Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great scientific paper.
Jessica Wynne is working on a book with photos of mathematicians’ blackboards to be released next year.
Curation as creation. On the life and work of Harald Szeemann and the rise and vulgarization of the practice of curating. I'm lucky to have seen his final exhibition, La Belgique Visionnaire. Sadly Szeemann passed away the day the exhibition was supposed to open.
With category theory, mathematics escapes from equality. Equality is a strict relationship — either two things are equal, or they are not. The concept of equivalence is more subtle and may be a better fit for large swaths of mathematics.
Machines beat humans on a reading test. But do they understand? Of course, the question is what it means to understand something. Unfortunately, none of the scientists appear to have read Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer.
A Science special issue on language and the brain.
Internal models of sensorimotor integration regulate cortical dynamics. The authors propose that cognitive control can be understood in terms of principles of motor control: 1) control, 2) simulation, and 3) estimation.
Short video of an octopus changing colour while sleeping, possibly because the octopus is dreaming.
Natural Selection. New entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which replaces the previous entry.
Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers. Derrida defines the “metaphysics of presence” as “the enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc”.
Global warming has made an iconic Andean peak unrecognizable. “Today, the idea born on Chimborazo—that the physical environment shapes life's grand patterns—is giving scientists an intellectual framework for understanding a phenomenon Humboldt himself could not have anticipated: how human-driven climate change is transforming life.”
John Updike Redux. "He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot." I've only read one of his novels and don't understand the praise.
Arundhati Roy on the tragedy of Kashmir.