It is a sign of the times. The last time the philosophy of “migration to other planets” went mainstream was when the Americans globally showcased their moon landing. The “Apollo” …
from online to onlife: engineering everything
History and Machines Can we perceive the ongoing parade of modern technological applications and wonders as something beyond a mere sum of “good and bad human inventions”? Can we perceive …
Risky jobs
We can make fun of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but its bosses are ahead. Way ahead. Their latest feat was legislation granting extraction rights for raw materials from extraterrestrial …
Turing’s test: notes on a genealogy of “intelligence”
putting consciousness on the anatomical table If one takes stock of the declarations of scientists (and their funders), the last terra incognita that the techno-scientific spirit is called upon to …
cybernetics
The gentleman in the first photograph is the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson, one of the principal (if not the principal) founders of structuralism in linguistics. Taking Saussure’s theories as his …
short history of computers
Every modern computer is, in essence, supposed to be a physical implementation of an ideal machine, the universal Turing machine that can compute any computable function. Extremely simple in conception, …
familiarity count
A recent survey of 1,002 adults in England, on topics related to the (and technological) future, yielded answers that are quite interesting. – Although 60% to 72% (depending on the …
scientific mysticism history: tao and physics
Are modern techno-sciences, the technoscientific tools of the bio-informational (capitalist) model, magic? The question, as such, could be considered provocative. In the age of bytes and genes, what could be …
scientific truths
Could radioactivity be less harmful than we think? Wildlife has “returned” next to the concrete shell of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, which 30 years ago became a nightmare …
genetic sins
Although the mapping of (still only a tiny fraction of) human DNA and the DNA of other species may not deliver the magical gene correlations and “solutions” desired by marketers …
Alien Aggressor
The Russian engineer and welder (old specialty…) Sergei Kulagin (right) and his friends are assembling a robot they have baptized “Alien Aggressor”, a beast 3 meters tall and weighing 600 …
thalidomide
Thalidomide was introduced in 1957, first in West Germany, as a harmless tranquilizer by the pharmaceutical company Chemie – Grünenthal. The sedative was specifically advertised (among other things) to pregnant …