The desolate rocky landscape belongs to the planet Mars. The vehicle visible in the lower right is the Curiosity rover, NASA’s spacecraft that landed on Mars in August 2012 and …
Hey teacher leave our brains alone! (first notes for neuroscience)
“It was generally accepted that our fate is hidden in the stars. But now we know exactly that it is written in our genes.” This phrase of Watson’s expresses in …
robotic reserve
If you look at the bulky object, it might resemble a robotic horse. Something similar, but not for races or walks! It is a “military unit support system” of the …
measured life
The illustration of self-monitoring / self-quantification as a (tribal) tattoo.There is indeed a “tribe”: the first…
Rigidity and learning
Excerpts from Norbert Wiener’s book “Cybernetics and Society, the human use of human beings”, Chapter “Rigidity and learning. Two models of communication behavior”. (The book was first published in 1949, …
“smart watch”
Google Glass may be pulling ahead with difficulty (the fate of the pioneer who rushes), but Apple seems to be stepping firmly into the wearables arena. Its watch (available next …
The Internet of Things: comments on the political economy of the networked information machine
Always look at the bright side of life… It’s 7:59 in the morning on some weekday and you’re enjoying your sleep. In a minute, the smart watch you recently bought …
robot-pope
A small humanoid robot shows a public school in the Iranian city of Varamin, just outside Tehran, that even machines have souls: it prays, encouraging the little students to do …
actroids
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro is the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan. The laboratory deals with the construction of humanoid robots with particular emphasis on facial …
the constructible body
In the last decades of the 18th century and the first of the 19th century, the rising bourgeoisie constructed its own cosmology, its own reasons-for: for social relationships, for political …
the myth of the machine
The Large Hadron Collider of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a literally pharaonic research project on behalf of (initially) particle physics. It is an “uncompromising experiment,” uncompromising in …
Spirit: science as an idea
The following pair of texts, as a fictional juxtaposition of viewpoints, is directly related to two presentations/discussions organized by the game over assembly during the winter and early summer of …