Increasingly, ordinary people encrypt their internet communications. Some want to share files. Some are worried about the increasing surveillance and threats of surveillance of Internet data that is taking place in many corners of the world. ACTA, Hadopi, data retention would be a few examples. People may simply wish to keep their data private, even […]
I’ve started watching Michael Sandel’s Harvard lecture series on political philosophy, “justice”. In this series, Sandel introduces the ideas of major political and moral philosophers, such as Bentham, Locke, and Kant, as well as some libertarian thinkers I hadn’t heard of. I’m only halfway through the series, so I’m sure there’s other big names coming […]
Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]
You read it here first – Monomorphic predicted this development in February. In a recent Nature article, researchers describe a multiplayer online graphical protein folding game, in which players collaborate against the computer to fold a protein correctly quickly. (Also: NYTimes article.) It turned out that the human players were successful compared to the computers, […]
In his highly timely and readable 2009 book “The Postdigital Manifesto”, Swedish writer and historian Rasmus Fleischer discusses the effects of the digital on our relation to music and sets out his vision for how we can make music listening more meaningful. Fleischer is a prolific blogger (almost exclusively in Swedish) at Copyriot, and is […]