How do contemporary technologies shape our understanding of ourselves? By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain.…
John Searle, NYRB, 1982: A lot of the nonsense talked about computers nowadays stems from their relative rarity and hence mystery. […] Until computers and robots become as common as cars and until people are able to program and use them as easily as they now drive cars we are likely to continue to suffer…
Every time Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire, the law magically changes. Mickey’s expiration date has been nudged forward from 1984 to 2003 to 2023 – a copyright term of 95 years. Will copyright last for over a century by the time Mickey’s next deadline arrives? More at Priceonomics.
…by 1859, thanks to John Tyndall’s experiments, the world had a better understanding of how CO2 warms the earth, and how the oceans absorb it, and how the burning of fossil fuels could lead to more intense weather. Cameron Muir at Medium.
Taylor Orci on the rise and fall of radium: Numerous are the ads of this time for wares like “radium silk lingerie” and decks of cards with the word “radium” emblazoned on them. In one ad, a pastoral landscape dotted with grazing cows near a pristine stream are bathed in the warm glow of a…
Is specific discrimination against the Irish a false memory? University professor says yes, teenage historian says no.
How to ensure enough men become soldiers? Daniel Defoe, 1704: ’tis as plain our people have no particular aversion to the war, but they are not poor enough to go abroad; ’tis poverty makes men soldiers, and drives crowds into the armies, and the difficulties to get English-men to list is, because they live in…
It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slightest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place. More from Seymour Hersh at the London…
A consideration of the effects of Master and Servant laws at Flip Chart Fairy Tales: For most of the period since the middle ages […] labour law was firmly on the side of the employer. […] State intervention in the labour market is nothing new. The only aspect that is relatively new is its intervention…
Plan a city break from Deva, taking in Gallia Lugdunensis, all the way to Roma with this digital map of the Roman Empire.