Did Meditating Make Us Human?
This article by Southern Louisiana U. professor Matt Rossano, published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal in 2007, has an awesome premise: Imagine you travelled back in time 100,000
A short film about the Sandwalk
I've recently had a mild obsession with the Sandwalk, the path that Charles Darwin laid out on his estate, Down House, and which he walked for nearly forty
Darwin’s “home and his homelife became an actual part of his intellectual enterprise”
From Janet Browne's great Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, a description of Darwin's house at Down that is also a wonderful meditation on the ways action and
The revival of the archaic meaning of “addiction” in social media
I've been interested in the use of the term "addiction" in technology and social media-- when the high-tech industry started talking about technology being addictive (or put more
Bytes of China
Via James Fallows, I just found Bytes of China, written by a Fulbright scholar doing fieldwork in China. It's great work: check out this post on supercomputing in
“Forgetting as a feature, not a bug”
Reading the great article but Liam Bannon, director of the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick, on forgetting as a feature, not a bug. His central insight
Neil Gabler on the post-idea society
A provocative... well, idea... in a recent New York Times piece: [W]e are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that
“Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s”
Via Gizmodo, I came across these estimates on 1000 memories about the number of digital photos in existence: Digital cameras are now ubiquitous - it is estimated that 2.5
Do Facebook users spend more time online than computer scientists in the 1960s?
There's a claim-- I found it first in one of Geoff "Nunberg Error" Nunberg's articles-- that before they were all put on CDs, the documentation for a 747
What was the first machine users considered an extension of themselves?
This is a question I spent a little time digging into today. Leaving aside weapons and artist's tools (though I'm not sure that the now-common "the sword is