A Fun-Stopia for Today’s Busy Citizen — The Message — Medium “Most people I ask seem to be OK with the idea of a little slavery in exchange for happiness-on-demand.” tags: weekly circle vcu technology dystopia lego Science Studio “Finding the best multimedia about science on the internet, so you don’t have to.” –not that I’m adverse to looking but this is an interesting collection tags: science media weekly tweet Letters and Photos – WINDOWS FROM PRISON GMU “If you could have window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?” This question is asked to individuals who are from Washington, DC but sent to prisons across the country. The corresponding photo requests were then fulfilled by students at George Mason University and Duke Ellington High School and mailed back to the incarcerated participants. tags: photography prison windows weekly tweet A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. “ tags: cyberspace declaration barlow eff freedom weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Americans Have Never Loved Poetry More—But They Call It Rap – The Daily Beast “To utterly naïve anthropologists sent to document the ways of Americans in 2014, one of the first things that would strike them is that this country is quite poetry mad. No, they would not find well-thumbed volumes of Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Billy Collins laying around the typical living room. However, they could not help but notice that a great many people under about 50 regularly go around listening to and yes, reciting poetry—rap, that is. Rap is indeed “real” poetry. It rhymes, often even internally. Its authors work hard on the lyrics. The subject matter is certainly artistically heightened, occasioning long-standing debates over whether the depictions of violence and misogyny in some of it are sincere. And then, that “gangsta” style is just one, and less dominant than it once was. Rap, considered as a literature rather than its top-selling hits, addresses a wide-range of topics, even including science fiction. Rap is now decades old, having evolved over time and being increasingly curated by experts. In what sense is this not a “real” anything?” tags: rap english weekly poetry “Stochastic Tinkering” | Center for Strategic and International Studies “”[Black Swan Author Nassim] Taleb, an anti-Platonist, believes that universities are better at public relations and […]

The Morbid Fascination With the Death of the Humanities – Benjamin Winterhalter – The Atlantic “He claims, in essence, that literary modernism’s insights about the relationship between abstract thoughts and tangible objects are now being understood by neurological research. “This thesis of Ezra Pound’s that poetry should yoke ideas to particular objects—so that the thing and the thought are brought together in a single manifold,” he said, “actually anticipates a very recent neuroscientific insight, which is that, in certain aesthetic states, processing and perception happen in the same cortical centers of the brain.” Matt’s big idea, in other words, is that literature sometimes comes to important conclusions about the nature of consciousness and reality before science can catch up. “The point is—and this is a major claim of literary theorists—that literature allows us to feel our way around insights that we don’t yet have a clean, conceptual articulation of.” By his logic, then, the way to drive science forward might be to fund the study of literature. “ tags: english science weekly humanities How the “Hype Cycle” explains MOOCs, big data, VR, and Google Glass. “Virtual reality, Novak suggests, has undergone a similar metamorphosis. Look around a crowded room, and you won’t see a bunch of people wearing VR headsets. Instead, you’ll see them peering into tiny screens, through which […]