Daniel Rourke /stream

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People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity,…

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What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In…

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Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only a…

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WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas…

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These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we…

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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 neurons,…

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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 to…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And…

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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 the…

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Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey…

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From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of war".…

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In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided…

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When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction titan:…

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Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt…

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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 fair…

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PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle…

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It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in…

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People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity,…

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What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In…

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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." A…

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WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas…

Bookmark

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 neurons,…

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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 454…

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Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And…

Bookmark

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 the…

Bookmark

Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey…

Bookmark

In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided…

Bookmark

Ray Brassier – My stance is not particularly original: it’s indebted to the work of several more genuinely original philosophers. The confluence of their influence in my thinking represents my attempt…

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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 and…

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It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in…

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Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself has…