“With the advent of later pub opening hours, the smoking ban, student tuition fees and the squeeze that a lot people are under financially since the recession … I think people are finding different ways and different places to go out.”
Category: ideas
Computers Have Changed The Way We Explain The World
“As yet, we have few powerful techniques for taking a computer-assisted proof or model, extracting the most important ideas, and answering conceptual questions about the proof or model. But computer-assisted explanations are so useful that they’re here to stay.”
The Utopian Planned City (Possible?)
There have been numerous attempts to build planned cities that can be better places than cities that develop organically and haphazardly. Few have succeeded (and not for lack of trying)
How The Brain Erases Ugly Memories
“New research has identified a neuronal circuit responsible for the brain’s ability to purge bad memories, findings that could have implications for treating PTSD and other anxiety disorders.” It’s all about the amygdala and prefrontal cortex …
How Morality Is Brokered By Attention On The Internet
“The mere act of choosing to look at something online generates real value for a company, materially helping to support its staff, its content, and the social interactions that a platform plays host to. This is why a website like Do Not Link exists: It promises a way to share a link from a website without boosting that site’s standing in search rankings.”
Do Whales And Dolphins Have Culture?
Barbara J. King talks to two scientists who say the answer is definitely yes, although the way they define culture may severely irk some anthropologists.
Mind-Bending: The Psychology Of Awe
“Awe is not an everyday emotion. You don’t wake up awestruck. A satisfying lunch doesn’t leave you filled with awe. Even a great day is unlikely to leave you in a state of jaw-dropped, consciousness-opening fear and trembling. Perhaps that’s why, up until about ten years ago, psychology had surprisingly little to say about awe.” So Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner set out to change that.
Boredom – We Could Not Live Without It
Andreas Elpidorou draws an analogy with pain: almost none of us enjoy it, but not being able to feel it at all is dangerous.
An Old Guy Rant About The Anti-Intellectualism Of Youth
“We’re creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.”
What You Going To Do When The Machines Take Over Your Job?
“Adapting to this change is going to require us to understand how man-machine partnerships are going to evolve. This is tricky, but not impossible. We know that machine learning is going to be used to automate many, if not most, low-level cognitive tasks. Our goal is to use our high-level cognitive ability to anticipate what parts of our work will be fully automated and what parts of our work will be so hard for machines to do that man-machine partnership is the most practical approach.”