The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ [...]

This is really old in internet time, but I just watched it now and it is definitely worth it. David Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and tells basically the same Aristotle to Heidegger story I tell in my own class.

See also: Ontology is Overrated and Information R/Evolution.
Coming up: The Three Pillars of [...]

Ran into this quote from Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without [...]

Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale

On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to [...]

The Soul in the Machine
When I was ushered into the room, the professor motioned me to a chair, his hands playing nervously, his shoulders rising with each breath. “Ask me anything you like,” he said, fixing me with an intent look, before staring at the floor despondently when I began to chuckle. “How many actuators [...]

Speaking of long articles worth reading, Vanity Fair has assembled a good oral history of the Internet to celebrate it’s 50th anniversary.
How the web was won
Leonard Kleinrock: September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a [...]

Excellent article on the Internet up on The Atlantic (thanks, Lally!) that ties the internet into the long history of automated “choreography” characteristic of the industrialized world.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at [...]

From He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) (NYT)

While nothing announces that Mr. Parker’s books are computer generated, one reader, David Pascoe, seemed close to figuring it out himself, based on his comments to Amazon in 2004. Reviewing a guide to rosacea, a skin disorder, Mr. Pascoe, who is from Perth, [...]

These are the videos I show for my big robot screening every year in 101. I’ve posted each of these videos here before, but it will be handy in the future to have the list consolidated and organized. I’ll periodically add to the list as I remember things and find new things.

Well-known awesome person Bill sent me this link a week or so ago. I ignored it at first out of a general hatred of any of the media coming out over Levy’s book. But there is just too much goodness in this article to pass it by.
Technosexual