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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

emmineb — Thu, 24 May 2007 11:03:07 GMT

In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto--and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books-- "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding Media" (1964)--and the graying professor from Canada's western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the hottest academic property around." He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant--and frequently baffling--theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.

wikipedia: Codex Seraphinianus

emmineb — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:18:56 GMT

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, an incomprehensible (at least for us) alphabetic writing.

wikipedia: Voynich manuscript

emmineb — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:15:54 GMT

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book with incomprehensible contents. It is thought to have been written between approximately 1450 and 1520 by an unknown author in an unidentified script and language. Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

Wired 14.12: Me Translate Pretty One Day

emmineb — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:36:16 GMT

Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven't been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code. With Carbonell on board, the new company set about building its Spanish system. Soon, however, Abir's peripatetic invention habits created conflicts. Klein, Carbonell, and the developers feared the company was losing focus. "Eli is a mad genius," Carbonell says. "Both of those words apply. Some of his ideas are totally bogus. And some of his ideas are brilliant. Eli himself can't always tell the two apart." Abir, determined to build a larger AI "brain" that would tackle not just MT but other problems, took little interest in the day-to-day engineering. Eventually he left the

YouTube: "To me, the Danish language has collapsed into, meaningless, guttural sounds"

emmineb — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:15:46 GMT

Tur att det är textat på norska!

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

emmineb — Tue, 29 May 2007 15:30:19 GMT

A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Here are the 26 most studied and widely accepted cognitive biases. 1. Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias. 2. Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. 3. Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.

American Scientist Online; The Semicolon Wars

emmineb — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:26:32 GMT

If you want to be a thorough-going world traveler, you need to learn 6,912 ways to say "Where is the toilet, please?" That's the number of languages known to be spoken by the peoples of planet Earth, according to Ethnologue.com. If you want to be the complete polyglot programmer, you also have quite a challenge ahead of you, learning all the ways to say: printf("hello, world\n") ;

Citation Tacite - Dicocitations

emmineb — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:42:50 GMT

Tacitus - Dicocitations <>

Co-evolution of neocortex size, group size and language in humans

emmineb — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:13:10 GMT

Keywords Neocortical size, group size, humans, language, Macchiavellian Intelligence Abstract Group size is a function of relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. Extrapolation from this regression equation yields a predicted group size for modern humans very similar to that of certain hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Groups of similar size are also found in other large-scale forms of contemporary and historical society. Among primates, the cohesion of groups is maintained by social grooming; the time devoted to social grooming is linearly related to group size among the Old World monkeys and apes. To maintain the stability of the large groups characteristic of humans by grooming alone would place intolerable demands on t

Hanzi Smatter 一知半解: dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture

emmineb — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:10:53 GMT

Trendy Pro-Communism Purses