Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving…

June 29 2011, 4:11pm | Comments

Metafilter New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation.…

June 19 2011, 5:29am | Comments

Link First ever direct English translation of Solaris published

The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and…

June 16 2011, 3:07pm | Comments

Link Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European…

The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when…

June 16 2011, 3:13am | Comments

Miscellanous Projects Digital Autonomy

June 11 2011, 4:02am | Comments

Link A Medium for the Masses

The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within…

June 6 2011, 2:25am | Comments

Link Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why…

Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend…

June 2 2011, 1:19pm | Comments

Link Depicting Relationships: The limits of language

The heart of the english sentence (and equivalent sentential forms in other natural languages) lies in connecting ideas together and creating meaning. Like placing two portals from the recent hit…

May 29 2011, 3:28pm | Comments

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