“Researchers are starting to see swarms as living entities with senses, motivations and evolved behaviour. … This does not simply tell us about flocking birds, shoaling fish, swarming locusts, and the like. It has implications for how we understand all sorts of collective action.”
Category: ideas
Are There Only Four Basic Emotions?
The existing scientific consensus has been that there are six, but a new study based on facial expressions suggests that there are only four, with the remaining two products of the others. Yet some observers, including commenters on this article, question the entire basis of the new research.
As We Have Access To All Our Artistic History, Lines Between Past And Present Dissolve
“Suddenly we find ourselves living in an online realm where the old is just as easy to consume as the new. We’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote, as our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves.”
When Detroit Was San Francisco (Does That Mean San Francisco Will Be Detroit?)
“Towers will spring up in Bay Area greenfields, just like Detroit back in the day. Fifty years going forward, these hulking structures will be suburban ruin porn and people will be shocked that San Francisco used to be the wealthiest city in the United States.”
So Software Coders Are Artists (Is That Selling Great Coding Short?)
“When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or painters, the error is that they aren’t claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble. To compare code to works of literature may point the programmer towards legibility and elegance but it says nothing about the ability of code to materialise logic.”
Can Twitter Predict Music’s Next Big Thing?
“While music is the most popular topic on Twitter — users discussed it in more than one billion messages last year — its depths have not been fully plumbed.”
How Big Data Is Finding Meaning In Meaningless Data
“While traditional data analysis tends to focus on data that has intrinsic, meaningful value, Big Data allows us to aggregate otherwise meaningless data and find insight in the group. By way of analogy, it probably won’t tell us much to observe the individual meanderings of an ant, but when observing the colony together, patterns emerge.”
Why Conspiracy Theories Make Some People Go Postal
Jared Loughner in Tucson. Aaron Alexis at the Washington Navy Yard. Raulie Wayne Casteel in Michigan. Timothy McVeigh. Lots of people believe in strange conspiracy theories; why are some people driven to serial murder because of them?
English Speakers Are Bad at Identifying and Describing Smells
“But is this a problem with our noses, or with English?” Or simply a matter of practice, compared with hunter-gatherers?
Sound (And Music) That You Can Focus On A Single Person
“Being able to direct sound in such a focused way has only recently become possible thanks to smarter audio processing algorithms, directional loudspeakers and gesture-recognition technology.”