Category: ideas

“Green: Is it true that any professor who walks into a classroom wearing a bowtie is, in fact, a conservative?

“Shields: Absolutely. No question. They just scream conservative. You can’t find liberals who wear ties anymore, much less bowties.”

“Sure, when we stop and think about it, we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like … Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now?” Rather the opposite, says Donald Hoffman: humans evolved as we did because our brains couldn’t process the world as it is (or not all of it).

It’s certainly possible: inventors have been working on ways to add aromas to telecommunications for 25 years or so. Yet the products have never caught on with the public. One part of the problem is “olfactory illiteracy”; another is for inventors to understand why and how users would use scents to communicate.

“Most of us are the products of people who survived in what was for a very, very long time, in our evolution as a species, a scarcity-oriented universe. … So we do have a very hard-wired tendency to be scarcity-oriented. … It is now being shown in quite a lot of studies that you actually perform better if you don’t put yourself under the scarcity mindset, if you don’t worry about the outcomes and enjoy the process of doing something, rather than the goal.”

Results of a meta-analysis of 124 studies on the purported benefits of mindfulness practice “show that many of these studies contained sample sizes that are too small to provide meaningful results – and they suggest that studies on mindfulness that have turned out negative results may have not been published.”

Dominic Frisby explains blockchain technology – and argues that it will likely revolutionize not only cash purchases, but also document authentication, land title and ownership, contract law, and even elections.

“Today’s physicists rarely debate what time is and why we experience it the way we do, remembering the past but never the future. Instead, researchers build ever-more accurate clocks. The current record-holder, at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Colorado, measures the vibration of strontium atoms; it is accurate to 1 second in 15 billion years, roughly the entire age of the known universe. Impressive, but it does not answer ‘What is time?’”

Working with constraints “allows a deeper exploration of fewer alternatives.” They “limit the overwhelming number of available choices to a manageable subset,” allowing us to “explore less familiar paths, to diverge in previously unknown directions.”

“What has the Facebook app and site become, if not a social network? The answer is rather obvious when you watch how people use it. It has become a personalized portal to the online world.”