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Science Technology

Blogging Borgmann: TCCL Chapter 9, “The Device Paradigm”

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book With chapter 9 we come to one of the most important chapters of TCCL. In it Borgmann elucidates the Device Paradigm, which is his way of explaining technology by reference to paradigmatic examples of it. The idea is that […]

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Science Technology

Blogging Borgmann: TCCL Chapter 8, “The Promise of Technology”

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book This chapter begins Part 2 (The Character of Technology), the first half of which (chs 8-12) aims to describe and articulate the paradigm of technology, and the second half of which (chs 13-16) aims to ask how we have […]

Categories
Philosophy Science Technology

Blogging Borgmann: TCCL Chapter 7, “Science and Technology”

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book At this point in our exploration of the relationship between modern science and technology, what can we say with confidence? First, that modern science shows us that the world exists in a large matrix of possible states of affairs. […]

Categories
Culture Philosophy Relay Science Theology

Relay: Interesting Stuff From the Last Month

Last month has been busy, and I haven’t figured out how to blog anything original. But that’s ok, because I have a bunch of links for you! These are things I found interesting, provocative, inspiring, or funny in the last month. I’m even going to categorize them for you: Science Honeybees are found to interact […]

Categories
Relay Science

Relay: Dead Downwind Faster Than The Wind

A few weeks ago, I came across the description of an extremely inspiring engineering project at Kimball Livingston’s blog (pictures and videos taken from there). Basically, conventional wisdom in wind propulsion is that, whatever the wind is propelling, that object can’t actually go faster than the wind unless it uses up some kind of stored […]

Categories
Design Gaming Science

Spore

A few years ago, I wrote a post detailing my personal gaming history, wherein I also looked ahead to the future at a computer game that was shaping up to be extremely interesting. That game was Spore (you should really go to their site and watch the introductory video). Under development for half a decade, […]

Categories
Musings Philosophy Science

The iPhone Era: Technological Adaptation and the Future of Human Evolution

When the original iPhone was released a year ago, I wanted one. The promise of being constantly connected to all the various sockets of the Internet into which I have plugged myself (news, e-mail, chat, social networks, information gathering, etc…) was seductive. Being able to work while not standing by a computer, or to keep […]