Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

Bookmark

Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised of…

Bookmark

There have been plenty of conferences about the future of publishing, but few, if any, have been aimed at writers. The Literary Consultancy remedied this recently with a two-day conference –…

Bookmark

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

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,"…

Bookmark

We have met our match at the genteel pastime of jigsaw puzzles. It seems an algorithm can now whiz through 10,000 pieces in 24 hours. The speedy solver could also help…

Bookmark

"The Rise of the Tweet takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good & bad senses" It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not…

Bookmark

About five years ago, Rubin’s father mentioned that Avi’s younger brother, Yaacov, had been winning money playing poker online. Soon after, Avi suggested to Yaacov that they play sometime. “He kind…

Bookmark

Huddled within one of the most influential theories of human desire and the destiny of democracy is an image of history and its future. This image is of a horizon. In…

Bookmark

A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version as…

Bookmark

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”…

Bookmark

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it…

Bookmark

The "prisoner's dilemma" is a classic psychology game used to study how collaboration evolves in animal societies. Now, a pair of mathematicians have identified a new way of playing the game…

Bookmark

While watching Die Hard the other night—one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an essay called "Lethal Theory" by Eyal Weizman—itself one of the…

Bookmark

Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology gives us a good perspective from which to think through what has been so far said about Derrida's book. The book is a careful selection of valuable…

Bookmark

Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a…

Bookmark

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

Bookmark

Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was picking another fight. Normally, this would not be an occasion worthy of comment. The best way to distinguish between Professor Dawkins’ waking and sleeping states is probably…

Bookmark

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the…

Bookmark

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,"…

Bookmark

We have met our match at the genteel pastime of jigsaw puzzles. It seems an algorithm can now whiz through 10,000 pieces in 24 hours. The speedy solver could also help…

Bookmark

"The Rise of the Tweet takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good & bad senses" It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not…

Bookmark

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in…

Bookmark

Huddled within one of the most influential theories of human desire and the destiny of democracy is an image of history and its future. This image is of a horizon. In…

Bookmark

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”…

Bookmark

Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made it…

Bookmark

The "prisoner's dilemma" is a classic psychology game used to study how collaboration evolves in animal societies. Now, a pair of mathematicians have identified a new way of playing the game…

Bookmark

While watching Die Hard the other night—one of the best architectural films of the past 25 years—I kept thinking about an essay called "Lethal Theory" by Eyal Weizman—itself one of the…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology gives us a good perspective from which to think through what has been so far said about Derrida's book. The book is a careful selection of valuable…

Bookmark

In dealing with her mother’s home in Minneapolis, Ms. Sholl has spent much of her life alternating between feeling shame about its squalid condition and attempting to rid it of the…