The question is, can they be more?
Earlier this week, Georgia Tech and eleven other higher education institutions announced their participation in Coursera, a company that hosts online courses. Reactions have been predictably dramatic, as exemplified by Jordan Weissman’s panegyric in the Atlantic, titled The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education. I’ll spare observations on the obvious problems with Weissman’s article, like the witless claim that… read more
It's QVC for the web generation, the new Thunderdome, Off Track Betting for ideas addicts. Whatever you call it, Kickstarter's becoming less about funding widgets than pouring gas on creative sparks just to watch them ignite.
You’ve probably heard about the latest Kickstarter darling, OUYA: “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their… read more
Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation
It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more
Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment
Also: I expanded the ideas in this post into a short article for Fast Company, Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform Or Reality Show? The web is flipping out today over the OUYA, a hypothetical new videogame console posted today on Kickstarter. It promises “A New Kind of Video Game Console,” but it’s really just an Android device with yet another 30%-take uncurated… read more
More on Harman on Time
I recently described time as a phenomenon “on the inside of objects.” Peter Gratton objects that time is “at the surface level of objects” for Harman, because the latter describes it as the tension between sensual objects and sensual qualities. Gratton argues, “if time is at the surface of where things relate then it is not within the object.” Short… read more
Some responses to the Alien Phenomenology reading group
Following the discussion of chapter 1, Darius Kazemi has posted discussion notes for chapters 2 and 3 of Alien Phenomenology—Ontography and Metaphorism, respectively. I thought I’d make a few comments on the topics discussed there. Time Time is discussed as a particularly mind-bending topic in OOO. AP doesn’t offer a theory of time; the conversation chez Darius is about meanwhile… read more
Camus said, the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
From the Italian news and an online reading group
Today yields two humbling approaches to Alien Phenomenology. First, an article by Evan Selinger in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, L’anima delle cose (“the soul of things”). It’s in Italian, but I’m sure you can figure out how to read it somehow. Corriere della Sera is a very old and respected Italian daily, so it’s particularly nice to see… read more
On failures to communicate
There’s a great article by Monroe Anderson at The Root titled ‘Obamacare,’ the Video Game?. Anderson recalls asking Obama strategist David Axelrod “why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term.” Axelrod’s response: “information gridlock.” Essentially, the White House hadn’t been able to communicate effectively with the… read more
Ontographs by Gregory Blackstock
Via Marina Zurkow via Greg Borenstein, a series of very lovely images that collect different sorts of similar things together, by Gregory Blackstock. They’re the kind of images I call ontographs, works that catalog the rich variety of being. You’ll find Irish joys, noisemakers, monsters of the deep, historic homes. But my favorite is saws, depicted in smaller form below.