Category: ideas

“There’s a wee bit of a gap that has closed down. I remember seeing Billy Wilder being led around this exhibition of conceptual film. He was being really dismissive and saying ‘A 12-year-old could do that.’ You wouldn’t get that attitude from George Clooney, Brad Pitt or James Franco.”

“When it comes to code breaking, ‘The Voynich is the Mount Everest of the genre and the K2 at the same time,’ said Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer who wrote a 2006 book about the manuscript and maintains a website about historical cyphers.”

“It is interesting to see the difference between removing text from say The New York Times, a text heavy site, versus Tumblr, where the difference is negligible.”

“Like humans, dogs appear to possess brain systems that are devoted to making sense of vocal sounds, and are sensitive to their emotional content. These systems have not previously been described in dogs or any non-primate species.”

“After Harvard Business School researcher Francesa Gino reported in 2011 that that highly creative people are more likely to engage in unethical activities, she began to wonder whether dishonesty could actually enhance creativity. Her latest paper suggests the answer is yes.”

“Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language. But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language.”

According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding.

“The law says that ‘Chinese and English’ are Hong Kong’s official languages. Whereas some people say that Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese, others insist that it is a language in its own right. Who is right – and how do dialects differ from languages in general?”

You get The Philosopher’s Mail, run by Alain de Botton (who else?), which “approaches celebrity news and global affairs as philosophically teachable moments. Paparazzi photographs of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are juxtaposed with quotes from Schopenhauer on the futility of love.”

“Our favourite four-letter words have a fascinating history. Rather than being written in manuscripts by monks, we find them used by normal people and preserved in surprising places like place names, personal names, and animal names and they reveal more about our medieval past than just attitudes towards sex and body parts.”