Category: ideas

(And yes, “Did Jesus Save the Klingons?” is an actual Scientific American headline.)

“Operating beyond normal science’s simple accumulation of more information, Big Data is touted as a different sort of knowledge altogether, an Enlightenment for social life reckoned at the scale of masses. As with the similarly inferential sciences like evolutionary psychology and pop-neuroscience, Big Data can be used to give any chosen hypothesis a veneer of science and the unearned authority of numbers.”

Study: “They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch.”

“With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones.”

“Google is known as a search engine, yet there is barely any searching involved anymore. The gap between a question crystallizing in your mind and an answer appearing at the top of your screen is shrinking all the time. As a consequence, our ability to ask questions is atrophying.” Says Google’s head of search, “The more accurate the machine gets, the lazier the questions become.”

“As some comedians are fond of pointing out, basically anything can be joked about if you do it the right way. Ebola would seem to be a particularly tough subject – it is, after all, killing a lot of people at this very moment, so anyone attempting to joke about it has to scale a rather imposing initial wall of tastelessness. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“Generation TED does lack sufficient scepticism. Truly great ideas are sculpted with the chisel of critical thought, not created fully formed by spontaneous genius and good intent.”

“Traditional approaches to language treated sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and meanings as essentially separable, and choked on language that relied on the multi-level interactions that characterize Shakespeare’s verse. That our brains are continually bombarded by information from all sides, though, is a basic tenet of modern approaches to cognition.”

“The aptly named Quake Column is a knurled pillar of 3-D printed concrete that combines an ancient Incan masonry technique with state-of-the-art manufacturing tools to create a structure that can withstand seismic shocks without mortar or rebar.”