I Hope the World Isn’t Real
Maybe it’s an experiment on how much an artificial consciousness can take before it melts…
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Saturday Video Roundup: World Cup Edition
The US takes on Ghana in the Round of 16 today, and we realize that soccer is a game whose nuances are alien to many American sports fans. SVR offers this brief primer on the basics of the game so as to enhance our readers’ enjoyment of today’s match.
Read moreDr. Slammy’s Law of Social Communication
This came to me just now in an e-mail exchange with our friend John Harvin. So, tell me – am I onto something? Has this already been said? In any public communication system where access is generally open, noise tends to expand at an exponential rate while the expansion of signal is merely additive. Of course, it’s hard to imagine
Read moreIs a GED better than a PhD?
I come from a family background that was conflicted on the question of education. On the one hand, my grandparents (who raised me from the time I was three) realized that whatever hope I was to have of a better life than they’d had hinged on school. As such, there was never a moment in my life, once I was
Read moreChaos, Complexity, Kant and Mill
One of the great debates in the field of ethics centers around the thinking of Emmanuel Kant vs. the Utilitarians – most notably John Stuart Mill. To simplify, Kant’s philosophy suggests that the means justify the ends: we should always do the right thing and trust the results to work out for themselves. Mill, on the other hand, argued that
Read moreLIFE and the long view: ideologies of science and technology since the Enlightenment
Part two in a series. As I suggested in Part One, the messianic/utopian view of science and technology attributed to LIFE Magazine is consistent with an ideological bent that traces its lineage to the dawn of the Enlightenment in Europe. Francis Bacon’s highly influential New Atlantis, first published in 1626, recounts the narrator’s fictional shipwreck on the shores of Bensalem,
Read moreAttack ads getting out of control
Thx to Jim Gwyn for passing this on.
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lullaby pit 