“We’ve experienced ‘take’ creep. The definition has expanded. What first meant a moronic gloss of opinion, slapped carelessly on cheap news aggregation to make it more shareable came to mean any opinion writing, argument, or analysis, or really, any piece of journalism I don’t like.”
Category: ideas
The Cultural Difficulties Of Universal Instant Translators
“What I’m interested in with these technologies is whether they can get to a place where they become so transparent that it doesn’t feel like there’s a layer of something happening between you and the other person who you’re trying to build a relationship with.”
Even Five-Year-Olds Can Sense That It’s Sometimes Better To Tell White Lies To People
“One of the best (and, sometimes, worst) things about being around young kids is how honest they are. A 3-year-old I know, for example, recently (and very sincerely) asked a visiting relative why he has such a fat belly. But at what age do kids start to realize that saying exactly what they think can hurt other people’s feelings?”
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changes The Ways We See The World
“Over the last five years, processing power and huge corpuses of teaching data have given computers the ability to detect emotions and moods. Soon, perhaps, they will be able to recognize a sideline scuffle or a player’s shift in attitude. Combine that with sensors gathering crowd reactions, the movement and changes in velocity for players and passes, historical statistics that provide context for the game and a player’s performance—and now AI is starting to encroach on analysis as well.”
How To Help Ward Off Cognitive Decline? Make Art, Says Study
The behavior that had the greatest protective effect, at least in this relatively small study, was “artistic activity,” such as painting, drawing, and sculpting.
What Does ‘New Age’ Really Mean? And How Did It Spring Up In The Age Of High Tech?
“It’s worth noting at the outset: New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes. … The aesthetic is one of unabashed pastiche. So, too, are the beliefs undergirding it.”
These 20 Buildings Point To The Future Of Architecture
“There’s a tremendous variety. Some, like Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower, are feats of form—her 82-story Chicago skyscraper is elevated to the realm of massive sculpture by the addition of curving balconies that jut out from the rectangular base. Others, like Neri Oxman’s pavilion made from silkworm thread, give us a sense of how new materials and digital fabrication techniques could be used to build tomorrow’s structures.”
‘Memetics’ – Towards A Theory Of Internet Memes
“In an age where politicians campaign through social media and viral marketers ponder the appeal of sneezing baby pandas, memes are more important than ever – however trivial they may seem. … What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept?”
What’s This Week’s Tool For Boosting Your Kids’ Brain Development? Family Card Games
“Looking for a way to help your children take turns, follow rules, learn math and memory skills and face competition in a healthy way? How about a game of Crazy Eights?” (Naaah – bridge works much better.)
Why Our Presence On Earth Matters
“A cognitive scientist and a German philosopher walk into the woods and come upon a tree in bloom: What does each one see? And why does it matter? While that may sound like the set-up to a joke making the rounds at a philosophy conference, I pose it here sincerely, as a way to explore the implications of two distinct strains of thought – that of cognitive science and that of phenomenology, in particular, the thought of Martin Heidegger, who offers a most compelling vision of the ultimate significance of our being here, and what it means to be fully human.”