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Memes

4,781–4,800 of 4,816

A Poetic Description of Ourselves as the Sum of Our Parts

...when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do no die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together…

Guard Your Knowledge Portfolio

You need to ensure that the knowledge in your portfolio is accurate and unswayed by either vendor or media hype. Beware of zealots who insist that their dogma provides the only answer--it may ore may not be applicable to you and your project.

Cyberspace as a State of Mind

Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong synesthetic imagery when in hack mode, interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this…

Hackers Subscribe to the Ontology of Science

Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines

The Pandemonium Software Architecture

This essay, while dealing with computational theory, provides a model for how the brain functions. The Pandemonium Model, where multiple processes try to answer a patter, with a administrative function picking the best answer, provides an excellent model for the environment in which the brain evolved, with useful…

Fundamental Names in Computer Science

Consider some fundamental names: Turing (computation theory and programmable automata), von Neumann (computer architecture), Shannon (information theory), Knuth, Hoare, Dijkstra, and Wirth (programming theory and algorithmics), Feigenbaum and McCarthy (artificial intelligence), Codd (relational model of databases)…

Nature is the Word of God We Should Study

Could a man be placed in a situation, and endowed with power of vision to behold at one view, and to contemplate deliberately, the structure of the universe, to mark the movements of the several planets, the cause of their varying appearances, the unerring order in which they revolve, even to the remotest comet, their…

How the Analytical Engine Weaves Concepts Like a Loom

The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of…

How the Analytical Engine Goes Beyond Mathematics

Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine…

Computer Programmers Master 10 Orders of Complexity

In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 10^10 or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with…

Obama Describes the World Wide Web

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo…

How Design of Medium Inhibits Growth

Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented fro understandable…

An Empirical Research Model for Software Development

2cThe research approach is strongly empirical. At the workplace of each member of the subject group we aim to provide nearly full-time availability of a CRT work station, and then to work continuously to improve both the service available at the stations and the aggregate value derived therefrom by the group over the…

Electronics as the Buddhist Third-Way?

Newton's physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory two-party system, in which the strong win over the weak. But in the 1920's a German genius put a tiny third-party (grid) between these two mighty poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the weak to win over the strong for the first…

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Press Release

MAINTAIN A CONSTRUCTIVE CLIMATE FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS BY A CIVILIZED COLLABORATION BETWEEN GROUPS UNREALISTICALLY DEVELOPING IN ISOLATION. ELIMINATE THE SEPARATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL FROM TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND EXPAND AND ENRICH TECHNOLOGY TO GIVE THE INDIVIDUAL VARIETY, PLEASURE AND…

The Content of Any Medium is Always Another Medium

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any medium is always another medium. the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content…

Cybernetics Extending Human Perception

And man's relationship to his environment has changed. As a result of cybernetic efficiency, he finds himself becoming more and more predominantly a Controller and less and Effecter. The machine, largely self-regulating and highly adaptive, stands between man and his world. It extends his perception in furthest space…

How Medium Constraints Can Enforce Good Design

Construction of a drawing with Sketchpad is itself a model of the design process. The locations of the points and lines of the drawing model the variables of a design, and the geometric constraints applied to the points and lines of the drawing model the design constraints which limit the values of design variables…

Arguments Aren't Necessarily Linear

Conceptually speaking, however, an argument is not a serial affair. It is sequential, I grant you, because some statements have to follow others, but this doesn't imply that its nature is neccesarily serial. We usually string Statement B after Statement A, with Statements C, D, E, F and so on following in that…