Category: ideas

“Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip.” The Oxford experimental psychologist argues “that in most cases at least half of our experience of food and drink is determined by the forgotten flavor senses of vision, sound, and touch.”

“The controversial psychologist, whose famous 1960s experiments concluded that most people will obey unethical orders, is the subject of a critically acclaimed new movie. … Not surprisingly, Milgram’s name is prominently mentioned in a recent study that takes a new look at an old question: What does it take to get us to comply with instructions, even when we know doing so could harm others?
The study’s conclusion: A gentle nudge will generally do it.”

The holdings of the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford “have been gathered from nearly 30 countries, span more than 50 years and cover some 850,000 person-days in total. They offer the most detailed portrait ever created of when people work, sleep, play and socialize – and of how those patterns have changed over time.”

“Rather than conceiving them under a rubric of disciplines, we are developing the ‘big idea’ that the enterprise entire is the study of the different ways that human beings have chosen or been able to live their lives as human beings.”

“RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

No, that’s not a joke. “Hologram USA, a technology company that specializes in these visual recreations of celebrities, announced that it would use the likenesses of Kaufman and Foxx and parts of their previously recorded routines to create hologram shows that will be presented across the country next year.”

“The individualistic appeal of the Regime of Choice tends to cast the desire for commitment as ‘loving too much’ – that is, loving against one’s own self-interest.”

“For some ancient Greeks and Romans, history was a downhill slide. … Nowadays some optimists think that history slants in the opposite direction. Some techno-utopians argue that technological progress is following an exponential curve, a J that is bending upward toward the vertical. … At the other extreme are today’s gloomy Malthusians. They view history as a spike, in which industrial and population growth overshoot the limits to sustainability, followed by a sharp crash likely to involve the collapse of industrial civilization … There is a third alternative: The shape of things to come may be a logistic curve or S-curve.”

“Melville, despite his struggles, was a hopeful person. ‘Bartleby’ is the freewheeling dream of a bibliophile, the mock epic of a dusty office, the shards of a lifetime of thought. One hundred sixty-two years of scholarship have failed to solve its mysteries—or diminish its pleasures.”

“‘I think being in a home environment is so much more comfortable for people,’ Ratzabi said. ‘It establishes this automatic comfort level. There’s something comforting about food, about sitting around a couch in a safe space where we’re here to support and critique each other.'”