Is language is a purely cultural phenomenon or not? Obviously it's the most successful...

Human beings versus machines, or machines as instruments of human designs? The answers to these two questions would have been obvious years ago: Human beings, of course, machines are instruments of human design! But now days when we speak so much of progress, science and technology as if progress, science and technology were in themselves...

If you haven't read any Buckminster Fuller, you need to get on it. I don't think you...

Outstanding Reading Material I have carefully selected a few of the outmost important texts on...

Today I was reading an interesting style website and they report that analyses: Robot love...

Project Proposal: There are hundreds of thousands of books published every year. Many are...

"Sync" by Steven H. Strogatz Topic: coupled oscillators, applied math Tonight the Beijing Olympic games (um... 2008) have opened with a huge bass of square drums made of bronze and wood that covered the central stadium. Each drum would glow when hit by a dedicated person, a drummer, or artist standing next. The performance was...

If ever there was a book I read that "Defined Reality", Then Brian Greene's The Fabric of...

Marshall McLuhan has been mentioned in passing in various comments here on spacecollective,...

Your average 'alternative' 'underground' 'cult' summer booklist will name conservative corkers like William Gibson, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Hubert S. Selby or Brett Easton Ellis. A 'real' underground list might add snotty punk-fashionistas like Stewart Home or Henry Rollins. But if you have read...

“There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techné... Once there was a...

While looking for our book club books at Counterpoint I came across Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur...

I was thinking about Spaceweaver’s post about immortality and remembered that in the early...

A compelling, thought provoking and eloquently written science fiction novel written by Robert Silverberg. It is essentially a dystopian novel, following many of the main themes explored by "We" (by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1921), "Brave New World" (by the great Aldous Huxley, 1932) and "A Modern Utopia" (by H.G....

We have constructed a ladder of how to think about – about what? Oh, yes, the pattern which...

by Kristin Feireiss (Editor), Lukas Feireiss (Editor) "Editorial Reviews Product...

A book that makes you think, laugh and continue reading.

Few weeks ago I was reading one of a dozen bulletins that I subscribe and also thinking about a...

I am a bad reader. Slow, ill-disciplined, with a wandering mind. I will rarely manage a...

I added a comment to this post today, about photographs of libraries. I reproduce it here. I...

I've just discovered Twine.com, a socially semantic web organiser of data, in 'twines'. Apparently...

Nine years ago scientists discovered the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and slowly...

Readers: Do you think in hypertext? The era of the linear tome is dead, information is a web -...

Via NewScientist.com 1. Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist 2. The Art of the Soluble -...

I havn't been fortunate enough to finish reading this book yet. Regardless, this book has provided...

"Reality has no opposite. Reality IS. NIRVANA IS." (emphasis appears in original) This...

I just finished a book that I must reccomend. It is called The Survivors. I feel so down since I...

This is a short book. Sounds good when I put it like that, doesn't it? However, much as its plot...

I made a short about a year ago that seems to be a fairly accurate metaphor for the Total...

Western intellectual tradition looks at Body and Mind as separate things existing in different...

As I'm sure many of you are aware, the COS (Church of Satan, not be confused with Cult of...

I came across this story by the late great Arthur C. Clarke. I'm not going to reproduce it here because it's probably copyrighted to his estate or something like that, but if you're interested in reading a very short story about the fictional fate of a certain species, which just might be applicable to our own, I suggest you do so by clicking the...

“Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh....

The Library of Alexandria was an enormous repository of ancient wisdom situated in Egypt. Due to...

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred...

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested:...

It is possible that writing has an intrinsic relationship with lines of flight. To write is to trace lines of flight which are not imaginary, and which one is indeed forced to follow, because in reality writing involves us there, draws us in there. To write is to become, but has nothing to do with becoming a writer. That is to become something...

Before the printed book there was the book as relic, the book as idol to knowledge. Those who...

This post is meant for those who are in the strange habit of finishing what they start. All others...

Nary a post goes by when I don't feel compelled to share a relevant book. I'd like to propose a collective recommended reading list, and in beginning this list I'll paraphrase the first page of my first recommendation. It's from a book called "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Many people, when they see an immense...