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"I would also note that almost no one here is actually a scientist, much less a Nobel prize winner. So no one is all that qualified to debunk his idea. There are certainly falsifiable points in his premise on race (and probably plenty of research to support it). All that need be done is produce and make the argument, and the issue should be closed. But no, that's not sufficient, he has to be punished."

Remember Diogenes of Sinope?

He infamously critiqued Plato's definition of man as an 'animal, biped and featherless' by appearing in the philosopher's academy with a plucked fowl exclaiming to have found 'human being.' The incident apparently caused Plato to add to his definition, "having broad nails."

Where were Diogenes's credentials? He was homeless. Science doesn't care about credentials, just the evidence. My own evidence speaks out against the Watson quotations I've read on here. I think he doesn't get out enough to meet blacks who are intelligent. Or listen to Louis Armstrong, for example.

See "The Skills of Xanadu", as text: http://books.google.com/books?...
and as audio: https://archive.org/details/pr...

Around 2001 or 2002, while working at at IBM Research I went to a talk by Ted Nelson there, and I asked him about the story given the similar name. He said that the story had inspired him (at least partially) to do his work, and thanked me for telling him the name of the story, saying he had been looking for that story for a long time. While I did not say so, his reply about looking for the story surprised me given that there are probably not many stories with Xanadu in the title so a library search would have found it I would think.. Ted Nelson records everything around him on a tape recorder (or at least did then), so that interaction should be on one of his tapes...

The 1956 story by Theodore Sturgeon is am amazing work that features a world networked by wireless mobile wearable computing supporting freely shared knowledge and skills through a sort of global internet-like concept. Some of that knowledge was about advanced nanotech-based manufacturing. The system powered an economy reflecting ideas like Bob Black writes about in "The Abolition of Work", where much work had become play coordinated through this global network. The story has inspired other people as well, both me from when I read it (and forgot it mostly for a long time, except for the surprise ending), and also a Master Inventor at IBM I worked with who got inspired by the nanotech aspects of that story when he was young. Even almost sixty years later, that story still has things we can learn from about a vision of a new type of society (including with enhanced intrinsic&mutual security) made possible through advanced computing.

A core theme is an interplay between meshwork and hierarchy, reminiscent of Manuel De Landa's writings:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/man...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."

See also, for other "old" ideas we could still benefit from thinking about:
"The Web That Wasn't"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007
For most of us who work on the

Many people have made the point that we are already cyborgs; the main prototypical example that comes to mind is Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. She argues interestingly that "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." All the casual Marxism makes for fun reading too. She is making a metaphorical comparison, as is Mr. Martin in TFA, but it's a useful and interesting metaphor. No, I do not have electronics built into my body, but I also could not survive without technology. Thus, when I answer the question "Who am I," it is reasonable to extend the boundaries of my "self" beyond my physical body to encompass the technology that I rely upon to sustain my existence. It's also reasonable to include the data that I maintain and publish as part of my self-concept, and the technology that makes that possible.

I believe it was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, http://www.egs.edu/resources/seneca.html

Since a long time art pretends to be useless (it was not the case till the 19th century, where, in a world that was not yet objective nor real the question about useful- or uselessness was not even to be raised). It is therefore logical that it should have a predilection for trash and waste, which is also useless. To turn any object into a piece of art you just have to make it useless. What the ready-made achieves by taking away the function from the object, without changing it in any way (by the way, Duchamp was not so obsessed with the ready-made : he said "One ready-made from time to time, but not ten a day !")

that the distinction you draw is a matter of opinion. Have a glance at Alain Badiou's work and get back to me. Opinion is a much more general notion that you credit. Anything that is not a raw tautology enters into the realm of opinion and differential evaluation; becomes more or less subject to the vagaries of intersubjective judgement.

Is that link you provided a joke? DJ Spooky and John Waters (director of Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom) are faculty members?

I think you underestimate the willingness of some intellectually bankrupt individuals in the humanities to put up with (a) any kind of relativism, no matter how nonsensical, and (b) any degree of obfuscation. And yes, there are highly-respected cultural theorists who would genuinely and seriously agree that "physical ``reality'' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct": try reading one of Judith Butler's books one day. (For fun, see if you manage to find more than two comprehensible sentences in the book!)

Try The Postmodernism Generator. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.

This certainly isn't universal, but it's enough for someone like Sokal to get a good joke out of it.

Sokal's hoax has not actually changed anything much: viewpoints like Homburg's (the gp post) are still the norm to which people doing cultural theory are supposed to adhere. And the best thing about it is that Homburg can claim to have been making a joke, or being serious, and that, too, is how cultural theorists are supposed to behave - everything is a joke, nothing is sincere. Holding intellectually bankrupt individuals up to ridicule actually changes nothing, because someone like Homburg can always come along and say "Aha! it's a joke, but actually it's also true." And there's nothing anyone can ever do to stop it.

Nothing legal, anyway.

to have been influenced by matrix.

And the matrix was heavily influenced by these two books:
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
&
Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (you can read the whole book online)

Just though I'd share, I found both these books amazing and giving me better insight into the Matrix, as well as introducing me to new topics.

I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.

I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernist philosopher who disavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."

In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.

Just a thought.