Category: ideas

“Astronomers are exploring ancient tombs in Portugal that they believe may have been used by prehistoric humans to enhance specific views of the night skies. Researchers are focusing on the alignment of the stars with … dolmens that feature long narrow entrances that act as apertures, essentially zooming in on stars and planets that wouldn’t always be visible from the outside.”

“Apple remains the biggest holdout. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but critics say it has little incentive to do anything that might undermine Beats One, Apple Music, and other streaming services.”

In a University of Washington lab test tube, researchers stored an HD video of the song “This Too Shall Pass” by OK Go. They also stored the text of 100 books, and the Declaration of Human Rights in multiple languages.

Their data lists not only the size of past cities, but how, when, and where they emerged. That’s a big deal—and not just for historians.

“The brainbound view pictures the brain as a powerful executive, planning every aspect of behaviour and sending detailed instructions to the muscles. But, as work in robotics has illustrated, there are more efficient ways of doing things, which nature almost certainly employs.”

It’s actually the other way around: “If music makes you see colors and shapes, you might be more likely to pick up a guitar or sit at a piano in the first place … Ssynesthetes see the similar in the dissimilar (music and color; pain and color; syllables and shapes), and people who excel at making metaphors are generally more creative.

“Writers, entrepreneurs, and creative leaders of all types know that intense focus that happens when you’re ‘in the zone’: You’re feeling empowered, productive, and engaged. Psychologists might call this flow, the experience of zeroing in so closely on some activity that you lose yourself in it. And this immersive state, as it turns out, also happens to be something that some adults with ADHD commonly experience.”

Karan Mahajan: “‘How’s it going?’ I ask the barista. ‘How’s your day been?’
‘Ah, not too busy. What are you up to?’
‘Not much. Just reading.’
This, I have learned, is one of the key rituals of American life. It has taken me only a decade to master.”

“Thanks to René Descartes and a pantheon of very serious dead white men, Western intellectual history has long maintained that thought is something that happens only in the kingdom of the brain; it’s just the body’s job, as educator Ken Robinson famously quipped, to bring the brain from meeting to meeting. But your hands suggest otherwise.”