Released on this day in ’79 Zappa’s target was, according to some sources, motivated by the banning of music in revolutionary Iran. The target we do know Zappa had in mind was the ascendancy of the fundamentalist Right of the ’80s and the idiotic PMRC proposal . . . but now the target is more appropriately applicable to the regressive…
The article examines several references to Friedrich Nietzsche made by Robert Musil in his non-fictional writings. An indication of Nietzsche’s significance for Musil is given by the fact that only one name occurs more often than Nietzsche’s in the collected works of Musil, where references to the philosopher span a period of more than forty…
THE PLACE WHERE the strange events related in this book occur, Feliciana, is not imaginary. It was so named by the Spanish. It was and is part of Louisiana, a strip of pleasant pineland running from the Mississippi River to the Perdido, a curious region of a curious state. Never quite Creole or French or…
My chum and collaborator Roger Frantz is the founding editor of this new open access journal. So stay tuned for the first issue. Behavioral economicsdistributed knowledgeFriedrich HayekHerbert Simonroger frantzsituated cognition
Born on this day — see the themed issue of Cosmos + Taxis dedicated to Ken. Here is Ken at his elegant and wry best in Morals & the servile mind. I think Ken would have been chuffed by BREXIT not necessarily because of which side actually won, but because of which side was the most arrogant. Clue .…
#9/119/11 never forgetArtblue dogChristopher HitchensGeorge RodrigueLiberalismReligionOfPeaceUSA
I’ve been thinking about Turing’s lesser-known but still very important other contribution (i.e. to mathematical biology) — so while in Turing groove, I was pleased to come across this open access paper from the latest issue of Swarm Intelligence. So glad to report that Swarm Intelligence has seen through its first decade. Alan TuringArtificial intelligenceCoevolutioncollective behaviorComplex systemsMachine learningmathematical biologySwarm…
Much of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics—including its account of the way we learn languages—is being overturned. Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello in Scientific American Artificial intelligenceDescarteslanguageMichael TomaselloNoam ChomskyPaul IbbotsonPhilosophy of minduniversal grammar
I’m very much looking forward to the reissue of TSO conveniently bundled along with other important MSS heretofore only available as Hoover photocopies. Kudos to Viktor Vanberg for pulling this together and of course to Bruce Caldwell, the series’ general editor. bruce caldwellConnectionismphilosophical psychologyPhilosophy of mindthe sensory orderviktor vanberg
Thirty years earlier the child knew that something was going to happen, and that the something was all he ever wanted or needed to know, and that it only remained for him to wait for it to happen and to settle for nothing less until it did. What was the something? Women? War? Or victory…
manwithoutqualities 