Daniel Rourke /stream

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With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant,…

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This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video game’s…

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In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the…

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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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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…

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...according to Akasegawa's definition. A publisher's blurb states that this includes the "doorknob in a wall without a door, that driveway leading into an unbroken fence, that strange concrete... thing sprouting…

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SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to…

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What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the earth…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume any…

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I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only…

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(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating…

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Freeman Dyson is one of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following his equations. His…

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Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple IT WAS a speech that changed…

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We've dedicated this Power Grid to the most disgusting alien civilizations to ever grace the page, screen, or hard drive. Why is biology used as technology the easiest way to make…

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The notion of SHEARING LAYERS is one of the centerpieces of Brand's How Buildings Learn [Brand 1994]. Brand, in turn synthesized his ideas from a variety of sources, including British designer…

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With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant,…

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In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number…

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In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the…

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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…

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The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools The…

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SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about—from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume any…

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I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only…

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(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating…

Bookmark

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple IT WAS a speech that changed…

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The notion of SHEARING LAYERS is one of the centerpieces of Brand's How Buildings Learn [Brand 1994]. Brand, in turn synthesized his ideas from a variety of sources, including British designer…

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The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction. Personally,…