Category: ideas

The Atlantic‘s headline for this essay, “How Aristotle Created the Computer,” stretches things a bit. Even so, Chris Dixon makes a solid case that direct application of Aristotelian logic is what made the invention and development of computers possible.

“Science is expensive, and since we can’t fund every scientist, we need some way of deciding whose research deserves a chance. So, how do we pick? At the moment, expert reviewers spend a lot of time allocating grant money by trying to identify the best work. But the truth is that they’re not very good at it, and that the process is a huge waste of time. It would be better to do away with the search for excellence, and to fund science by lottery.”

“In 2012, several media headlines touted the narrative of what seemed like a groundbreaking study, which claimed that techniques used to make people think analytically can make them less religious. Half a decade on, however, the study’s findings are being brought into question with multiple papers that suggest its underlying methods were flawed – and, what’s more, the authors agree.”

Damien Hirst turned himself into a high-value business (with Charles Saatchi as his venture-capitalist backer), argues Ian Bogost, and collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps play with form and procedure every bit as much as a work by, say, Yoko Ono. These days there are young tech companies whose ideas seem more conceptual art than practical idea.

From the “Art for Tomorrow” conference: “My dream is a Syrian refugee a few years living in Germany explaining a Christian sculpture to a Berliner. Our society becomes more and more complex and multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious, it’s important really to explain to each other what we are and where we come from. This political issue is, I think, the most important task for a museum.”

Wait, what? Convicted murderer Richard Hickok left behind an unpublished memoir that claimed a man named “Roberts” contracted the hits. It’s probably not true, but … “Documents on file at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka and the New York Public Library, along with letters of Mr. Capote and interviews with people who knew Mr. Nations, suggest that Kansas prison and law-enforcement officials sought to thwart the Hickock/Nations book while enabling Mr. Capote’s.”

For instance, Thinx has gone all in while, of course, getting its wares out there: “The event took on the contours of an activist call to arms, but it doubled as a product preview.”

“Human beings are most creative when we get time by ourselves and then time with one another. The way to maximize creative potential is to flow between being alone and being in a group, and back again. When you’re alone, you’re essentially building a woodpile in your brain. Then, when you join a group, you’re igniting a shower of sparks that might light it up. Of course, you sometimes need to go be alone again in order to let the sparks you’ve started generating get close enough to the wood.”