Daniel Rourke /stream

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When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s…

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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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Along with his work on synthesis, or using machines to create sounds, Cope had dabbled in the use of software to compose music. Inspired by the field of artificial intelligence, he…

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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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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…

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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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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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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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"'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind…

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In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the Amazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up…

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by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow…

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Get sucked in

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(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)

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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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In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports. After…

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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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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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A head spinning new take on the classic videogame. Play it until your sense of direction explodes.

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The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is so…

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When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s…

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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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Restoration experts have used ultra violet rays to shine an astonishing new light on the work of one of the most important painters in the history of Western art. The paintings…

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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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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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Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod (see…

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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

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…

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,…

Bookmark

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…

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"'To read what was never written.' Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind…

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by Manuel DeLanda The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow…

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Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube... Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture…

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(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)

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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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In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports. After…

Bookmark

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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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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The arrow of time points in one direction only, from past to present to future. Now there's a fact—rather like Wittgenstein's observation "A is the same thing as A"—that is so…

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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…