“Our past choices in all areas can be analysed to predict future choices. Our taste in music, movies, books, news articles and clothes can be analysed – but also our sexual proclivities, political alliances and moral decisions. Those can be deduced and used to make recommendations. Everything we think we are, it seems, can be predicted, the probabilities sifted – and the chances are that what we do will fall inside the bell curve of predicted behaviour. Free will? Are you kidding?”
Category: ideas
Does Living In Skyscrapers Change You Psychologically?
“Given the age of our species, living more than a few stories up is a very recent phenomenon. This tempts one to conclude that high rises are unnatural, and some would argue that what is unnatural must be, in some way, harmful.”
Decline Of The French Intellectual
“Because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.”
Neuroscience And Neighborhood Blight
“Blocks and neighborhoods aren’t concrete concepts that mean the same thing to everyone, unlike, say, things like ‘apple’ or ‘sky.’ Points of reference shift depending on the person that’s using that reference, so blocks/neighborhoods are more like alternate realities laid atop one another, like plastic sheets on an overhead projector. There’s even a phrase for the study of this murky concept: mental maps. They can help us understand why some neighborhoods thrive, others die, and how changes are made.”
Some People Really Can Multitask – And Their Brains Are Different From Ours
For the past few years, scientists have been telling us that there’s not really any such thing as multitasking – that the best the human nervous system can manage is very fast task-switching, and that we get better results by concentrating on one thing at a time. Turns out there are a few exceptions – and researchers have been putting some of those individuals in a brain scanner.
How Bedbugs Get Under Our Skin And Into Our Psyches
They don’t transmit West Nile virus or Lyme disease or malaria, yet humans – especially city-dwellers – are terrified of them. Ashamed, too: If we get them, we’re reluctant to tell our friends, lest they avoid us. How and why do we give these critters such power over us?
Why Loki Has Been Popular For, Oh, 900 Years Or So
“Of all the gods of Asgard, Loki is the subversive, the social and racial outsider; a gender-fluid character in a binary world. It seems appropriate, therefore, for Loki to subvert the epic tradition of prose just as he subverts everything else. It is a gesture of defiance – one of many – against authority, convention, even the rules of storytelling.”
Subsidizing Internet Service For The Poor Makes Good Sense For Everyone
“When you introduce the subsidy to people living in poverty, you’re letting the private sector take a look at a whole new market that isn’t currently using their services. … The market will adapt to this new source of customers.”
Urban Planning Via LEGO
“With the sounds of real construction—jackhammers, saws, cranes—whirring steadily in the background, the toy-sized towers were being heavily edited by visitors with less in the way of architectural bona fides.”
Color Collotype Printing Preserves Japan’s Heritage [VIDEO]
“Benrido has been kept alive by the Japanese government, who use this intricate printing method to ‘replicate and preserve Japan’s heritage’ by copying important cultural documents and artworks in case of natural disaster. Yamamoto, who treasures collotype, and is saddened to see its decline over the past several decades, views it as his duty to preserve the process – and Japan’s history – for the next generation.”