“Somewhere in the latest issue of Badiou Studies, a multilingual, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the thinking of the philosopher Alain Badiou, lives an article entitled, ‘Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-) Being-Queer.'”
Category: ideas
Will Virtual Reality Technology Change Our Perceptions Of What’s Real?
“Along with transforming everyday life, a VR revolution could fundamentally change how we understand and define what is real.”
There’s Another Kind Of Synesthesia, One Involving Touch
“Imagine being so disgusted by denim, for example, that running a hand over jeans makes you want to puke. Or feeling the urge to laugh whenever you touch silk. Or getting the creeps whenever you put on a fabric glove. That’s life for people with tactile-emotional synesthesia, a mysterious condition in which seemingly arbitrary textures can be enough to make someone laugh or cry.”
Why People Gossip
“The origins of gossip can be traced at multiple levels: evolutionary, cultural and developmental. While some forms of gossip are almost certainly negative or superfluous, others seem to serve a beneficial social role: Gossip can help solidify personal relationships and encourage cooperation. And if a new research finding is right, children engage in this form of gossip by age 5.”
Megachurch Architecture Is Unusually Bad, But It Doesn’t Have To Be
“Most megachurches are located outside city centers, camouflaged into suburban sprawlscapes. Their architecture often mimics that of warehouses, shopping malls, or dome-shaped stadiums. Sometimes, the only thing distinguishing a megachurch from a defunct K-Mart is a spindly cross on its facade.”
Even Before Tinder, Heck, Even Before The Internet, Dating Was Always Hard
“Weigel read dating-advice books from the 1800s and hundreds of articles on dating from teen and women’s magazines over the years, and she found two common themes: First, there is usually an older part of the population that perceives dating to be ‘dying,’ or, at least, as not being done ‘appropriately.’ Second, Weigel found that the way people date has almost always been tied to the market forces of their era.”
To Write Better Code, Read More Virginia Woolf
“I’ve worked in software for years and, time and again, I’ve seen someone apply the arts to solve a problem of systems. The reason for this is simple. As a practice, software development is far more creative than algorithmic. The developer stands before her source code editor in the same way the author confronts the blank page.”
‘Unethical Amnesia’ – How We Conveniently Forget The Times We’ve Behaved Badly
“We hold ourselves to be moral agents in the world, so evidence of wrongdoing creates all sorts of dissonance between our ideas about ourselves and our actual behavior. The unethical amnesia acts like an ‘adaptive defensive behavior,’ helping our egos sidestep unpleasant truths.”
Our Brains Are Not Computers And Don’t Work Like Them (Why Do Some People Find This Hard To, Er, Process?)
“Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.” Robert Epstein reminds us of the (enormous) differences.
‘Bio-Techne’: Robots And Replicants In Ancient Greek Myth
“The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god Hephaestus, and the tragically inquisitive Pandora all raised the basic question of the boundaries between human and machine.”