“Peru’s drone archaeology team has quickly become one of the most active in the world, working to accurately survey and preserve the South American nation’s thousands of valuable archaeological sites.”
Category: ideas
Sorting All The Numbers In The World
“What’s the greatest number of cake slices that can be made with n cuts? Look up sequence A000125 in the OEIS. How many chess positions can be created in n moves? That’s sequence A048987.”
The Tyranny Of Algorithms: How Our Choices Are Being Narrowed
“Cyberspace is no longer an escape from the ‘real world’. It is now a force governing it via algorithms: recipe-like sets of instructions to solve problems. From Google search to OkCupid matchmaking, software orders and weights hundreds of variables into clean, simple interfaces, taking us from query to solution. Complex mathematics govern such answers, but it is hidden from plain view, thanks either to secrecy imposed by law, or to complexity outsiders cannot unravel.”
The Neuroscience Of Being A Selfish Jerk
A team of Hungarian researchers scanned the brains of people who got high scores on a test for Machiavellianism (yes, this is a clinical term for a personality trait) while they played a game of trust. “They found that Machiavellians’ brains went into overdrive when they encountered a partner who exhibited signs of being fair and cooperative. Why? … Because the Machiavellians are immediately figuring out how to exploit the situation for their own gain.”
Taking To Kickstarter, A Major Architect Wants To Fund Activist Public Art
The Kickstarter campaign is as much about activism as it is about funding—an increasingly popular tactic in the architecture world. “You could say the whole idea of the project is an exercise in radical transparency. What the project does is make blatantly legible a carbon footprint that is invisible, and only exists in the form of numbers and specifics and news.” The point of the tower is to raise environmental awareness. By asking the public to contribute, the firm is putting it to the people to decide if they want a visual representation of pollution on the skyline. It also detaches the project from any corporate influence.
What Defines Your Identity? Your Moral Compass, Suggests Study
“What defines a person? Is it their memories? Their hobbies? … According to a new study, kindness, loyalty, and other traits of morality are what really constitute someone’s being. … Contrary to what generations of philosophers and psychologists have thought, memory loss doesn’t make someone seem like a different person.”
So The Culture Wars Are Over? Oh Really?
“Whether the internet is simply a new, more broadly accessible forum for old debates about the meaning of America, or whether it is facilitating a new kind of culture war altogether, is not entirely clear. Nor are online spaces any less susceptible to the imperatives of capitalism than any other part of American culture. But if the culture wars are over, no one told their most energetic partisans: on this new frontier, the battle rages on.”
Archaeology’s Fraught Relationship With Religion
The very beginnings of the discipline are tied up with religion, particularly attempts to validate the Bible. Today, there are students who neither know nor care much about the Bible and aren’t willing to take its importance as a given. How will that change the field?
The Emptiness Of The Invented City
Pico Iyer on Pyongyang and Las Vegas: “Plato’s Cave can look much the same in East or West, whether its screens are projecting images of tumbling cheerleaders or brigades of goose-stepping soldiers.”
The Brain Implant That Can Wirelessly Control Emotions
“What if we could, with the push of a button, make microscopic alterations of a few neurons, causing the happy chemicals to ring out in a jackpot celebration, with no side effects? Would we be ready to handle such complete control over our emotional reality?”