Incunabula: Ong's Hat

You have been searching for us without knowing it, following oblique references in crudely xeroxed marginal "samsidat" publications, crackpot mystical pamphlets, mail order courses ... a paper trail and a coded series of rumors spread at street level ... and the propagation of certain acts of insurrection against the Planetary Work Machine and the Consensus Reality ... or perhaps through various obscure mimeographed technical papers on the edges of "chaos science" ... through pirate computer networks ... or even through pure synchronicity and the pursuit of dreams. In any case we know something about you, your interests, deeds and desires, works and days ... and we know your address. Otherwise...you would not be reading this...

Science

François Laruelle: Principles of Non-Philosophy (1996/2013)

in Art, eBooks, File Sharing, Games, News

Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle’s mature philosophy. As well as presenting the method and principles of non-philosophy, it includes a history of the development of non-philosophy, a novel conception of science, a discussion of non-philosophical causality and new theories of the subject [...]

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8445

Samir Amin: Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism (1988-) [FR, EN, ES]

Since its first publication more than twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world’s foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great “ideological deformations” of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly [...]

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Bern Dibner: The Atlantic Cable (1959)

“Bern Dibner wrote a lucid chronological history of the laying of the Atlantic Cable. He covers the early experiments of Morse in New York Harbor in 1842; Ezra Cornell’s laying of a line across the Hudson River in 1845; the five actual attempts at laying the cable; and the eventual success in completing two telegraph [...]

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Ray Monk: Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2012)

J. Robert Oppenheimer is among the most contentious and important figures of the twentieth century. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough which was to have eternal ramifications for mankind, and made Oppenheimer the ‘father of the [...]

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Dorothy Stein: Ada: A Life and a Legacy (1987)

In this engrossing biography, Dorothy Stein strips away the many layers of myth surrounding Ada Lovelace’s reputation as the inventor of the science of computer programming to reveal a story far more dramatic and fascinating than previous accounts have indicated. Working with original sources, Stein clears up a number of puzzles and misinterpretations of Ada’s [...]

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Steven Shapin: The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008)

Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? They are experts—indeed, highly respected experts—authorized to describe and interpret the natural world and widely trusted to help transform knowledge into power and profit. But are they morally different from other people? The Scientific [...]

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The Shape of Experiment (2006)

What is the result of recent studies on the history of experiment? How has our image of science been changed since Ian Hacking’s statement, “experimentation has a life of its own,” turned into a catch phrase for investigations into the history of science? What is the lesson to be drawn from the studies following Steven [...]

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Michel Meulders: Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (2001/2010)

Although Hermann von Helmholtz was one of most remarkable figures of nineteenth-century science, he is little known outside his native Germany. Helmholtz (1821-1894) made significant contributions to the study of vision and perception and was also influential in the painting, music, and literature of the time; one of his major works analyzed tone in music. [...]

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Brian Clegg: Light Years: An Exploration of Mankind’s Enduring Fascination with Light (2001)

This is the story of the greatest puzzle in our universe: what is light? Light Years is an engaging survey of everything we know of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomenon and the remarkable people who have been captivated by it. Light Years looks over the shoulders of the great revolutionaries of light theory–Bacon, Galileo, Newton, [...]

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Palle Yourgrau: A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein (2005)

In 1942, the logician Kurt Godel and Albert Einstein became close friends; they walked to and from their offices every day, exchanging ideas about science, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist. Einstein [...]

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Heat Spike is Unprecedented in 11,000 Years

A new study looking at 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the world in the middle of a dramatic U-turn, lurching from near-record cooling to a heat spike. Research released in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny organisms to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age. It shows how [...]

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Julia Kursell (ed.): Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930) (2008) [English, German]

The following collection of papers documents the workshop Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800 to 1930, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in October 2006. The workshop asked about the role sound plays in the configurations among science, technology and the arts, focusing on the years [...]

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Esther Leslie: Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005)

Synthetic Worlds considers the remarkable alliance between chemistry and art, taking us from the late eighteenth century to the period immediately following the Second World War. Esther Leslie offers fascinating new insights into the place of the material object and the significance of the natural, the organic, the inorganic and the synthesized in this poetics [...]

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Karen Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and [...]

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In-Brain Monitoring Shows Memory Network

Working with patients with electrodes implanted in their brains, researchers at the University of California, Davis, and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) have shown for the first time that areas of the brain work together at the same time to recall memories. The unique approach promises new insights into how [...]

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Report: Pervasive surveillance undermines trust in government

Increases in surveillance can negatively impact the way individuals feel about government and even cause hostility among citizenry normally not likely to commit crimes, says the U.K. government’s Foresight project. In a recent report (.pdf) commissioned by the Government Office for Science, the project says the United Kingdom plans to increasingly use surveillance for pre-emptive [...]

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Marcus Wohlsen: Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life (2011)

Bill Gates recently told Wired that if he were a teenager today, he would be hacking biology. “If you want to change the world in some big way,” he says, “that’s where you should start-biological molecules.” The most disruptive force on the planet resides in DNA. Biotech companies and academic researchers are just beginning to [...]

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Ruth Hagengruber (ed.): Emilie Du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton (2012)

Emilie du Châtelet was one of the most influential woman philosophers of the Enlightenment. Her writings on natural philosophy, physics, and mechanics had a decisive impact on important scientific debates of the 18th century. Particularly, she took an innovative and outstanding position in the controversy between Newton and Leibniz, one of the fundamental scientific discourses [...]

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