The Little Nordics – Life in miniature DAMPDESIGN
How valid is evolutionary psychology?
Richard Burton Reads John Donne’s Poem “The Flea” | Brain Pickings
The End of Trickle-Down Technology | stratechery by Ben Thompson “If indeed Apple has broken through with conservatives, this has powerful implications for all kinds of companies: smartphones are the tip of the spear when it comes to the spread of technology into every part of society, and what Apple may be demonstrating is that […]
Why Can’t The World’s Greatest Minds Solve The Mystery Of Consciousness? from: January 21, 2015 at 12:51PM
Our Exclusive Hands-On With Microsoft’s Unbelievable New Holographic Goggles “The depth camera has a field of vision that spans 120 by 120 degrees—far more than the original Kinect—so it can sense what your hands are doing even when they are nearly outstretched. Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second, all managed with […]
Only the Lonely from: January 21, 2015 at 09:35AM
Alan C. Braddock on Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land “Tanner recognized that the real “danger” confronting him was American racism, which continued to categorize him—and now potentially his son—as second-class citizens, based on absurd “blood” distinctions that chafed against the artist’s Christian worldview. That worldview was selective in its own way, […]
How to browse to google.com from: January 20, 2015 at 09:51AM
Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel—that’s what’s important to me.”
Climbing The Wrong Hill “How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions? I think a good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science.”
Mysterious Statistical Law May Finally Have an Explanation On the Tracy-Widom distribution: ‘The asymmetry of the statistical curve reflects the nature of the two phases. Because of mutual interactions between the components, the energy of the system in the strong-coupling phase on the left is proportional to N2. Meanwhile, in the weak-coupling phase on the […]
Elon Musk donates $10 million to fight the coming robot uprising “The SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder has gone on record as believing that that artificial intelligence could eventually become sentient. (Or at least self-improving, if not self-aware.) And when that happens, humans could face the kind of robot uprising that keeps sci-fi nerds awake […]
Personal Histories “How many children do you have? might sound like the simplest question, until it brings a grieving parent to their knees. When is your anniversary? might create a moment of pause for someone who’s recently separated. Even What’s your hometown? or Where did you go on vacation as a child? might feel painful […]
The Deep Mind of Demis Hassabis “The big thing is what we call transfer learning. You’ve mastered one domain of things, how do you abstract that into something that’s almost like a library of knowledge that you can now usefully apply in a new domain? That’s the key to general knowledge. At the moment, we […]
Betrayal of Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul Jesus Radicals
Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time – Ideas – The Boston Globe “An admirer of Karl Marx’s sociological theories, Ellul came to believe that by the 20th century, the central issue facing industrialized societies had shifted from class struggle to technology—or, as he called it, “technique.” Ellul used this term to underscore his conviction […]