“It’s the most frequent word in the English language, accounting for around four percent of all the words we write or speak. It’s everywhere, all the time, so clearly it must be doing something important. Words have meaning. That’s fundamental, isn’t it? So what does ‘the,’ a word that seems to be supporting a significant portion of the entire weight of our language, mean? It must mean something, right?
Category: ideas
The Word “Because” Gets A Whole New Function
Why? Because Internet.
How NSA Surveillance Is Threatening Free Expression
“This sweeping disregard for electronic privacy has particularly troubling implications for freedom of expression. In part that is because privacy and free expression are intimately linked.”
Science Doesn’t Want To Take God Away From You
“A chance encounter forces [theoretical astrophysicist] Marcelo Gleiser to reconsider his view of the relationship between science and religion.”
Lectures Never Worked, So Why Are We Addicted To Them (Instead Of, Say, Holodecks)?
“Go to Second Life and check out a classroom–and they’re exactly like they are in the real world. It’s strange, because this is a place you can move by teleporting, you can do whatever you want.”
Ours Brains Work The Way Google Searches Work (Or Don’t)
“To capture more complex patterns, the brain does better by amalgamating and integrating information from many different neurons with very different response patterns. The brain crowd-sources.”
Why We Need To De-Theologize The Internet
Both authors “set out to secularize contemporary discussions of technology and dispel the dubious theologies and teleologies peddled by evangelists of the cyber-creed.”
Why We Prefer Smaller Rewards Today Over Larger Rewards Tomorrow
“You do it every time you bust your diet by scarfing a donut, puff ‘just one last cigarette’ before quitting, or watch a dancing-penguin video instead of getting to work. You are performing the self-deluding mental bookkeeping known as temporal discounting.”
How Young People Come To Love Camus (A Centennial Appreciation)
Jerry Delaney: “Friends of mine still speak openly of their ‘love’ of Camus. Does anyone speak of a love of Jean-Paul Sartre? Or Martin Heidegger? I feel an intense gratitude to Camus for giving me the language to express a few basic truths on which to base a life.”
Now Germans (Some Of Them) Are Getting All Verklemmt About Denglisch
“With terms like ‘flashmob’ and the newly adopted ‘shitstorm’ the German language society Verein Deutsche Sprache criticized the German language bible for diluting the language and incorporating too many Anglicisms.”