The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future

The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future by Aaron Schuster, A brief history of levitation from St. Joseph to Yuri Gagarin (Cabinet Magazine).

Related:

The levitation of Daniel Dunglas Home at Ward Cheney’s house interpreted in a lithograph from Louis Figuier, Les Mystères de la science 1887

The Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. He drew a lot of criticism from e.g. Amartya Sen (see e.g. NYT or read his book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny ).

Samuel Huntington died Dec 24, aged 81.

The Free Physics Textbook

The Free Physics Textbook, probably one of the best on the internet ! Just great !

Reading list

Questioning authority. Nietzsche’s gift to Derrida. “Be it the moral-theological tradition, God, or his own status as author, Nietzsche’s refusal to legitimate authority remains constant. As Alan D. Schrift writes, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of authoritarian subjectivity shares much with Jacques Derrida’s post-modern critique of the subject as a privileged centre of discourse.”

Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope. Reviewed by Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

What the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly.

Rage against the machines

Modern video games mean big business, and big controversy. Yet most of the charges levelled against games—that they stunt minds and spark addiction—are based on an outdated understanding of what gamers do when they sit down to play.

Opinion by Tom Chatfield in the June issue of Prospect.

Return to Paradise: the enduring relevance of John Milton

Jonathan Rosen writes in the New Yorker about John Milton and his epic poem Paradise Lost.

Update: can someone tell me who Jonathan Rosen is in this case ? I think it’s the author of The Life of the Skies, or is it the illustrator J.Rosen, or still another guy ?? He’s also not listed with the contributors of the New Yorker. Strange.

Sons of Sartre

In his memoirs, Eric Hobsbawm, the 90-year-old British historian, recalls how serious young men and women of his generation would learn French and flock to Paris to be at the cutting edge of global debate, led and shaped by France’s famed intellectuals.

Nowadays, those serious young men and women speak English and visit the US instead. According to Hobsbawm, France has been reduced from an intellectual superpower to a hexagonal ghetto.

(…) conversations with Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, Nicolas Baverez and Edgar Morin – four of France’s most provocative thinkers – yield insights on the state of France, the environment, the defence of human rights and military interventionism.

John Thornhill, editor of the FT’s European edition, reports.