Category Archives: science

turing’s cathedral

Posted on Sunday, 25th March 2012 by

Here’s the official synopsis of historian of science ↑George Dyson‘s latest book ‘Turing’s Cathedral’ (2012): “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s … Continue reading →

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lego serving science

Posted on Wednesday, 21st March 2012 by

I especially like this Google Science Fair 2012 video, because it shows how much makeshift and creative improvisation takes place in laboratory work—quite to the contrary of the usual renditions of hight-tech labs in movies. And I of course do … Continue reading →

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einstein archives online

Posted on Tuesday, 20th March 2012 by

via ↑entry at ↑boingboing

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the construction of social computing

Posted on Wednesday, 7th March 2012 by

Just yesterday I received an e-mail from ↑Maurizio Teli [whom I know from back in 2005, when we met at the Cyberspace conference in Brno, Czech Republic] containing a call for papers for a workshop he is organizing together with … Continue reading →

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brains ain’t computers

Posted on Thursday, 2nd February 2012 by

When, ↵like recently, I am talking about the historical significance of cybernetics for contemporary culture and society I more often than not mention that in the process of marking itself off from mechanistic visions (Ashby 1957 [1956]: 1-6), cybernetics quite … Continue reading →

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commodifying bodies

Posted on Saturday, 26th November 2011 by

At one level, then, the commodification of the body is a new discourse, linked to the incredible expansion of possibilities through recent advances in biomedicine, transplant surgery, experimental genetic medicine, biotechnology and the science of genomics in tandem with the … Continue reading →

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paleofuture

Posted on Sunday, 30th October 2011 by

Since January 2007 Matt Novak runs the weblog ↑paleofuture, collecting and presenting past visions of futures that never were. Drawing on his “physical archive of materials related to retro-futurism” his project is of such quality that it meanwhile has ↑moved … Continue reading →

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marco tempest

Posted on Friday, 21st October 2011 by

… get to the poetry faster  This is way overdue. It must have been in the late 1980s or early ’90s that for the first time I saw ↑Marco Tempest perform live. It was at one of those bigger magicians’ … Continue reading →

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final problem

Posted on Sunday, 30th January 2011 by

‘Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by Nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible.’ (Doyle 1893) DOYLE, Sir ARTHUR IGNATIUS CONAN. 1893. The adventure of … Continue reading →

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2012 scorcher

Posted on Tuesday, 4th January 2011 by

‘Apocalyptic blockbuster absurd, say NASA scientists‘—thus headlines an article by John Harlow in ‘The Australian’, published yesterday. NASA is very unhappy with scientifically overflawed science-fiction movies like Roland Emmerich’s ‘2012‘ of 2009 (which they deem to be the worst), or … Continue reading →

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