I recently heard from a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. He forwarded me an essay he wrote about Nicolaus Steno, a seventeenth-century ... Read more
Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it
Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German polymath who was an astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and music theorist. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural science, and modern science. He has been described as the "father of science fiction" for his novel Somnium.
Decolonising Science Reading List
In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have been asking me about what I’ve been reading as reference points for my commentary on the…
In Tech We Trust - Second Renaissance
The god-like authority of technology in the modern age – and what it means to set a wiser course
Triggers: Introducing the Technosphere | Peter K. Haff
Why Reading Matters - Cal Newport
Last week, Rose Horowitch published a splashy Atlantic article titled “The End of Reading is Here.” (Ironically, given the subject matter, it weighed in at ... Read more
Erasmusprijswinnaars - Praemium Erasmianum Foundation
It takes only a glance at a newspaper nowadays to see that much of what we once took for granted is either being cast aside or turned on its head. Indeed, with floods sweeping away entire cities, and the prospect of a nuclear war closer than it has ever been, I couldn’t bring myself to […]
Everything I Know
Everything I Know During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. Jump to Sections Introduction These …
Dripline: Fixing the 'dumb opinions' problem: Addison, Johnson, Walpole | Hypha
What do 18th century writers say about posting online?
A budding discipline around how science gets read and judged - Aris
Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely begun arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. At Aris we call that second argument scholarly interface design. Mike Morrison's community calls it ScienceUX. Either way it is becoming a field, and here is why it is worth your attention.
Cas (Stephen Casper) on Twitter / X
It is hard to overstate how disappointing I think this new paper from Oxford, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (et al) is. I can't take it seriously as academic work, just as propaganda. It also has some very bad scholarship and questionable adherence to research ethics. Having… pic.twitter.com/Z5fBx360ya— Cas (Stephen Casper) (@StephenLCasper) May 13, 2026
Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph
In one of the most famous paragraphs of our most famous autobiography, Henry Adams located the precise moment when “eighteenth century troglodytic Boston” joined industrial America: “the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard Steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the presidency. This was May, 1844.”
Meditations on Machinic Desire
The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:
Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 : Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984
xi, 270 pages ; 22 cm
Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method
The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public's understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.
