Day: April 15, 2010

  • Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

    There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. These people are our friends and allies. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core of computer science.

  • Star Trek: How the New Comes Into the World

    Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping science fiction that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even hard sciences.

  • Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

    Ah yes, rely on so-called “French theory” so-called authority Alan Sokal to provide you with an excuse to not read Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, and Virilio. That’s very bright. Ignore the intellectual contribution of an entire nation. The one that co-invented democracy.

  • Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard’s book Impossible Exchange (2001), the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading. Much of the book transported me into a state of wonder, other parts I found irritating.

  • In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    I begin with a quotation. “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes”, writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out.

  • The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.