Category: ideas

What makes it hard to maintain our intellectual integrity in such times is that crises can expose some political truths, though we have to struggle to see straight and recognize the limits of what they expose. – The New Yorker

The average scientist’s acquaintance with philosophy tends to be of the passing variety. This is a great pity. Deep-rooted, seemingly intractable problems in foundational theoretical physics – the physics of matter and radiation, space, time and the Universe – have now frustrated progress for 50 years or more. We’re living through a period in the history of foundational physics in which ideas about nature are cheap, but gathering the empirical facts needed to show that these ideas have anything at all to do with the real world has become extraordinarily expensive, protracted and time-consuming, and without guarantee of success. – Aeon

Among the USPTO’s arguments is the fact that US patent law repeatedly refers to inventors using humanlike terms such as “whoever” and pronouns like “himself” and “herself.” The group behind the applications had argued that the law’s references to an inventor as an “individual” could be applied to a machine, but the USPTO said this interpretation was too broad. – Verge

The U.S. and other countries have been looking to China and Italy to predict what the pandemic would be like during the most intense times of infection. Now, take Wuhan as an example, the slow reopen is accompanied by fear of a second wave. “Trains, highways, and buses are humming anew and people venture out more. Yet many businesses have not reopened, many people … are still working from home, many restaurants are still open only for takeout, and the local economy is still a shadow of its former self.” – The Atlantic

For decades American culture has promoted the ethos of disposable things. We are encouraged to be acquisitive – getting things for the sake of getting them. Suddenly under lockdown, is a new zeitgeist taking hold? Reuse. Make last. Seek permanence. – Vox

Leonard Susskind argues that we don’t. He says that “dating back to the Ancient Greeks, what’s often been perceived as elegant simplicity was almost always a fiction or an approximation covering for a much messier reality.” – Aeon

The city’s mayor: “I say in all firmness that it is out of the question that we allow ourselves to be invaded by cars, and by pollution. It will make the health crisis worse. Pollution is already in itself a health crisis and a danger — and pollution joined up with coronavirus is a particularly dangerous cocktail. So it’s out of the question to think that arriving in the heart of the city by car is any sort of solution, when it could actually aggravate the situation.” – CityLab

“It turns out that being in a dangerous situation with others fosters a new social identity. Boundaries between us, which seem so salient when things are normal, disappear when we perceive we’re locked in a struggle together, with a common fate, from an external threat. People go from me thinking to we thinking.” – Nautilus

On paper, the practice of logging on to a video-conferencing site to sit with strangers for an hour without communicating may hold limited appeal. In practice, silent Zooms have become a lifeline in lockdown for users trying to focus on writing, reading, meditation and more. – The Guardian

Will the current pandemic change human attitudes to death? Probably not. Just the opposite. Covid-19 will probably cause us to only double our efforts to protect human lives. For the dominant cultural reaction to Covid-19 isn’t resignation – it is a mixture of outrage and hope. – The Guardian