research items › MachineMachine /stream

Link The Brain: Look Deep Into the Mind's Eye

When the scientists tested the mind’s eye of MX, though, the difference was stark. The researchers gave all their subjects a standardized test called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire.…

March 26 2010, 5:53am | Comments

Link 'A Thousand Years of Non Linear History' :…

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War…

March 24 2010, 10:25am | Comments

Writing from 3quarksdaily Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science

March 21 2010, 10:30pm | Comments

Link Scientists supersize quantum mechanics

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Andrew…

March 21 2010, 12:51pm | Comments

Metafilter A taxonomy of GAMES / game types? Types of Games: I have come across various attempts to catalogue the possible varieties of stories that exist. The basic assumption being that all plots (narratives?) can be…

March 10 2010, 9:39am | Comments

Link Chtodelat? / What is to be done?

Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod…

March 9 2010, 11:10am | Comments

Link A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites: Robert Smithson

By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture."…

March 7 2010, 4:53pm | Comments

Link Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It…

March 2 2010, 5:38pm | Comments

Link Incredible Journeys

Some animals can instinctively solve navigational problems that have baffled humans for centuries. Now, researchers are uncovering how. The nervous system of the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, with around 100,000…

March 1 2010, 10:17am | Comments

Link Should We Clone Neanderthals?

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…

March 1 2010, 4:58am | Comments

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 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, 7:37am | Comments

Link Black Hole Simulator

Get sucked in

February 14 2010, 5:03am | 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

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, 2:33pm | Comments

Link From Eternity to Here

The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is…

January 12 2010, 3:15am | 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 Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron Collider

Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute…

December 25 2009, 7:54pm | 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, 6:05pm | Comments

Wikipedia Deep Web The deep Web (also called Deepnet, the invisible Web, dark Web or the hidden Web) refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the surface…

December 8 2009, 8:11am | Comments

Link The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis…

December 7 2009, 6:11pm | Comments

Link A reader’s guide to the art of science

There is something stirring in the world of science writing. Since it emerged as a labelled corner of the bookshop, the genre has been dominated by practising scientists who also…

December 7 2009, 6:07pm | 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

Link How we read: an investigation

A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel…

November 23 2009, 8:55am | Comments

Link Overhyped Placebos of Doom?

Let’s say a new drug appears to be effective in combating a condition like chronic anxiety and is the subject of popular news stories. When the drug enters clinical trials,…

November 20 2009, 4:35am | 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 Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to…

A recent essay in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye has managed to attract quite a bit of attention around the internets — most of it not very positive.…

October 15 2009, 8:13am | Comments

Wikipedia Wikipedia enters a new chapter Yet again, Wikipedia is about to break new ground. The website that has become one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge is due – within the next…

September 28 2009, 9:10am | Comments

MachineMachine /stream

Tag Cloud

Stream Categories

Search

Share This...

Portfolio

Latest Blog Posts