Babel

The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas. There's a heaven above you, baby.

Babel

Archives for January, 2012

The Cosmic Machine

Posted by  on Sunday, January 29th 2012     

FUNDAMENTALS If you could record everything that is happening everywhere at any given moment and feed this information into a computer, you could predict the next one and its consequence and so on: how, when, where, why, Frankie killed Johnny, or Sluggo kissed Nancy, or Albert decided to square energy instead of money.

Read the rest of this entry »

Drescher and the Toaster

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 24th 2012     

The following is a koan — perhaps apocryphal — from the community of artificial intelligence researchers about one of their own. Drescher and the Toaster A disciple of another sect once came to [Gary] Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. “I would like to give you this personality test”, said the outsider, “because [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Kathryn Freeman’s Review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety

Posted by  on Saturday, January 21st 2012     

I’m pleased to announce that Kathryn Freeman’s review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety has just appeared in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. I would like to thank both BIQ for sending my book out for review and Kathryn Freeman for taking time to review it. Freeman’s highly professional review accurately identifies both my book’s [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Ethics of chess and artificial intelligence

Posted by  on Friday, January 20th 2012     

Rob Beschizza recently posted an engaging report on software plagiarism and other ethical transgressions in the field of artificially intelligent chess. Excerpt: Rybka, a powerful chess program, was stripped last year of its titles and its author publicly disgraced. Declared a plagiarist by the International Computer Games Association, Vasik Rajlich was also handed a lifetime ban on competition and [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Tune in to Brazilian music, learn Portuguese

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 17th 2012     

Luciana Lage of Street Smart Brazil and I have a video series on how to learn Portuguese via Brazilian songs. Here is the introductory video where we explain the connection between listening, music and learning a new language. The next video is our first using the song Você Não me Ensinou a Te Esquecer by [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

City of Wind

Posted by  on Sunday, January 15th 2012     

We blew up chicken gullets, like balloons for the girls to carry around on strings, and played pirate with sharpened stockyard bones which we sheathed in our clothesline belts, like swords, marauding through the neighborhood. Along the sidewalks, the girls played hopscotch, arms raised in the air like wings, hopping toward the Blue Sky with [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewing the Reviewer

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 10th 2012     

Reviewing the Reviewer: Katherine Ashley’s review of Sherry R. Truffin’s Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature and Scholarship (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Katherine Ashley’s review of Sherry Truffin’s Schoolhouse Gothic is a serious enough case of careless and irresponsible misreading that it requires a response. What is particularly intriguing [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Catacombs of Paris: Walls of Skulls

Posted by  on Thursday, January 5th 2012     

It is said half of Paris is hidden underground. The limestone once carved out and brought forth from its depths (which created its great historical buildings and beauteous landmarks) have left behind a hollowed cavern of alleyways within Paris’s subterranean depths creating a sort of double city. It is not uncommon in Europe to exhume [...]

Read the rest of this entry »

Poetry24 Year in Review 2011

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 3rd 2012     

  Poetry24 http://poetry-24.blogspot.com/.    

Read the rest of this entry »

BBC Video: Amish

Posted by  on Tuesday, January 3rd 2012     

       

Read the rest of this entry »