Adam Bencard

Martin Robbins of The Lay Scientist has posted this scathing and completely brilliant look at what most science journalism looks like. It is funny because it is true, as they say. Be sure to read the comments as well, some of them are comedy gold.

One of the mantras of museum discourse in the past decade has been that of digitalization. The future is digital, collections should be online, new digital medias define the frontiers of museum practice, and so on. A quick glance at the Heritage Agency of Denmark’s list of supported projects in the past 10 years will […]

Engaging with objects is key to understanding knowledge production, but you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from a lot of philosophy, cultural theory or sociology. More often that not, objects are either flatout ignored (as Bjørnar Olsen and others have argued) or seen as secondary by-products of immaterial knowledge structures. This dismissive view on objects […]

Writing on a blog about the benefits of blogging might seem a bit superfluous, but here is a nice reminder of the possibilities that the social web can open. The philosopher Levi Bryant, one of the central figures in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), recently wrote this blogpost on chance encounters and why blogging can be a […]

The RSA – the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce – have a wonderful series of animated lectures which are worth checking out. One of them is based on the American writer Daniel Pink’s work on motivation. [biomed]u6XAPnuFjJc[/biomed] The video seems to me to raise a fundamental issue in science communication, […]

The awe-inspiringly active philosopher Graham Harman recently wrote a blog post on Thomas Metzinger’s book The Ego Tunnel, in which the author interviews neurophysiologist Wolf Singer. Metzinger asks Singer why he is interested in philosophy, to which he replies that he believes neurophysiology can solve the problems of philosophy. This view — that the neuroscience […]

The ongoing battle between university administrators and teaching staff is in the process of claiming another victim. The well-renowned Department of Philosophy at Middlesex University is being closed down, much to the dismay and disbelief of staff, students and philosophers across the world. You can read much more about the debacle here, here and here. Below is […]

Anette Stenslund, our new prospective Ph.D.-student, and I attended the Conference Art and Identity, hosted by the Danish Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Among the speakers were prominent names like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Mark Johnson and Andrew Bowie – quite a line-up for a Danish conference. All in all, it was a great experience with both […]

I just finished an application for a 2-year postdoc position with The Danish Council for Independent Research, entitled ‘Materializing life – protein science and philosophy in the post-genomic age’. The project aims to combine studies of protein research with recent philosophical thinking on materiality, and should hopefully be a way of developing some of the […]

Another object-oriented conference is coming up, this one organised by CRESC (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) at the University of Manchester. The list of speakers looks very promising (I’d particularly like to hear Graham Harman, as his work on object-philosophy is extremely intriguing). Here is an excerpt from the conference description: As contemporary social […]

Thomas wrote a post yesterday on medical board games, which got me reminiscing about medical computer games. There is a long history of medical computer games, particularly within the simulation genre. Most noteworthy is the now extinct Bullfrog Productions’ wickedly funny Theme Hospital, which was published in 1997 by Electronic Arts. The game is a […]

As Science Daily reports, researcher from the University of Washington have developed a computer game that turns protein folding into a competitive sport. The free game is called Foldit, and will, perhaps, one day lead to the first Nobel Prize won by a gamer. The game targets a huge problem for protein research, namely the […]