This year the IceHotel, built out of 30,000 tons of snow and 4,000 tons of ice, features a Tron room. Cool does not even begin to describe it. [more inside]
posted by dabitch on Dec 18, 2010 - 15 comments

Mapping the Republic of Letters is a cartographic tool designed by students and professors at Stanford that seeks to represent the Enlightenment era Republic of Letters, the network of correspondence between the finest thinkers of the day, such as Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Newton, Diderot, Linnaeus, Franklin and countless others. Patricia Cohen wrote an article about Mapping the Republic of Letters as well as other datamining digital humanities projects in The New York Times. The mapping tool is fun to play with but I recommend you read the blogpost where Cohen explains how to use Mapping the Republic of Letters.
posted by Kattullus on Nov 16, 2010 - 15 comments

The University of Michigan's collaborative translation of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encylopédie has completed some 650 selections from the Enlightenment keystone, including articles on California, vanilla, werewolves, the English language, beauty, and the complete structure of human knowledge. [more inside]
posted by Iridic on Sep 1, 2009 - 7 comments

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. Or: You weren't meant to have a boss. On the other hand, maybe you are.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Mar 21, 2008 - 36 comments

First Contact: Is it ethical to charge people for the privilege of making "first contact" with nomadic hunter-gatherer groups when the situation of indigenous peoples is so dire? Are we still entranced by the idea of the "noble savage"?
posted by ITheCosmos on Feb 6, 2005 - 18 comments