MachineMachine /stream

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Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column? Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my…

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As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the…

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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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To test the effects of photographic editing on memory, Slate altered the content or context of five images. The first was a TV screen shot from President Clinton's 1999 impeachment…

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When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

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[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give…

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Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and…

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The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated,…

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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…

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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…

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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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Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the…

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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…

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A concept-map exploring the Left vs Right political spectrum. A collaboration between David McCandless and information artist Stefanie Posavec, taken from my book The Visual Miscellaneum (out Nov 10th). Of…

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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…