August 2011
155 posts
Paul Krugman: The President Surrenders →
cognitivedissonance:
Posting nearly in full:
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America...
Aint Studying You: Discovering Inhabited Lands:... →
…to deem that the field was unsophisticated and amateurish before you showed up is not the most congenial tact in an introduction. But, even more important, it is likely to weaken the scholar’s own work with misunderstandings that could have been avoided by presuming that the understandings in place before he arrived (like Columbus on inhabited Hispaniola) issue from intelligance and...
FuturistSpeaker.com – The personal blog of... →
…it’s not because the information on Wikipedia is not credible. Rather, they, like the encyclopedias they helped put out of business, will be upended by a company with better ways of aggregating information. They too will become irrelevant.
July 2011
107 posts
It's Okay To Be Smart: So... doesn't the word... →
jtotheizzoe:
No it doesn’t, jrockchocolate:
Entropy- the tenancy towards disorder in any system
So, if everything is always coming apart and heading towards chaos… how did molecules “come together” to create the universe?
Something had to be there so put them together…
The best explanation (that…
“It’s doubtful, though, that any of the scientists Verne polled would have sensed...”
– PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE by Michio Kaku reviewed by Alastair Reynolds - TLS (via mediafuturist)
Paul Higgins: This is part of my problem with most versions of use of the Delphi technique where experts are polled on their views. Experts are too deep into their own subject to be the best people to see...
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Armchair Revolutionary: Social Change Rarely Comes... →
armchairrevolutionary:
Our schoolbooks would like us to believe that social change must always be gradual and peaceful. Sudden, abrupt changes are seen as disruptions of a “normal” functioning society. “Respectable” society looks upon mass protest, civil disobedience, strikes, disruption and revolution with horror. But…
5 tags
How close are we to creating artificial life? -... →
Artificial life can be described as man-made systems that function like natural systems. Many disciplines are involved: biology, computer science, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, philosophy and ethical studies.
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Watch
And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film. I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self not my own. And it felt so good. It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self — one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life...
When Will We Be Transhuman? →
cerebralicious:
An interesting list of proposed preconditions courtesy of Discover magazine.
Not bad, but perhaps a little, ah, unambitious for my taste.
THEY PUSHED BACK STAR TREK.
siriuslythough:
it’s not coming out june 29th, i don’t even know when it’s coming out but i’m crying.
zappr's delight: Futurism & Anarchy - Inverse... →
crysmoore:
Sousveillance is an concept developed by Mann where an activity is being recorded by a participant of that same activity. Activist groups such as Cop Watch use this to record instances of police brutality. You could say that what happened around the Rodney King beating was an example of…
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“On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of...”
– Captain Sisko, on Nechayev’s suggestion that he “establish a dialogue” with the Maquis (Deep Space Nine, The Maquis Part II)
The AI Singularity is Dead; Long Live the... →
The Cybernetic Singularity is the logical extension of a process humans have been pursuing throughout history: the augmentation of our brain’s computational left-hemisphere. By recognizing the relative functions of the hemispheres of the human brain, we are able to see how cybernetic augmentation of the left-hemisphere of the human brain will enable significant increases in some forms of...
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Transhumanism/Posthumanism - The Human Future -... →
The pursuit of transhumanist ideals will very likely lead to a large disparity in the types and extents of biotechnological modifications between individuals and entire communities. As a consequence, people may feel threatened by those who are seen as different from themselves, leading to the potential of discrimination against both the enhanced and the unenhanced.
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a critical introduction to queer theory.
suitableforvegans:
Gender is… a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.
- Nikki Sulivan.
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Aaron in transit: becoming me: I was fired from my... →
aaron-in-transit:
Apparently my supervisor and coworkers were fine with it, but the HR representative, who I never even got to meet, was not.
They first had the person from my staffing agency contact me (instead of speaking to me personally) requesting that I not use the correct bathroom, because I might…
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THE ROYAL NOCTURNE: Cultural Marxism →
royal-nocturne:
After the tragic events of the Norwegian bombings from radical right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, his manifesto began to circulate around the Internet. Within it’s pages of twisted, ultra-nationalist views, cultural Marxism was constantly attacked. But what is cultural Marxism? Is it…
archive library space future reading information:... →
nikosvoyiatzis:
Abstract:
The birth of Information Age meets human species in the postmodern condition.During the next decades (60s-70s) the necessity of a new model for managing and handling information and the first theories on Information Literacy are emerging.The term information literacy first appeared in…
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“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,...”
– - H.P. Lovecraft (via meskdale)
Action Addiction: News Alert: JJ Abrams Will... →
actionaddiction:
While J.J. Abrams has (in public) been scuffling his feet about actually committing to the task of directing Star Trek 2, it is understandable. Between his having completed post-production and promotion duties on Super 8 just a couple months ago, and his involvement as producer on upcoming…
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Google+ U.S. Visitors Spend Less Time on Site Last... →
parislemon:
Hardly surprising after the massive initial surge. If my own stream and usage is any indication, it’s significantly slowing down.
Now begins the true test of the network.
World SF Blog » "The Emergence of Latin American... →
wildunicornherd:
From Wesleyan University Press (that’s right, not Tor, not Del Rey, but an academic publisher so you know it’s fancy):
Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to 1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has...
Yet Another Set of Muddled Anti-Transhumanist... →
There is an enormous amount of good that can be achieved with our new technoscience, especially regenerative medicine. The issue is where we draw the line between ethical and unethical use of it.
