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Profits over people: Aaron Swartz and the dominant model of our world
For those who did not know, Aaron Swartz committed suicide on the 11th of January, 2013. He was being prosecuted by the state attorney for having ‘stolen’ thousands of documents from the online academic library JSTOR, and faced up to 35 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. He did this at MIT,…
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Complexity Science, Marx and Religion
One of the tenets of a religious life is the acknowledgement of the fact that we are not in control; we surrender to the belief that there are bigger forces at work. This is construed by some people to be defeatist. It could be argued that this line of thinking is not only not defeatist…
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Method in Acting and Science: Why there is no such thing
Growing up in China, with the state television often showing boring programs, I was hooked to our cherished VCR and movies. My favorite actors growing up were Al Pacino and Robert Deniro (no surprises there). It was only later on that I discovered while doing my PhD in the Netherlands, that actors like Pacino and…
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Big Data or Pig Data?
(A fable on huge amounts of data and why we don’t need models) There was a pig who wanted to be a scientist. He was not interested in models. When asked how he planned on making sense of the world, the pig would say in a deep mysterious voice, “I don’t do models: the world…
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Galileo and Economics
Or ‘Why we can’t blame Galileo for the latest financial crisis!’ 🙂 Modern science can be roughly said to begin with Galileo Galilei. One of the commonly used methods in science is sometimes referred to as the Galilean Style. This style refers to, among other things, the idealizations and abstractions that scientists use in modeling…
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Postmodernism: The Opium of the Intellectuals
What follows is a post-modernist defense of Agha Waqar Ahmad’s water-car. The postmodernist author is Derridalacanlatour, a famous French intellectual specializing in, and battling against, the “Hegemony of the transcendental claims of science over the ontology of world concepts” Here it is:
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Fiction as Simulation
Studies by neuroscientists have shown that while reading fiction, our brains simulate the action narrated in the text. The information from the text is taken, integrated with the reader’s personal experience, and often those areas of the brain are activated which would also be involved if the reader was actually performing or observing comparable real…
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Alan Turing in a society of machines
I am usually not at a loss for words (at least while writing). But what can one possibly write about that bird, that song; that tragedy, that ecstasy; that lamb, that lion; that beautiful genius called Alan Turing—that hasn’t already been written? What can I add? Don’t forget what Iqbal said: ‘A particle in its place…
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Realm of the SCENSCI 