issue_74
Networks
That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. Yes, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Arpanet, a network that linked four computer nodes in 1969, the prototype of today’s Internet, a giant leap for humankind. (That moon landing was pretty significant, too.)
How to Collapse the Distinction Between Art and Biology
What Xenotext does is cause its audience to reevaluate their ideas of creation, both literary and biological.Illustration by GiroScience / Shutterstock Language,” the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, “is a virus from outer space.” Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which words, phrases, idioms, sentences, lines, and narratives […]
Physicists Peer Inside a Fireball of Quantum Matter
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. A gold wedding band will melt at around 1,000 degrees Celsius and vaporize at about 2,800 degrees, but these changes are just the beginning of what can happen to matter. Crank up the temperature to trillions of degrees, and particles deep inside the atoms start to shift into new, non-atomic configurations. Physicists […]
Families of Choice Are Remaking America
Through their networks of friends, singles are strengthening society’s social bonds.
The Flawed Reasoning Behind the Replication Crisis
It’s time to change the way uncertainty is quantified.
Collective Intelligence Will End Identity-Based Politics
It is possible to imagine, explore, and promote forms of consciousness that enhance awareness as well as dissolve the artificial illusions of self and separate identity.Photo illustration by Shane Taremi / Flickr The Canadian poet Dennis Lee once wrote that the consolations of existence might be improved if we thought, worked, and lived as though […]
Who Will Design the Future?
AI will be staggeringly diverse. Its developers should be, too.
The Disappearing Physicist and His Elusive Particle
He ushered symmetry into theoretical physics, then vanished without a trace.
The Science Behind “Blade Runner”’s Voight-Kampff Test
Is a fictional test designed to distinguish between replicants and humans, called the Voight-Kampff test, feasible?Universo Produção / Flickr Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, passed away recently. To celebrate his iconic role, we are revisiting this piece on the Voight-Kampff test, a device to detect if a […]
We’re More of Ourselves When We’re in Tune with Others
Music reminds us why going solo goes against our better nature.
