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Nuestra piel es una gran página en blanco; el cuerpo, un libro. El tiempo va escribiendo poco a poco su historia en las caras, en los brazos, en los vientres, en los sexos, en las piernas. Recién llegados al mundo, nos imprimen en la tripa una gran «O», el ombligo. Después, van apareciendo lentamente otras letras. Las…
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens. The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s…
The metaphor of the computer represents in some crude fashion the chemistry of life. Nowadays one may assume that the average citizen of an industrialized country is at least as familiar with computers as with rain forests. The idea of using the computer as a metaphor is a natural one. A computer is a device for…
Social science and philosophy have generated a vast number of other metaphorical descriptions of the public, rooted in different and often scientific perspectives on systematicity and relation. These are technologies in the broad sense that they enable different kinds of questions to be asked. An account of these…
How Foxes Think Multidisciplinary: Incorporate ideas from different disciplines and regardless of their origin on the political spectrum. Adaptable: Find a new approach—or pursue multiple approaches at the same time—if they aren’t sure the original one is working. Self-critical: Sometimes willing (if rarely happy) to…
An interesting reference to the exponential growth when the Vizicar asked the king for doubling growth of grains for each square of the chessboard he had invented. Not terribly large amounts at first, but they become vast as we work across the boards 64 squares.
The name is symbolic. The first pale roots and shoots of a germinating seed look so tiny and fragile; it's hard to believe it can grow into a big tree. Yet there is so much life force in that seed that the roots can work their way through boulders to reach the water, and the shoot can work its way through cracks in a…
M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations. It is a bit like a map. As is weU known, one cannot show the whole of the earth's surface on a single map. The usual Mercator…
Walk upstairs, open the door gently, and look in the crib. What do you see? Most of us see a picture of innocence and helplessness, a clean slate. But, in fact, what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are…
If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t…
The software, the program. is responsible for organizing hardware, the organism. Yet throughout the process, it is the organism in its various stages of development that has to run the program. In other words, the hardware runs the software, whilst at the same time the software is generating the hardware.
So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round for a time or so before it lies down