Culture

The renaissance Vitruvian Man helped to bring about was above all a rehabilitation of the human being as the pinnacle of creation and the expression of a divine ideal; with the discovery of new cultures and ideals that followed, the notion of a single human ideal would be put to the severest test.

The electronic collage-music duo The Books give leisure time one more crank of the handle, and it all becomes funny and vaguely unsettling: an 18-hole course deep in the uncanny valley.

Coffee isn't only a stimulant, but also a social glue and fuel for creative lives. A proposed mobile app would allow caffeinated bloggers, writers, artists, and designers to share their coffeehouse-generated work in real-time.

Don't even think of challenging this poisoned pooch to a staring contest�or the postmen of the Great Northern Railway, who were the early 20th century's answer to the Internet.

The animated GIF may be little appreciated in the world of Web 2.0�but in the right hands, it plays with the unsettling riddle of our mechanical nature.

"Just as the shadows in the hollows of the Earth diminish in size as the Sun rises higher, so also these spots on the Moon lose their blackness as the illuminated part grows larger and larger."

The information-design authority Edward Tufte is selling his multimillion-dollar collection of rare books, which together make up a "Museum of Cognitive Art." For most of us, the slideshow will have to do.

"An idiolect is a language (or some part or aspect of a language) that can be characterized exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person, the person whose idiolect it is."

To Kelly, the advance guard of the technium is to be found among the quadrillions of computer chips networked into vast electronic systems. But It may be difficult to discern whether the desires driving that process belong to technology, or are our own.

"Some flashes of lambent light, much like the aurora borealis, were first observed on the northern part of the heavens....as soon as the meteor emerged from behind the cloud, its light was prodigious."