Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central...

I have just seen this picture on Facebook. Today on the memorydealers.com website: "We are...

I have been using Facebook for a few years, at the beginning not very much, but now I use it more and more often. Most of my friends are there, Facebook is a very quick and convenient way to stay in touch, and I am beginning to consider it also as a very good alternative to email, discussion group and blogs. And, it has also a very useful mobile...

Calling forth light from the void was once an act of biblical proportions. Now all it takes is a bit of smoke and mirrors provided by the laws of quantum mechanics. By creating particles of light from seeming nothingness, an international team of researchers has confirmed an idea first proposed in 1970. According to quantum physics, empty...

Sometimes I've believed as many as s i x impossible things before breakfast....

Democracy is an interesting prospect, and one we can finally make an effective move towards. Not just voting in the next dictator. We have the tool. It is the internet. It is no secret to anyone who has kept their eyes on the news and the dealings of governments around the world that democracy is not the power at work guiding the future of the...

But not like 1 negative and 1 positive.... all splits on a bell curve, which should match to what is called a "particle and antiparticle" because both of those are subject to heisenberg uncertainty which really means they were split on a bell curve instead of +1 and -1. In the double slit experiment, when its not observed, wave...

MARY We did it. The bot apoc is finished. Now it is time to count the survivors. Who's left? FRAN That one is beginning to get over his amnesia. It was probably induced by the bots at the beginning of their operations. MARY What's his name? FRAN Not sure. Most he knows so far is Lou something. It'll come back to him, he...

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

Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain A study links life-changing religious experiences, like being born again, with atrophy in the hippocampus.

Why No Straight Lines By Alan Moore We are now living in what many people now call the...

Alternatively titled: Knowmads, Knowledge and Madness “An image of thought called philosophy...

It looks as if the world was about to come to a complete standstill. Nobody knows that at this very moment, we are hurtling through space at an amazing speed. Hard to believe, since the stars don't look like they are moving. The Hunter hovers just over the horizon yonder, ready to shoot aimlessly at the vast number of bright gems studded on the...

Dear NotMarie, As you well know I am following quite closely the development of your research and this retro-futurist idea of yours, which you have so aptly named the Artificial Intelligence project of Vague, Very Vague, or 3V. I like it, of course I like it, you know I like it, but I like it like one likes a poem, or a sweet memory of an old...

"Timewave zero" is a numerological formula that purports to calculate the ebb and flow of "novelty", defined as increase over time in the universe's interconnectedness, or organized complexity.According to Terence McKenna, the universe has a teleological attractor at the end of time that increases interconnectedness, eventually...

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me....

Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend....

I just want to share an inspiring video I found this week... Some of you probably knows Daniel...

Principles 21. Respond to basic needs with what you have, introducing innovations inspired...

Regarding the political letter writing campaign, to raise Singularity awareness within political arenas (and to increase investment in science and technology); at least two people I'm aware of have received replies from the UK Department for Business Innovation & Skills. Here's a copy of one reply, published via the kind permission of The...

In-progress–feedback welcomed. [Drawing upon cultural anthropology, my current...

Delia Elena San Marco by J. L. Borges We said goodbye on a corner in Once. From the...

The moon is a rock. But it's also Selene, Artemis, Diana, Isis, the lunar deities; an...

I know why there is a square root of -1 in the quantum physics equations, why things are waves sometimes and particles other times, why the double-slit experiment works, why there are bell-curves in quantum physics, and why time exists. Start with nothing. Then divide the nothing into X number of possible states of the universe (ways the...

I wrote this a while ago for the LandscapeTechne exhibit catalogue at Little Berlin gallery in Philadelphia. LandscapeTechne. The crafting of a landscape. It begins with the irreducible landscape of nature. There is a rich history of landscape art, from Romantic paintings to Ansel Adams' photography and Robert Smithson's deformations in dirt,...

Animals live long and prosper when eating from a menu that puts them just this side of starvation. So far, experiments with yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish and rodents all have shown the antiaging power of severely restricting calories. And research in rhesus monkeys suggests similar benefits in primates: One study found that monkeys eating 30...

Intro There's so many startups nowadays. Everyone is trying to bring their ideas to the world,...

Why is the sky blue? The simple answer is Raleigh Scattering. But it is not until it reaches the observer, specifically the brain, that the wavelength is interpreted as "blue". It is easy to detatch the concept of color from the eyes once you understand that there is nothing physically inherent about color. We try to reproduce the...

By firing a particle beam into a cloud chamber, physicists in Denmark and the UK have shown how cosmic rays could stimulate the formation of water droplets in the Earth's atmosphere. The researchers say this is the best experimental evidence yet that the Sun influences the climate by altering the intensity of the cosmic-ray flux reaching the...

Part I [viral campaign by Ayoub Qanir] [pattern + poster design by Ayoub...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3976979749889442679# Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210.[1] Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America",[2] he rose to prominence in 1999 while...

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

My grandpa has brain cancer and is probably going to die soon. Of course I feel sad about this. I see how it's affecting my parents, siblings, cousins etc and it seems as though they're all... more sad?... than I am. I want to feel really badly for Grandpa and his situation, thinking his $10 scratch ticket is a $4 million dollar winner must be...

If Einstein was alive today, he may experiment and teach people things much more powerful than nukes. He only spent time on things as weak as nukes (regardless of who eventually built them using his math) because he had 100 year old technology to work with. Powdered explosives are to nukes as nukes are to what? Airplanes crashing into buildings...

Just thought I would share an experience I had the other morning. While I was trying to sleep in, it must have been the way the light was shining in the dark room through a crack in the curtains that awoke me. My dog, now seeing that I was awake, hit the curtatin with her tail as shs made her way over to lick my face. But when she hit the...

What: Anish Kapoor's Leviathan @ MONUMENTA Who: Anish Kapoor Where: The Grand...

"For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me...

Wroclaw Poland / Puro Hotel

Sometimes I sit back and think about what it means for other animal species to be alive. They hunt and they reproduce and they migrate and they just keep going and going about their business. The only species who seem to be messing anything up are humans, but, I will give us credit at least for this thought. What if there is no point to being...

We all need delusions to keep us going, but sometimes delusions just get too hard to maintain. Thats why, at Pharmacorp, we've developed a wide selection of delusions in pill form. We understand what its like living in a post-scarcity, post-magical, post-human world, and we're here to help. Ask your local conscious systems...

Whilst it may be possible to soon grow your own clothes with synthetic bacteria, or indeed...

From the perspective of the floating head, vision is the most direct and descriptive form of...

THE ARGUMENTATIVE THEORY A Conversation with Hugo Mercier Introduction Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, "The New Science of Morality", Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in...

[words and pattern design by Ayoub Qanir] [excerpt from research paper] “New advancements...

Might the repeated laboratory demonstration of purportedly non-local macro-level phenomena -...

Mycologist Paul Stamets studies mycelium and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help...

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