October 2009
207 posts
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“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
– Isaac Newton after losing £20,000 in the South Sea Bubble
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Watch
Via Michael Anissimov we hear that the second generation of the RepRap self-replication machine, codenamed “Mendel”, is nearly ready for public release. Meaning that you could buy one (if you found someone who’d sell you one), but you could also build your own from the free open-source plans found at the RepRap website; the parts will cost you around US$650.
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What happens to the internet if there’s a viral... →
The gist:
And what do you do if you’re stuck home from work or school under house quarantine? You fire up your computer and mess around on the internet (unless that’s just me), meaning a severe pandemic will cause a serious uptick in bandwidth demand, potentially slowing down essential infrastructure systems at the same time. [image by matthewjethall]
In a rare display of pragmatism, Homeland...
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Seven questions that keep physicists up at night →
My favorite in the list:
What is reality really? The material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, but Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, is profoundly hopeful that physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of...
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Why Google will win: entrapment in the iPhone is a... →
Entrapment can be an effective strategy when you are building up a business. Marketers tend to call that customer lock-in. From the perspective of the business this sounds like a great thing to do. Hook the customer to your business and dont let go. From the perspective of the customer it sounds exactly what it is, an entrapment…
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“For she has always been an effortlessly graceful tactile assemblage of current...”
– Martin Demasco in a comment on The New York Times’
Can’t say I agree with him on that, but the quote was charming…
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NYTimes Happy Days Blog: Kierkegaard on the Couch →
All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has been become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to...
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“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and...”
– Soren Kierkegaard
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“Well, the computer changes epistemology, it changes the meaning of ‘to...”
– Gregory Chaitin
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““I think that we are training our nervous systems to expect a certain kind...”
– William Deresiewicz
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“Fueled by social media sites and ever-cheaper devices, information production...”
– Tad Toulis
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“I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time on blogs, to the point where I...”
– Chris Gray
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“Discontinuity is a manifestation of independent individuality and autonomy,...”
– Nicolai Bugaev
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“…regarding ourselves as complex machines need not diminish our feelings of...”
– Marvin Minsky
Quoted by Brian Appleyard, looking for feedback:
I am, periodically, going to put various quotations on this blog. They will be taken from my current reading. I shall not comment. The idea is that you should. Each one will be headline ‘Discuss’. It is possible this will...
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A Postcard from the Arctic →
The New York Times DotEarth blog features a letter and sound piece from artist David Rothenberg, “a philosopher, musician and author of fascinating books on whales, birdsong and a host of other facets of the natural world,” who, along with 20 others, has embarked upon a journey to the arctic…
October 14th, sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E
We are 14 artists, 2...
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“Asking the Question” is the first step in a formal futures thinking...”
– Jamais Cascio
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WatchFrom Serial Consign’s interview with Jose Luis de Vicente:
And lately I have enjoyed a lot Aaron Koblin’s projects, from The Sheep Market to Bicycle for 2,000, where a question is posed and the data to explore that question is generated from scratch by a collective of participants that are never aware of the global picture.
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“The average middle class person alive today has more goodies than the kings and...”
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The Way We Live Now: Going Offline in Search of... →
NYTimes columnist Peggy Orenstein writes of her experience in trying to gain freedom from the web. She used a mac-based program called “Freedom,” which when activated blocks your internet access for up to 8 hours at a time…
It could be that sometimes our greatest freedom may be to choose freedom from freedom. I am still surprised by the relief that floods me whenever I bind...
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The Robots Are Coming! Oh, They’re Here. →
…some kids at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University are suggesting that an average game day story can be bolted together without human intervention…
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A people's history of the internet: from Arpanet... →
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“New business practices are really driving productivity. But one of the great...”
– Erik Brynjolfsson, the Schussel Family Professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management
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