Category: ideas

“It is time to liberate ourselves from the propaganda of divestment. I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display.”

“An injured animal doesn’t diagnose its sprained ankle; it finds a limp that allows it to keep moving. Similarly, the team’s robots didn’t pinpoint the damage; they just noticed a drop in speed or a change in course, and selected a new movement to resume their actions.”

“Interdisciplinary collaborations are often a good thing, especially between science and the arts. It makes sense that a design scholar would want to know how creativity works—in this case, a person who teaches a creativity course at Stanford’s d-school actually suggested the study. But creativity is, in the end, a human construct. That lack of definition makes it tough to study, even though the researchers tried to focus on a specific kind.”

A research team led by psychologists Ken Paller of Northwestern University and Xiaoqing Hu of the University of Texas-Austin reports it was able to able to reduce prejudice through a combination of conscious brain training and subliminal reinforcement as the study participants napped.

“Deep learning is particularly interesting because it has transformed so many different areas of research. In the past researchers used very separate techniques for speech recognition, image recognition, translation, and robotics. But now one this one set of techniques—though a rather broad set—can serve all these fields.”

“Weirdly, nostalgia used to have a bad reputation—psychologists interpreted it as people avoiding the present, and it was even classified as a psychiatric disorder at one point. But recent research has shown that nostalgia can have positive effects, like making people more optimistic about the future and more willing to set new goals.”

“The terror of death has guided the development of art, religion, language, economics, and science. It raised the pyramids in Egypt and razed the Twin Towers in Manhattan. It contributes to conflicts around the globe. At a more personal level, recognition of our mortality leads us to love fancy cars, tan ourselves to an unhealthy crisp, max out our credit cards, drive like lunatics, itch for a fight with a perceived enemy, and crave fame, however ephemeral, even if we have to drink yak urine on Survivor to get it.”

“When I started, I had absolutely no idea that I was capable of writing so much or so often. Blogging has been a huge surprise for me: It has been a life-transforming experience and a door-opener.”

“You made it … and you’re fucked.”

“Restaurants have always doled out preferential treatment to the ‘best’ customers — but now, they’ll be able to brand them with a specific dollar sign the second they walk in the door.”