MachineMachine / stream

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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. books and literature, Borges, Jorge Luis, Heisenberg, Werner, Hume, David, Philosophy, physics, writing and writers

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[This is the first of a series of posts which form a reading guide to Deleuze's Cinema I & II.

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Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are…

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...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…

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Image spam is one of the many dark matters of the digital world; spam tries to avoid detection by filters by presenting its message as an image file. An inordinate…

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The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era…

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Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce

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It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong,…

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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…

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Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations,…

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Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment,…

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Writing articles about video games is so much fun that we often have to stop, wipe the manic grins off our faces and find something really boring to do. Sometimes…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume…

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Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance,…

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When I began writing, distractions were all low-tech. I had to worry about typewriter ribbons and correction fluid, for God's sake. There was no possibility of spending an apparently productive…

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In Delete, Mayer-Schönberger traces the history of such external memories – cave paintings, scrolls, photographic slides, diaries – and their importance to the flourishing of human knowledge. "Since the early…

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Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

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Visitors enter the dark, gargantuan room and take up postures of reverence in front of a massive screen, which towers 40 feet above them. They take off their shoes at…

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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…

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You can satisfy your low-brow GIF cravings on sites like 4chan or the countless GIF-glorifying Tumblrs like GIF Party and Fuck Yeah GIFs. A step above is the image-based chat…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

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Archaeologists and other scientists report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that excavations show hunter-gatherers were living at the Buttermilk Creek site and making projectile points, blades, choppers and…

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Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…