Culture - Would sex with a robot be infidelity? Imagine you’re rich enough to spend $40,000 to visit a town for a day where rules don’t matter. You can be whomever you want. You can kill whomever you want. You can rape whomever you want. You can force every single person you encounter to honour your every sadistic whim. There are no consequences for your actions in this town. Sounds evil, right? Now imagine the same scenario, with just one twist: everyone you force into sex is a robot. Does that sound as evil as the first scenario? The robots can’t hurt the guests. This is one of the major ideas being explored in Westworld, HBO’s newest drama, about a Wild West-themed amusement park where guests are able to do whatever they wish to the ‘hosts’, or robots, who populate the resort. “All kids rebel,” warns head of security Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth). Westworld forces viewers to confront urgent questions about our future - particularly as they relate to our increasingly wired sense of eroticism. Cybersex Are there not? Maeve is a host.
35 Incredible Tim Berners-Lee Quotes Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and is also known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. As the founder and director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C), he oversees the mission, freedom, and openness of the Web. Here is a collection to some of the most incredible Tim Berners-Lee quotes from his life. “Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. “Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.” “Celebrity damages private life.” “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” “I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.” “I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.”
How To Install Ceramic and Porcelain Floor Tile at The Home Depot • Find the center point of the room by measuring the four walls in the room for their midpoints. Then, snap two chalk lines, one from the midpoints of two opposite walls, and another from the midpoints of the other two walls. Where they intersect will be the room’s center point. • Check that the chalk lines are square by marking points 3 feet on one chalk line and 4 feet on a perpendicular chalk line starting at the intersection. Measure the diagonal space between each of these two points. • Lay a single half row of tiles in both directions without mortar, starting at the center point and working outward. • Insert spacers between the tiles. Tip: Pull tiles from different boxes and mix them. • When installing tile, be sure to wear safety glasses and rubber gloves when mixing and applying mortar. • Thin-set mortar is the cement or bonding agent used to attach the tile to the backerboard or concrete subfloor. • Use a large bucket and a drill with a mixing paddle.
I'll Bee There for You: Do Insects Feel Emotions? Charles Darwin once wrote in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” That was in 1872. Now, nearly 150 years later, researchers have discovered more evidence that Darwin might have been onto something. Bumblebees seem to have a “positive emotionlike state,” according to a study published this week in Science. In other words, they may experience something akin to happiness. Unlike humans, you can't simply ask a bee to interrogate its own emotions and describe them. Biologist Clint Perry of Queen Mary, University of London devised an experiment to do just that. Then the researchers tested the bees on ambiguously colored flowers at intermediate locations. The assumption that an ambiguous stimulus contains a reward despite the lack of evidence is called an optimism bias. Sound familiar? In another test involving a simulated predator attack, the sugar-addled bees showed the same optimism bias.
18 Greatest Robert Hooke Quotes Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, architect, and polymath. Hooke is known as one of the greatest experimental scientists of the seventeenth century. With a broad scope of interest ranging from physics and astronomy to chemistry and biology, Hooke invested many historic mechanical components and instruments. Here is a short listing to some of the greatest Robert Hooke quotes from his life. “By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.” “By this the Earth it self, which lyes so near us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter, we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the Whole Universe itself.” “Cut your morning devotions into your personal grooming. “It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.” “Nature … is, as it were, a continual circulation.
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Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief detour toward hard-line atheism. During that period, she produced writing that, as she later described it, “tended to the Dawkinsesque.” Since then, Armstrong has emerged as one of the most popular — and prolific — writers on religion. In her new book, “Fields of Blood,” Armstrong lays out a history of religious violence, beginning in ancient Sumer and stretching into the 21st century. Reached by phone in New York, Armstrong spoke with Salon about nationalism, Sept. 11 and the links between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Over the course of your career, you’ve developed something of a reputation as an apologist for religion. I don’t like the term “apologist.” Your new book is a history of religion and violence. Yes. Yes.
Epistemology Branch of philosophy concerning knowledge In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as "What do people know?", "What does it mean to say that people know something?", "What makes justified beliefs justified?", and "How do people know that they know?"[4][1][5][6] Specialties in epistemology ask questions such as "How can people create formal models about issues related to knowledge?" Etymology[edit] The etymology of the word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē, meaning "knowledge, understanding, skill, scientific knowledge",[7][note 1] and the English suffix -ology, meaning "the science or discipline of (what is indicated by the first element)".[9] The word "epistemology" first appeared in 1847, in a review in New York's Eclectic Magazine : The title of one of the principal works of Fichte is 'Wissenschaftslehre,' which, after the analogy of technology ... we render epistemology.[10] Historical and philosophical context[edit] Knowledge[edit]
You often hear the phrase "money talks" — but why is so hard to actually talk about money? "Money is something very personal. Some people work really hard to make ends meet and it becomes a sensitive topic," says Carey McBeth, an etiquette specialist based in Vancouver. And if you don't have a reason to talk about it, you probably won't. "As soon as there is money involved both people get stressed," she tells The Huffington Post Canada. Of course, asking someone to cover for lunch and help you pay for a car are very different, but McBeth says it doesn't matter how much money is being tossed around. Details aside, borrowing money also means asking the right person. Family and close friends are probably the easiest way to go, and most of the time, both would be willing to help out, according to Time Magazine. So how do you get around borrowing and lending money? Etiquette On Borrowing And Owing Money Borrowing: Find Alternative Means Borrowing: Ask For It In Writing
How VR Gaming will Wake Us Up to our Fake Worlds “It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical superspace. It’s just your cultural point of view […] Travel shows you the relativity of culture.” — Terence McKenna Human civilization has always been a virtual reality. At the onset of culture, which was propagated through the proto-media of cave painting, the talking drum, music, fetish art making, oral tradition and the like, Homo sapiens began a march into cultural virtual realities, a march that would span the entirety of the human enterprise. Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”. Today, philosophers and critics have pointed out that businesses such as McDonald’s and Starbucks are like virtual realities in and of themselves. Indeed, no one ever actually ‘enters a church’. When we read we decode the text.
Brain Pickings What To Do When You Feel Like Your World Is Ending And Everybody Hates You And Nothing Will Ever Be Ok Again | The Belle Jar Trigger warning: suicide I am not always an easy person to be around. I’m sure that most people feel that way, and to some extent it’s probably true. But there are times when I am particularly, especially, really awful to be around. I don’t have a very good instinct for boundaries. I am a great friend until I’m not. I am a cryer. I have sat in my living room at three in the afternoon and three in the morning and every hour in between consumed with an unhappiness so intense that I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that it just is. I know. And once you’re there, you just keep going further down the rabbit hole. These are all awful things to do and I am ashamed to write them out but at the time they felt inevitable. I did not drive every friend away. When I was going through a particularly hard time in university, a friend that I often leaned on for support – let’s call her C – suggested that I make a list of all the things I hated about myself. C was big on self-improvement.
Philosophy of Mind: all-female syllabus - Zoe Drayson Welcome to my all-female syllabus for teaching undergraduate philosophy of mind. I created this syllabus largely to show that it can be done, and to create a resource for other philosophers looking to add female authors to their syllabi. (I did not create this syllabus in an attempt to rid the philosophical world of men.) I was also inspired by finding this personal ad on Google. I'm very happy for people to use (any part of) this syllabus on its own or to supplement an existing syllabus. All the readings can be found in my Dropbox file here. This is very much a work-in-progress: please email me with comments and suggestions. Description of course Unit 1: Introduction There are two core problems in philosophy of mind: the problem of consciousness and the problem of intentionality. Units 2-4: Consciousness The problem of consciousness concerns how to account for the first-person subjective nature of our conscious experience within a third-person objective approach to science. Unit 10 Wrap-up