Category: ideas

Actually, it’s making us far more polite: “We may not speak with the butter-toned exchanges of the characters on ‘Downton Abbey,’ but in substance our speech is in many ways more civilized.”

“When the website suggests that you be tagged in a photo, what it actually does is compare a pre-created quantified dataset of your face to the newly uploaded image and measures how closely you match the identifiable subjects. Facebook keeps individual face templates in its databases to use over and over again.”

“Scientists released the most detailed map ever made of the fetal human brain today. It contains a massive amount of information about gene activity at a crucial time in development — just as the cerebral cortex is developing. The scientists believe it holds important clues about the biological origins of disorders like autism, as well as insights into what makes the human brain unique.”

“As nations become increasingly ineffective, gridlocked and dysfunctional, cities are taking their place not just as local problem solvers – which they’ve always been pretty good at – but also as collectives that start to tackle global problems like climate change, that nations are unable to redress on their own.”

“I’ve now been active for something like 70 years, and still I use the same mathematics. I think the main thing that’s changed as a result of computers is the magnitude of databases. We now have these huge amounts of data and very little understanding. So what we have now — I forget who it was who said this — are small islands of understanding in a sea of information. The problem is to enlarge the islands of understanding.”

From Lysistrata to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show to the satirical banners in Tahrir Square, it can seem that comedy really is that powerful. On the other hand, all those Soviet jokes weren’t what brought down the USSR. (On the third hand, it wasn’t actually Sarah Palin who said, “I can see Russia from my house.”)

No, this isn’t about a sub-genre of lawyer jokes. Comedians and civilians alike steal each other’s laugh lines. “Does anyone actually own a joke, after all? What legal recourse, if any, does that owner have when some hack swipes his best material?”

New research “suggests that humans are equipped with ‘serially dependent’ visual perception, a process that uses prior stimuli and current information to construct the scene in front of us.”

“Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status … Just as a practicing mathematician need not have views about the metaphysical status of numbers, so too religious life does not require a theoretical stance on God’s existence.”

“For years, scientists studying facial expressions have focused their research on six primary emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.” But Ohio State University researchers “suspected that there’s more to the human condition than these six simplest states of being.”