Category: ideas

“If you regard the Oscars as anything but the annual, televised offsite retreat of a company that is hugely profitable despite everything about itself (complete with the crummy inside jokes), the problem is really with you. The Academy Awards were never meant to be anything but that.”

Or, as the subheadline of this article has it, “What makes New York’s Penn Station suck so bad?”

“Everything, however, remains visual; nothing exists in data form. To accomplish this, the team had professional engravers laser-etch the various visuals in platinum on sapphire discs, resulting in delicate-looking objects that are works of art in their own right.”

“Clean up your desk too much and you might find you’ve accidentally cleaned out your mind.”

“What was truly surprising for me was going into a space that was ancient, and to crawl around the ceiling and look at the walls and realize that they were looking at things acoustically. It wasn’t just about the architecture. They had these big jugs that were put up there to sip certain frequencies out of the air … They built diffusion, a way to break up the sound waves by putting striations in the walls. They were actively trying to tune the space.”

“The Mongol 482 may be just a ‘middle-range, everyday’ pencil. But it’s also one of the most famous pencils in history … Because the Mongol 482 has written its autobiography” – with the “as told to” services of a libertarian economist. Thus, like so many autobiographies, this one had an agenda – and, also like so many autobiographies, it isn’t entirely accurate. (podcast with transcription)

“So wherein lies the truth: Is the con artist psychopath, narcissist, Machiavellian? A little bit of all? It is possible, it turns out, to possess all the tenets of the dark triad, and then some, and still not turn to con artistry.”

“What if artificial intelligence is so unfamiliar that we have a hard time recognising it? Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it? The huge obstacle to addressing such questions is that no one is really sure what consciousness is, let alone whether we’d know it if we saw it.”

“Do you know Edwina didn’t even cry when that crocodile popped off her leg? She didn’t even cry, Edwina. She was fascinated, just fascinated. Her mother fainted dead away, and her father fainted dead away. … And Edwina just stood there and watched him chew up her leg. You know what? She said she always wanted to be Long John Silver!”