language 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, 4:56am | 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, 8:38am | 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, 6:28am | Comments

Link A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter

In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him…

February 21 2010, 5:00pm | Comments

Podcast /noise on 12th February 2010 / theme = I Don’t Understand

February 13 2010, 6:38am | Comments

Link Code is Law

Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about…

February 7 2010, 10:20am | Comments

Wikipedia Other The Other or constitutive other (also referred to as othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy, opposed to the Same. It refers, or attempts to refer, to…

January 26 2010, 2:48pm | Comments

Link Sleep Talkin' Man

My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only…

January 9 2010, 7:24am | 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, 8:16am | 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, 8:54am | Comments

Metafilter Arcangel and the future of digi/net art Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most infamous hack, masher-upper, digi/net artist. His work stands for a growing culture of artists who run wildly through animated GIF landscapes…

December 8 2009, 6:44am | Comments

Wikipedia Profanity The original meaning of the adjective profane (Latin: "in front of", "outside the temple") referred to items not belonging to the church, e.g. "The fort is the oldest…

November 30 2009, 8:12am | Comments

Blog Post Speaking about Ants, Superman and Centaurs

November 23 2009, 9:29am | Comments

Link A Certain Realism: 'The Known Unknowns' - 4…

The Known Unknowns is a scheduled cycle of continuous readings running parallel to Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing, an evening organised by Maria Fusco and Book Works at Whitechapel…

November 21 2009, 5:45am | Comments

Link Whitechapel - Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art Writing

Saturday 21 November, 6pm Until 11pm Showcasing UK artists and writers, this parley-based event speculates on the materialisation and dematerialisation of art writing through newly commissioned works, together with readings…

November 21 2009, 5:43am | Comments

Blog Post 100% Magenta

November 13 2009, 2:40am | Comments

Link keytweeter

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…

November 10 2009, 2:26pm | Comments

Link A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?”…

November 8 2009, 4:01am | Comments

Link The Future of Reading

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading…

November 3 2009, 10:30am | Comments

Link The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that…

November 1 2009, 4:32am | Comments

Link Luis Camnitzer, ALPHABETIZATION, Part Two: Hegemonic Language and…

In all the traditional approaches to pedagogy, both in art and in literacy, the possibility of perceiving the transitional nature of the space produced by text or image—the common space…

October 27 2009, 11:51am | Comments

Metafilter The alternate 'Testament of Doctor Mabuse' - Fritz Lang's… Having recently learned that Fritz Lang filmed an entirely different, French language, version of The Testament of Doctor Mabuse alongside the 'original' German version, I set out to…

October 22 2009, 2:55am | Comments

Wikipedia Petrichor Petrichor (pronounced /ˈpɛtrɨkər/; from Greek petros "stone" + ichor "the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology") is the name…

October 15 2009, 3:36pm | Comments

Link Don Tapscott on the ways the Net Generation…

The author of Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott, refutes the belief that the internet is turning today's youth into "the dumbest generation". Tapscott illustrates how the net has changed the…

September 29 2009, 11:27pm | Comments

Link Thinking literally

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to…

September 28 2009, 8:59am | Comments

Wikipedia Postliterate Society A postliterate society is a hypothetical society wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary. Many…

August 6 2009, 1:34pm | Comments

Link Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of…

July 13 2009, 7:19am | Comments

Link Daniel Everett Debunks the Essence of Human Language

Professor Daniel Everett, author of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, discusses the importance of preserving dying languages. He describes his experience living with the Piraha people in Brazil, and explores…

July 9 2009, 1:28am | Comments

Blog Post The Movement of The Middle

June 30 2009, 9:05am | Comments

Book The Open Work by Umberto Eco

June 8 2009, 1:40am | Comments

Link Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension « Strange…

“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ’sounds…

June 7 2009, 3:42am | Comments

Link Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse…

People have a deep desire to communicate with animals, as is evident from the way they converse with their dogs, enjoy myths about talking animals or devote lifetimes to teaching…

May 29 2009, 6:51am | Comments

MachineMachine /stream

Tag Cloud

Stream Categories

Search

Share This...

Latest Blog Posts