Daniel Rourke /stream

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Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and…

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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 those…

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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 the…

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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. They…

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In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio…

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"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the mass…

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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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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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Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the…

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Another binary myth fundamental to Western culture is the eternally popular hubris/nemesis complex. According to this idea, those who transgress against the natural order always get their just desserts. Hubris is…

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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 their…

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So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)…

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This is the whole of the experimental film, It Felt Like a Kiss. It was the basis of the show [Adam Curtis] did in Manchester with Punchdrunk. The show may well…

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Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also believed…

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A collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131 There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these…

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Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world, including…

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It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional way…

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For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of…

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Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and…

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This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are…

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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 the…

Bookmark

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. They…

Bookmark

"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the mass…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

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 YouTube…

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Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the…

Bookmark

Another binary myth fundamental to Western culture is the eternally popular hubris/nemesis complex. According to this idea, those who transgress against the natural order always get their just desserts. Hubris is…

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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? What,…

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So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)…

Bookmark

This is the whole of the experimental film, It Felt Like a Kiss. It was the basis of the show [Adam Curtis] did in Manchester with Punchdrunk. The show may well…

Bookmark

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.” It is also believed…

Bookmark

A collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131 There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these…

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The planned October 9, 2009 bombing of the moon by a NASA orbiter that will bomb the moon with a 2-ton kinetic weapon to create a 5 mile wide deep crater…

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It Felt Like a Kiss started life as an experimental film I made for the BBC last year. My aim was to try and find a more involving and emotional way…

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A few years ago Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett opined that the idea of natural selection - proposed 150 years ago in Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" - was "the…