From the monthly archives:

May 2009

Wolfram Alpha, yet another pretender to Google’s throne.

As it kept coming up empty, Wolfram Alpha came to seem less like HAL 9000 and more like a chatbot. It’s been trained to respond

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Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.

Parody and then some:

Many years later, and many times over, the famous writer was to remember the day he discovered how to set about

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Bio Mapping

It’s an art project that doubles as a tourist guide.

via Very Short List and Kurtis Kolt.…

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The Path and the slow video game movement. – By Chris Suellentrop

[T]he game is pleasingly weird and a good proof of concept that a video game needn’t include any fighting or puzzles in the course of

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‘Lost In the Meritocracy’

Better yet, theory was intent on proving the illegitimacy of all those great books he’d never read. “We skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism,” he

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Some of the most disturbing photographs from Abu Ghraib are not photographs of torture.

Rather, they are photographs that show our soldiers trying — without the proper training or equipment — to do their jobs.

via Op-Ed Contributor –

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Caught in the Net

Whatever prophets of the net say, information for its own sake is not power. Power is power. The relentless gush of electronic information and invitations

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Backward Runs ‘Newsweek’, says Kinsley

The newsmags face a choice. Actually, they’ve faced it since long before the Internet. Should they try to provide a complete picture of what happened

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