The Singularity
Imagine that a team of scientists has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) with capabilities unfathomably far beyond the human mind. As soon as this AI…
Tom Ingram
Time’s arrow: William Herschel
William Herschel did not begin his career as a professional scientist. For the first several decades of his life astronomy was just a hobby. His…
The string’s the thing
Last week’s Dream Big conference featured a number of events aimed at a general audience, but one was definitely for the physics in-crowd. On March…
Dream Big
Campus will be bustling this week with lectures, demonstrations, and exhibitions for Dream Big, a series of events that brings together major figures in space…
<strong>CS Women</strong>
The Computer Science Students’ Association (CSSA) has announced that they will be sending two teams to the 2014 Computer Science (CS) Games, one of which…
Free software and ethical consumption
In September 1983, the GNU Project was born. GNU was to be a new kind of operating system: the first one with an explicit ethical…
The price of convenience
Seemingly everyone has a smartphone these days. According to surveys from 2013, almost half of all Canadians and more than half of all Americans use…
Time’s arrow: the Sokal hoax
In 1996, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal tried an experiment: he wrote an article satirizing deconstructionist philosophy and its abuses of scientific terminology,…
The science of music
It is said that music has a much more precise vocabulary for describing its objects than any other art. This allows us to talk scientifically…
All this machinery, making modern music
Örjan Sandred is a professor of composition at the University of Manitoba’s Marcel A. Desautels faculty of music. His music involves the use of computers,…