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Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, explains why we should embrace the imagination and the fundamentally paradoxical structures of consciousness. Reposted from boingboing. … by Jeffrey J. Kripal We grossly underestimate the weird powers of reading and writing. Take the Library Angel, so named by the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. These are not subtle beings with wings, but magical moments in which one picks up a book or turns to a page, seemingly at random, and—Whammo!—there is a precise answer to one’s own mental state. Such Library Angels …

We were oh so excited to read this yesterday… Reposted from NYT. By Carl Zimmer. … Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies. A male Acmon blue butterfly (Icaricia acmon). Vladimir Nabokov described the Icaricia genus in 1944. He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. …

The Biotechnic Opera: Eat the Mouth That Feeds You took place last night at Avenue 50 Studio. And it was an evening filled with cannibalism, mouths & tongues, philosophical inquiries, farmers, fruit (both fresh & rotting), crisis, mothers & daughters, bioart, education systems, jam, knives, & more. Check out photos from the event: … And Arne De Boever‘s talk covered so many topics of interest, we know you didn’t have time to write them all down. For easy reference, here are the links that were covered in his talk: KEN EHRLICH’S BOOK PROJECT http://viralnet.net/ SAVE MIDDLESEX PHILOSOPHY http://savemdxphil.com/ NORMAN KLEIN …

(reposted from htmlgiant) The Book: A Spiritual Instrument by Stéphane Mallarmé I am the author of a statement to which there have been varying reactions, including praise and blame, and which I shall make again in the present article. Briefly, it is this: all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book. It terrifies me to think of the qualities (among them genius, certainly) which the author of such a work will have to possess. I am one of the unpossessed. We will let that pass and imagine that it bears no author’s name. What, then, will the work …

How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin’s corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace, there have have been numerous attempts to deny man’s mortality. Why can’t we accept the limits of science? … John Gray of The Guardian writes on science and its strange quests. (Reposted from The Guardian) … Lenin’s embalmed corpse on display in his mausoleum. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features The séance that Charles Darwin attended in January 1874 at the house of his brother Erasmus brought the pioneering biologist together with …

It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike. Thomas Thwaites calls himself “a designer (of a more speculative sort).” His thoughtful projects look deeply at the science behind technology, as in the Toaster Project, which sent spiralling him into the history and techniques of metallurgy and plastics production, and Policing Genes, a thought experiment …

(reposted from Rhizome) The following excerpt comes from the final chapter of my book Media, New Media, Postmedia, recently published in Italian by Postmediabooks, who kindly gave Rhizome permission to republish it in English. The book is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called “New Media Art” in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot …

Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds (TED talk originally posted here.) From the talk: “When he was trading fours with me, improvising versus memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca’s area, which is inferior frontal gyrus on the left. He actually had it also homologous on the right. This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication. This whole …

Reposted from BoingBoing. by Cory Doctorow. Joseph Reagle Jr‘s Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is exactly what a popular, scholarly work should be: serious but not slow, intelligent but not dull, and esoteric but not obscure. It’s practically a textbook example on how to adapt a dissertation as a trade book — dropping the literature review, moderating the stuff that’s meant to prove you’ve done your homework, and diving straight into the argument. Reagle, an avid wikipedian himself, nevertheless takes up an objective distance and tries to suss out how it is that Wikipedia works as well as …

(Posted on NeuroLogicaBlog by Steven Novella) The most succinct criticism of postmodernist philosophy as applied to science that I have heard is this – that proponents confuse the context of discovery with the context of  later justification. It occurred to me that the same is true of the role of both anecdotes and anomalies in science. Often when I criticize reliance on anecdotes or so-called anomaly hunting, I get feedback that makes the exact same confusion of context. The context of discovery refers to how new ideas are generated in science. Playing off of Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigms (and …