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Posts

May 16, 2013

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1:02 PM | tracking baba yaga
Why do Russian literary creations, from Gogol’s promenading nose to Bulgakov’s talking cat, hold such a captivating and enigmatic place among the classics of world literature? Perhaps the answer lies with the old woman who haunts Russian fairy tales. “If...
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12:59 PM | a fault line of European civilization
By the mid-thirties there were already fifty seven large cinemas in Moscow and hundreds of other places where films could be shown. The party was very well aware of the propaganda potential of the medium, and generous provision was made...
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12:54 PM | calvino's letters
Calvino does not have any sort of eye on posterity, as so many other modern letter-writers do. He is living in the present, not constructing a future monument. This may offer something of a surprise to the reader who comes...
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10:44 AM | Thursday Poem
If You Could See Her After Drinking Wine . . . —to Micheál agus Michelle If you could see her after drinking wine, Wine from Chile of the berry-red kind Prancing ahead of me in the middle of the night...
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9:50 AM | Evolution shapes new rules for ant behavior
From PhysOrg: In ancient Greece, the city-states that waited until their own harvest was in before attacking and destroying a rival community's crops often experienced better long-term success. It turns out that ant colonies that show similar selectivity when gathering...
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9:39 AM | "It's like the British during the Blitz:" How It Feels to Lose Your Breasts
Liz Kulze in The Atlantic: When I first saw Angelina Jolie's announcement about her double mastectomy, my mind immediately conjured up a picture of her once-magnificent chest, the prominent supporting-actors in Tomb Raider eliminated from her commanding figure. But of...

May 15, 2013

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8:56 PM | We, researchers, just need a medium for social interaction, and some apps
… so that we can freely play the game of research. Because is a game, i.e. it is driven by curiosity, desire to learn, does not depend on goals and tasks, it is an extension of a child attitude, lost by the majority of adults. Let the vanity aside and just play and interact with […]
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1:59 PM | Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong
Michael Chorost in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Thomas Nagel is a leading figure in philosophy, now enjoying the title of university professor at New York University, a testament to the scope and influence of his work. His 1974 essay...
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1:54 PM | Albert Hirschman: An Original Thinker of Our Time
Cass R. Sunstein in the New York Review of Books: Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman...
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1:40 PM | 3-D Scans Reveal Caterpillars Turning Into Butterflies
Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science: The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is one of the most exquisite in the natural world. Within the chrysalis, an inching, cylindrical eating machine remakes itself into a beautiful flying creature that drinks...
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1:30 PM | The organic myth of the British constitution
Michael Gardiner writes at openDemocracy on 'public' services in Britain: The British left is packed with voices demanding an unreflective defence of ‘public services’. This public is frozen beyond any evaluation of commonality, is held to be equalising even as...
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1:17 PM | M. J. Rosenberg: Pro-Palestinian Is Not Anti-Israel But the Opposite
M. J. Rosenberg in the Washington Spectator: Sometimes it is instructive to listen to what Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz says because his way of seeing the Israel-Palestinian conflict is typical of the thinking of both the Netanyahu government and...
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1:06 PM | Robert Pinsky reads his poetry to improvised jazz
No summary available for this post.
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1:01 PM | infinite fossil fuel
For years, environmentalists have hoped that the imminent exhaustion of oil will, in effect, force us to undergo this virtuous transition; given a choice between no power and solar power, even the most shortsighted person would choose the latter. That...
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12:56 PM | Permanent Present Tense
Henry had his first epileptic episode in 1936, at the age of ten; by 1953 his seizures had become increasingly frequent and debilitating. His family doctor referred him to William Beecher Scoville, a leading neurosurgeon at Yale Medical School. When...
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12:53 PM | Graphic lambda calculus used for quantum programming (Towards qubits III)
I want to make a bit more clear one of the goals of the research on graphic lambda calculus, which are reported on this blog.  I stress that this is one of the goals and that this is live research,  in the making, explained here in order to attract, or invite others to join, or […]
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12:38 PM | isadora duncan
From childhood, Duncan saw herself as a liberator, opposed but never vanquished by philistines. In My Life she recalls that in elementary school she gave an impromptu lecture in front of the class on how there was no Santa Claus,...
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10:25 AM | Princess Not-So-Charming
From Harvard Magazine: “Fairy tales have always tapped into the subconscious, bringing to light children’s deepest fears,” says Soman Chainani ’01. In his new fantasy-adventure novel, The School for Good and Evil, he has brought that tenet into the twenty-first...
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10:14 AM | The emergence of individuality in genetically identical mice
From Kurzweil AI: How do people and other organisms evolve into individuals that are distinguished from others by their own personal brain structure and behavior? Why do identical twins not resemble each other perfectly even when they grew up together?...
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2:06 AM | Chris Hadfield’s 5-month Space Mission in 90 Seconds
Many people have probably just become aware of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in the last week because of his musical video Space Oddity that went viral. It might be hard to find anyone who has not watched that video. However, Hadfield … Continue reading →

May 14, 2013

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7:31 PM | How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled
In the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman reviews Neil Irwin's The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, David A. Stockman's The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, and Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History...
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2:25 PM | The case against empathy
Paul Bloom in The New Yorker: The immense power of empathy has been demonstrated again and again. It is why Americans were rivetted by the fate of Natalee Holloway, the teen-ager who went missing in Aruba, in 2005. It’s why,...
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2:10 PM | Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust
Jacob Aron in New Scientist: For the first time, a commercially available quantum computer has been pitted against an ordinary PC – and the quantum device left the regular machine in the dust. D-Wave, a company based in Burnaby, Canada,...
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2:02 PM | Enlightened monsters
Michael Saler in the Times Literary Supplement: The child may be father to the man, but how did a girl become mother to the monster? We continue to ask that of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus...
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1:51 PM | What's wrong with Mochizuki's 'proof' of the ABC conjecture?
(Cross-posted at NewAPPS)A few days ago Eric had a post about an insightful text that has been making the rounds on the internet, which narrates the story of a mathematical ‘proof’ that is for now sitting somewhere in a limbo between the world of proofs and the world of non-proofs. The ‘proof’ in question purports to establish the famous ABC conjecture, one of the (thus far) main open questions in number theory. (Luckily, a while back Dennis posted an extremely helpful and precise […]
Editor's Pick
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12:00 PM | punk
Questions of what punk is aside, it’s difficult to deny that, other than the crude beauty of the Ramones, the noisy dirges of bands like Flipper, or the shouts that “Civilization’s Dying” by the Indianapolis band Zero Boys, punk is...
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11:34 AM | Three Ways to Catch a Liar
Paul Ekman in Big Think: Spotting a micro expression is the single most useful thing. This is an expression that lasts about a 25th of a second. We’ve tested over 15,000 people in all walks of life and over 99...
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11:30 AM | Pakistan elections: how Nawaz Sharif beat Imran Khan and what happens next
Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian: Here's a little fairytale from Pakistan. Fourteen years ago a wise man ruled the country. He enjoyed the support of his people. But some of his treacherous generals thought he wasn't that smart. One night...
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11:22 AM | Michael Sandel and AC Grayling discussing stuff
From Prospect:
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11:21 AM | what is bangladesh?
The United Nations categorizes Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim democracy. Meanwhile, the current Foreign Minister called Bangladesh a secular country. She defined Bangladesh to be a “non-communal country” with a “Muslim majority population”. The Foreign Minister further added that the...
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