The Angel of History: walking backwards into a digital mental health future by Mark Brown Living a life with mental health difficulty can rob us of our sense of the future; reduce us to living from moment to agonising moment. The debate about technology and mental health often focuses on what might be lost rather than what might find. When...

http://libraryofbabel.info/search.cgi Search term: relay thinking moment to software...

Why artificial intelligence research has been working on the wrong problem. Slow down to learn...

Another brilliant project by Katie Paterson A thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a...

Systems thinking is relevant to all professions and academic disciplines that deal with life in...

Motivating people is very simple, and its surprising how most people can fail to understand its most basic concept.... Everyone acts toward their own goals, whatever those may be, some weighted more important than others. They act toward nothing else. Their goals may include good things for others or that others also accomplish their own goals in...

I wrote this post December 2008 but didn't publicly post it here. I don't why, other than I hate facebook, I was ranting and thought I'll keep it to myself. But, appearing in this past year (2009), there are already solutions to what I see as new emerging problems with the internet and usage being confined to pre-designed and pre-determined...

I'm not sure how to prove it, but I think that to solve this reliably is an NP-Complete problem and practically is useful for new kinds of routing protocols and a foundation for decentralized global democracy more similar to how Wikipedia allows billions of people to agree on many things instead of top down ways of organizing things. How can a...

The fashionable ideology that “artificial” lacks the inherent goodness of “natural” is...

I think I am thinking about thinking, but when I try to write it in math it doesn't think about its own thinking. Intelligence is deeply self referencing, a hall of mirrors so bizarre you can't tell if you're a reflection or the real thing. We live in darkness, delusional enough to think the electricity patterns crossing our skull are the objects...

When 2 scientists meet the first time, they should start as Socrates did. Its the only way to...

I know that I know nothing and from that I start to know one thing. I often rebuild large parts...

In 1997 the superformula was discovered, which solved the problem of the limited symmetry of...

Something's exciting about the bluish little illustrations printed on nearly every page of...

Do some research starting at places like and calculate and prove to scientific peer reviewed standards, how much does it cost to save the cheapest Human life? That number of dollars we should call HUMANLIVES. It fluctuates like a stock price. It increases when more is given to efficient charities, since the cheapest Human lives to save are saved...

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as...

Government corruption has gone too far and crossed the line in how it openly allows a whole...

Anticipation of Love Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day, ...

... our children can only do as bad as we are doing, and this is the challenge we are facing - we...

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of...

“I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what...

Humans can build spaceships and fly to the moon because they have a more advanced communication...

(The following is an excerpt from 'Contact' by Carl Sagan) “Do Buddhists believe in God,...

“Whether the cloud of alternatives that is yet hidden in our eyes; Whether the soft snow that...

from neurons to self by Rodolfo R. Llinas This essay arose out of a set of talks given at The University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where Professor Glen Cottrell had graciously invited me to give the American Alumni Lectures in 1989. Little did I know then that St. Andrews would be back in my life, when, in 1998, my son...

Jack A. Tuszynski (Ed.) "THE EMERGING PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS" Contents 1 The Path Ahead Jack A. Tuszynski, Nancy Woolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Definition and Fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Definition of...

Something from the Past-Future-Present. "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my...

Smarter animals recognize themself in a mirror. Others see their reflection and act like its another animal. They hide their food, get ready for a fight, or run away for example. Monkeys are smart enough to act based on where others are looking. They value 1 of 2 boxes higher if a person appears to value it, and more often choose to open that...

This essay was originally published on my site: MachineMachine.net In two short essays –...

I am currently reading one of (probably) the best books in the hard sci-fi genre, it appears that...

September through December 2010 was my first semester of education since I left high school in 2007. In one of my courses, Contemporary Issues, I wrote a paper (a very short one) entitled "Why Computers Do Not," which was meant as a counter to the hopelessly superior article by Marvin Minsky of MIT "Why People Think Computers...

Tonight, I see the Internet as a sort of controlled state of dreaming: directed, curated......

t]he earth — the deterritorialized, the glacial, the giant molecule — is abody without...

Zeesy Powers Zeesy Powers gave us some impressions on the following questions for the Future...

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

“Dear Mother Nature: Sorry to disturb you, but we humans—your offspring—come to you with...

i am desperate to find participants from the arts, design, architecture etc. communities....

(Below are some brief thoughts on the effects on creativity in the Information Age, taken from...

In this book, I discovered one of the most inspiring (fore)words in the area of BRAIN SCIENCE that swiftly explain consciousness as if it never represented much of a problem. I am sure you will enjoy. "Modeling Phase Transitions in the Brain" Editors: D. Alistair Steyn-Ross · Moira Steyn-Ross Early in the 19th century debates on...

Spaceship Earth is a world view term usually expressing concern over the use of limited resources...

The Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1455, was thought to be the world's first printed book, until a...

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. --Albert Einstein E usually does not equal M C^2. Thats only when its not moving. The USA government learned that terrorists keep more secrets and try to have more privacy than people who are not terrorists. Therefore secrets and privacy are bad, so the USA government proceeded to build...

This article was originally published at 3quarksdaily and io9 Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The...

Sensation and Forces "Not to reproduce what we can already see, but to make visible what we cannot" (Paul Klee) The task of art, in all its forms, is to capture forces. Deleuze and Guattari say that this, ultimately, is what makes art abstract - the "summoning" and making visible of otherwise imperceptible forces (Deleuze...

The Elements and Movements in Bacon's Paintings "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions" (Sir Francis Bacon) Deleuze distinguishes 3 pictorial elements in Bacon's paintings, which together constitute a highly precise system - the field that is the spatializing material structure, the...

Painting, Its Ways and Faces "The adventure of painting is that it is the eye alone that can attend to material existence or material presence [...]" (39). Deleuze relates to two definitions of painting - one by line and color, which is visual, and the other by trait and color-patch, which is manual. He then proceeds to...

A Short Introduction "If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it". (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 144; in O'Sullivan, 5) Though it may not have been recognized as such at the time of its publication, today, The Logic of Sensation has come to be recognized as one of...

In this short (8 minutes) video, some people give out their short response to the question: What we...

In the chapter titled Author as Producer of Walter Benjamin's Reflections, he introduces Sergei Tretiakov's 'operating writer', and how his/her mission, as opposed to the 'informing writer', is "not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively". This description is of the author not as activist--because...