Daniel Rourke /stream

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Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create a…

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We take it for granted that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a safe endeavor. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong with passively searching for interstellar radio signals? Unfortunately, the…

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"How does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will & human life?" Can cells become little computers? And how does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will, intelligence, and…

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The idea of evolution is of great antiquity. Empedocles, around 440 BC, wrote that there were once "countless tribes of mortal creatures, scattered abroad and endowed with all manner of forms,"…

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It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to offer…

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There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative entropy”…

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The form of the story permeates every aspect of our cultural life. History, politics, memories, even subjectivity, our sense of identity, are all representations in narrative form, signifiers chained together in…

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As pressure on resources increases, pollution accumulates and humanity's impact on Earth escalates, global-scale governance of the environment is increasingly necessary. In June, the United Nations' Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio…

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With regard to the relativity of value, Karl Marx expressed this function of ideology in the clearest terms in Volume I of Capital: "... one man is king only because other…

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German artist Sebastian Schmieg has devised a sort of backdoor to understanding, however, in his “Search By Image” project. You can look at a handful of said project’s iterations below, but…

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Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed to…

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I’m more hesitant about the idea that neuroscience will kill the idea of ‘the self.’ I think it might be a good thing if it did, but some ideas are recalcitrant…

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The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet, stories…

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Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts, talks…

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The concept of a “formless matter” [that] embodies … all that’s been thought between Hegel and Turing on the relation of “things” to “mind.” It tests out a trivalent—or multivalent—logic that’s…

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Written jointly by philosopher of religion Charles Taliaferro and visual artist Jil Evans, The Image in Mind takes up a suggestion of Suzanne Langer that religious thought operates primarily with images…

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In a New Yorker essay a few weeks back, Laura Miller considered the various ways in which science fiction writers have imagined aliens, from the 18th century through today. Perhaps inevitably,…

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Alongside the Dadaists in the early twentieth century, the German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a style he called “Merz” (detached from the end of “Kommerz,” German for “commerce,” to create a…

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"How does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will & human life?" Can cells become little computers? And how does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will, intelligence, and…

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Dyson refutes the idea that scientific revolutions are concept-driven, a stance pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later endorsed by other theory-driven…

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It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to offer…

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There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative entropy”…

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Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s onward,…

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As pressure on resources increases, pollution accumulates and humanity's impact on Earth escalates, global-scale governance of the environment is increasingly necessary. In June, the United Nations' Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio…

Bookmark

German artist Sebastian Schmieg has devised a sort of backdoor to understanding, however, in his “Search By Image” project. You can look at a handful of said project’s iterations below, but…

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The renowned philosopher of science Elliott Sober has, in recent weeks, given a talk and written a paper that both make the same points: Evolution is totally silent on the idea…

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I’m more hesitant about the idea that neuroscience will kill the idea of ‘the self.’ I think it might be a good thing if it did, but some ideas are recalcitrant…

Bookmark

The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet, stories…

Bookmark

Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts, talks…