Category: ideas

The Prize for Medicine went to researchers who found that roller coaster rides could help dislodge kidney stones, while a Japanese gastroenterologist won a Medical Education Prize for performing a colonoscopy on himself while sitting. (He reported “Mild discomfort”.) The Chemistry Prize went to researchers who found that saliva worked better on 18th-century sculpture than alcohol-based cleaners, and researchers who found that workers did in fact relieve stress by sticking pins in voodoo dolls of their bosses won the Economics Prize.

While it has fingers in many pies, its search function is the thing that changed everything. There is virtually no fact that we can’t find out in a heartbeat, thanks to its all powerful engines. It is, of course, a double-edged sword since it killed lively pub debates. Virtually every disputed topic is now resolveable in the length of time it takes to take out a smart phone.

For Habermas, the function of public debate is not to find a reasonable common ground. Rather, the public sphere ‘is a warning system’, a set of ‘sensors’ that detect the new needs floating underneath the surface of a supposed political consensus. And if we worry too much about civility and the reasonable middle, we risk limiting the ability of the public sphere to detect new political claims. To get those claims on the agenda in the first place often requires uncivil and confrontational political tactics.

Rather than potentially wiping out humanity, as some high profile futurists like Elon Musk have warned is a possibility, A.I. could increase our lifespan tenfold.

Basically, machines can do a lot – but they’re having a hard time with creating art. Now, “olfactory circuits bear striking similarities to more complex brain regions that have been of interest in the quest to build better machines.”

Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen announced on Friday that “film productions with anywhere from four to eight women in key positions would be eligible for a higher government subsidy.” She said, “When things don’t change by themselves, or do so too slowly, it’s up to us to bring about change.”

Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world one inhabits. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as secular diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them. These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle the social world around them – what’s going on around the house, what they did today, who came to visit, who was born or who died.

“We are becoming stupider. This is happening. It’s not going to go away, and we have to try to think about what we’re going to do about it.”

Time can now be sliced into slivers as thin as one ten-trillionth of a second. But what is being sliced? Unlike mass and distance, time cannot be perceived by our physical senses. We don’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste time. And yet we somehow measure it. As a cadre of theorists attempt to extend and refine the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s momentous law of gravitation, they have a problem with time. A big problem.

Our present era is one in which the heart of culture is blowing hard upon a coal of fear, and the fascination is everywhere. By popular consent, horror has been experiencing what critics feel obliged to label a ‘golden age’. In terms of ticket sales, 2017 was the biggest year in the history of horror cinema, and in 2018, Hereditary and A Quiet Place have been record-breaking successes.