Science Daily brings us “news” of the impending digital dark age, courtesy of Jerome McDonough at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I write this with some sarcasm because the Digital Dark Age is not exactly news; people have been speculating about it for years, probably ever since some guy realized that he needed something [...]
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports researchers have developed a way to use a computer and image software to analyze a painting and determine whether it is genuine or a forgery.
The experiment was performed on 101 high-resolution scans of Van Gough paintings from museums in the Netherlands. The program analyzed the artist’s brush strokes and [...]
Talk about tricksters. Several news agencies are reporting (here and here, for example) this morning that some significant portions of the opening ceremony of the Olympics were faked. The cute little girl who sang the Chinese national anthem was lip synching; the real little girl singer, it seems, had crooked teeth and wouldn’t look good [...]
A recent article by Jessica Winter in the Boston Globe reminds us that the importance of forgetting has not been forgotten.
A phenomenon supposedly innate to the human mind, forgetting is becoming less common as our capacity for digital remembering increases, threatening to make our “memory” perfect.
Wait, isn’t forgetting bad?
New York Times writer Benedict Carey reports that they ways people choose to tell their life stories do more than get information across. The story patterns fall into predictable patterns based on the psychology of the teller, and those patterns reflect their present lives and future ambitions.
“Every American may be working on a screenplay,” Carey [...]
