Category: ideas

“More than ever, highly technical design is becoming more data-driven, faster, and smarter. As I learned at the Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Experience Forum in Las Vegas this week, engineers are increasingly using virtual test benches, new data sources, advanced computer simulations, and extremely sophisticated 3D modeling software to build much better mousetraps.”

“If you get into a very high or very low emotion that you’re almost to the point of being overwhelmed, you become incapacitated so you can’t function well. Emotional homeostasis is important for people so they can be in control of their cognitive, social, and psychological functions.”

“The current design, which is a mishmash of buildings built over the past century, can be difficult for tourists to navigate and isn’t up-to-par for modern exhibitions. In addition, it faces away from the National Mall, making it less inviting to those walking from the US Capitol to other sites.”

“Now that life isn’t evaluated by good grades or audiences who feel forced to applaud, every period to a sentence is my own tiny award for finishing a coherent thought. I keep going. I don’t have a path or a vision board or a career strategy, but I just keep moving in this direction and trusting that something cool will eventually happen.”

“For many, the sudden arrival of 50 grand had a predictably transformational effect, allowing day jobs to be ditched, world-class instruments to be purchased, studio rent paid or simply providing creative time and space.”

“The quality of public discourse is low. There is a disposition in this country at the moment to take offense. It seems as if it’s become a hobby for people to wait around for someone to express an opinion they don’t like and then to react violently.”

“The historian Megan Kate Nelson estimates that two million trees were killed during the war. The Union and Confederate armies annually consumed 400,000 acres of forest for firewood alone.”

“Throughout human history, innovation -including the technological progress we cherish -has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides. … We’re natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is to copy.”

But there seems to be an exception, and it explains why viewers like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.

“To date, 56 people have been identified as possessing a structural difference in their brain that allows them to swiftly and vividly recall their life’s events – from the mundane to the monumental – usually starting around early adolescence.” Here’s a Q&A with one of those people, a 30-year-old New Yorker.