Daniel Rourke /stream

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Steven Levy writes in Wired on the unexpected turn of the Artificial Intelligence revolution: rather than whole artificial minds, it consists of a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would…

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Philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness are fascinating topics, which recur both here at Scientia Salon [1] and at my former writing outlet, Rationally Speaking [2].

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

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Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet. Kingsnorth is 41,…

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Humans have beat the odds over 400,000 years surviving climate change, super volcanoes and the worst that Mother Nature could throw at us. Technology has always helped us along the way.…

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There's something silly about GIFs. Perhaps it's the smell of the early, weird web. Or maybe it's in the nature of the loop itself. Or perhaps we think that such short…

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Influential post-industrial sound alchemists Coil once implored us to Worship the Glitch, and it’s true that errors and flaws have long been perceived as having an essentially spiritual nature: they serve…

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Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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Metaphor wants to be… ‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...]…

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Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

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Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the…

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GIFs have flashed across many a webpage, flickered within millions of MySpace profiles and glittered among innumerable Tumblrs. You've spotted them in animated advertising, email signatures, web forums and social avatars.

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So, returning to an old subject, about which I’ve got very annoyed in the past. Last week Arts Council England (ACE) published the second version of their 10-year strategic framework for…

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As we pointed out earlier this week, we’re still far from being able to replicate the awesome power of the human brain. So rather than use traditional models of computing, IBM…

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Steven Levy writes in Wired on the unexpected turn of the Artificial Intelligence revolution: rather than whole artificial minds, it consists of a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would…

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Philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness are fascinating topics, which recur both here at Scientia Salon [1] and at my former writing outlet, Rationally Speaking [2].

Bookmark

| | | Among the four languages covered in this section, the most common terminology in use today is Japanese. This page contains English terminology with Japanese in parenthesis (where applicable).

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

Bookmark

Humans have beat the odds over 400,000 years surviving climate change, super volcanoes and the worst that Mother Nature could throw at us. Technology has always helped us along the way.…

Bookmark

OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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There's something silly about GIFs. Perhaps it's the smell of the early, weird web. Or maybe it's in the nature of the loop itself. Or perhaps we think that such short…

Bookmark

Influential post-industrial sound alchemists Coil once implored us to Worship the Glitch, and it’s true that errors and flaws have long been perceived as having an essentially spiritual nature: they serve…

Bookmark

Nature is the featureless remainder at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever: it’s basically featureless, abstract, gray. It has nothing to do…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a…

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Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

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Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written.…

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GIFs have flashed across many a webpage, flickered within millions of MySpace profiles and glittered among innumerable Tumblrs. You've spotted them in animated advertising, email signatures, web forums and social avatars.

Bookmark

So, returning to an old subject, about which I’ve got very annoyed in the past. Last week Arts Council England (ACE) published the second version of their 10-year strategic framework for…