Life, the Multiverse and Everything...
A leaked internal memo from physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva reports a whiff of the Higgs boson, the long-sought theoretical particle that could make or break the standard model of particle physics. The preliminary note, which is still under review, was posted April 21 in an anonymous comment on physicist Peter [...]
When it comes to the digital networks that now surround us, the fact is that most us can’t just GTFO, even if we wanted to. The sooner we move beyond the addiction metaphor, the sooner we’ll be able to see, with some clarity and honesty, the extent and implications of our dependency on our networked computing and media devices.
What happens to the human self as it comes to experience more and more of the world, and of life, through the mediation of the screen?
I would like to direct the Internet’s attention (when the Internet pays attention, servers fail and nodes collapse, and a rictal grin spreads across Ned Ludd’s bony face) to an article on the topic of Ludditism by Thomas Pynchon, which ran in the New York Times Book Review in that fabled year, 1984.
Written nearly a decade before the World Wide Web would turn the Internet into a popular medium, the article is nevertheless entirely up to date in its description of humankind’s submergence in a superabundance of accessible data.
Three strangely echoing visions of the future:
from the O’Reilly Radar, Kevin Kelly, and Ted Kaczynski.
Since I started writing my Realtime Chronicles series a year ago, I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment.
Realtime is a journey that you and your child take together. Every moment is unique because every moment is disconnected from both the one that precedes it and the one that follows it.
Realtime is a state of perpetual renewal and unending and undifferentiated stimulus. The joy of infancy continues forever.
I admit to having a bit of a personal interest in this, but I’ve been fascinated to see how the thinking of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has evolved over the past few years on the question of the Net’s effect on reading and cognition.
Here are three quotes from Schmidt on the topic …
Though the written word seems horribly low tech, I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing.
But writing will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness.
We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.
Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and … [Read More...]
A leaked internal memo from physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva reports a … [Read More...]
The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem … [Read More...]
Can you recall a moment when you could honestly say 'I told you so', but when no one listens? Well … [Read More...]
