Latest Tweets:
What Ursula K. Le Guin has taught SF
Or, on two kinds of science fiction: With World of Exile and Illusion, Ursula K. Le Guin presents us with an alternative notion of what science fiction can be. In a previous post, I was somewhat concerned about setting up a gender-based dichotomy of this…
Open question: the interplay of narrative and the physical text
In any story, there is a tension between its content, the narrative flow on one hand, and the actual object by which it is conveyed on the other. The ‘immaterial’ informational content has a medium of material conveyance (to such an extent that calling…
WiSee: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
Ok. Hai you guys. Spying? Great. Just great.
(Source: youtube.com)
Agent Swarm: HARMAN'S MAGICAL REALISM (and magical critiques of others)
“For Harman, Deleuze “undermines” objects through Hericlitean flows (see, e.g., http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/ who-wrote-this/). This misses the place of assemblages and breaks in Deleuze’s works, but more importantly, this is not an argument but an assertion—an assertion of…
Stay behind the line please, sir.
We need a term, preferably a German compound word, for that faux pas which we commit specifically in an art gallery. I suggest Kunstinteraktionsfehlerschande.
"This time around, it’s not a ridiculous compound, but a single word: “Blase.” It’s the word used to refer to a financial “bubble,” but it also has another meaning: “blister.” The advantages of “blister” over “bubble” for describing the financial phenomenon in question are manifold. A financial bubble sounds wholesome and fun, as though financiers are blowing soap bubbles in the park. Eventually they’ll pop, but why dwell on that? If we believed that there was a financial blister underway, by contrast, there’d be much less metaphorical incentive to let nature take its course — once it got to a certain point, it would need to be lanced in order to avoid an uncontrolled bursting that could lead to infection. Further, the metaphor of a blister is more evocative of the origin of the phenomenon, pointing as it does toward an excessive amount of friction, rubbing a part of the financial markets raw and causing it to become inflamed. A financial blister in the housing market, for instance, would not indicate that the housing market was doing especially well, but instead that an unsustainable amount of work is being demanded of it."
Yet another concept that is better expressed in German. Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich
"
How could it be that so far the network age seems to be a time of endless austerity, jobless recoveries, loss of social mobility, and intense wealth concentration in markets that are anemic overall? How could it be that ever since the incredible efficiencies of digital networking have finally reached vast numbers of people that we aren’t seeing a broad benefit?
The medicine of our time is purported to be open information. The medicine comes in many bottles: open software, free online education, European pirate parties, Wikileaks, social media, and endless variations of the above. The principle of making information free seems, at first glance, to spread the power of information out of elite bubbles to benefit everyone.
Unfortunately, although no one realized it beforehand, the medicine turns out to be poison.
"Jaron Lanier, Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all
Variations on a theme, digital scales.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/lets-defy-the-big-pharma-attempt-to-turn-difference-into-illness/
“Psychiatrists should stick to what they do best — treating people who have real psychiatric problems — and not expand the field to include the normal worried well, who will do just fine on their own. Primary care doctors should stick to what they do best and stop being amateur psychiatrists. Drug companies should stop acting like drug cartels, irresponsibly pushing product where it will do more harm than good. Consumer advocacy groups should advocate for their consumers, not for the group. The media should expose excessive medical claims, rather than mindlessly trumpeting them.”
Agent Swarm: Science and Philosophy: Dogmatic confusion vs Heuristic Blending
Kyle Donahue requested a “translation into the vulgate” of this post: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/on-the-irreducibility-of-philosophical-concepts-to-scientific-categories-scientistic-reduction-vs-transversal-porting/ Here is an attempt at such a translation: Some people…
Writing about women in SF: Le Guin, Finkbeiner, Bechdel…
Doing some preparation for a post about Ursula K. Le Guin, I began to get worried. I am part of the…
"For Lem, communism and capitalism are delusional twin faiths: communism, that we can collectively and centrally control chance and causality; capitalism, that chance and causality will intrinsically prove benevolent and productive for us."
