Category: ideas

“What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to ‘commencement’ speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.”

“Titled ‘Carne y Arena,’ the project has both Hollywood bona fides — it is partly funded by the studio heavyweight Legendary Entertainment — and the stamp of the art house community, for which Cannes is a holy site. … ‘Carne y Arena’ tells the story of Latin American immigrants who are attempting to cross into the United States via the Arizona desert when they are spotted and caught by U.S. authorities.”

Uh oh. “We’re going to see ransomware against our cars. Our digital video recorders and web cameras will be taken over by botnets. The data that these devices collect about us will be stolen and used to commit fraud. And we’re not going to be able to secure these devices.”

Why yes, I’d like to use “Bank Butt” for the living room, while “Snowbonk” is nice for the kitchen. In short: “1. The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey; 2. The neural network has really, really bad ideas for paint names.”

The evidence says Amazon Go may be coming to both the UK and Europe: “The company filed applications to trademark four slogans: ‘No Lines, No Checkout. (No, Seriously),’ ‘No Queue, No Checkout. (No, Seriously),’ ‘Every Queue is a Defect,’ and ‘Every Line is a Defect.'”

Both “Less is more” and “More is more” are the catchphrases of a consumer society faced with unimagined plenty. Following World War II, “Less is more” suggested unease with mass abundance: restraint became an emblem of refinement. Two decades of uninterrupted prosperity later, “More is more” poked fun at its abstemious parent. It is also a fitting description of the way we live now.

“In physics, it’s dangerous to assume that things ‘exist’ in any conventional sense. Instead, the deeper question is: what sorts of processes give rise to the notion (or illusion) that something exists? For example, Isaac Newton explained the physical world in terms of massive bodies that respond to forces. However, with the advent of quantum physics, the real question turned out to be the very nature and meaning of the measurements upon which the notions of mass and force depend – a question that’s still debated today.”

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. “The phrase has a dour fatalism to it – if everything’s bound to fail, why bother trying? But time has distorted the law’s intended meaning entirely. There really was a Murphy, and the law that bears his name is not an admission of defeat. It is a call to excellence.” Corinne Purtill explains. (Has she ruined it for the rest of us?)

Recognize the name but can’t quite place it? The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the cognitive phenomenon wherein many people (especially on the lower end) overestimate their abilities, such as 80% of drivers rating themselves above average. (We’ve been seeing the effect in action quite a lot lately.) The incident that inspired psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger to investigate the phenomenon was a doozy.