Semibotic Semibiotic

It's not often you get to see an article about consciousness on the BBC, but you do, it's Dan Dennett getting mega-memetical. (just kidding, that doesn't even make sense, in this context.)

Is consciousness just an illusion?
Apr 2017, BBC

We're not just are robots", he says. "We're robots, made of robots, made of robots".
-Dan Dennett

More Human Than Human

It's Alive

[This image is of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, illustrated by artist Matt Kish.]

New Zealand river first in the world to be given legal human status
March 2017, BBC

["It's no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies." -New Zealand's Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.]

Yup.

Buildings On Ice

No it's real though.

If there is one thing I learned in architecture school, it's that water is the building's number one enemy. (Insects are number two, by the way.)

High winds turned this New York home into an ice house
the internet, 2017

Smearing the Clock

This image was made by smearing together hundreds of photos; it's by Toronto photographer Matt Molloy, and it's called time-stacking. Source.

I wrote a whole book on approximation and ambiguity. Not really; it was about smells and how the language of smells is imprecise and ambiguous.

But really, we see here how the slowly thawing truth of a quantum science is smearing our sense of reality all over the place:

'Blurred times' in a quantum world
Mar 2017, phys.org

The more precise a given clock is, the more it "blurs" the flow of time measured by neighbouring clocks.