Category: ideas

“Actress, designer, and former White Power Ranger Jessica Rey has a mission: to get as many women as possible in one-piece swimsuits” – preferably those marketed by her. But her campaign has led to a serious debate among Christian writers in the US about the meaning(s) and purpose(s) of dressing modestly.

NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel lays out the basic premise of his c/ntroversial book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

“Sometimes, they concluded, too many options repel us. The researchers called it ‘the paradox of choice.’ You might call it ‘feeling overwhelmed by options.’ But some economists are calling it something else: ‘complete hogwash’.”

“There’s apparently something alluring about filling those empty white boxes with embarrassing anecdotes – anecdotes that BuzzFeed then compiles and publishes in list form for everyone else to laugh at. … What compels us to tell the world with our fingers what we’d hesitate to utter in a room full of loved ones?” Naturally, social scientists have some ideas about why.

“When we use GPS, the research indicates, we remember less about the places we go, and put less work into generating our own internal picture of the world. Often referred to as mental maps, these schematics tell us where things are in relation to each other and allow us to navigate among them.”

“Google silently did something revolutionary on Thursday. It open sourced a tool called word2vec, prepackaged deep-learning software designed to understand the relationships between words with no human guidance. Just input a textual data set and let underlying predictive models get to work learning.”

“We find writers frantically writing posts, blogs, press releases and website content and gathering data on industries they know nothing about through brief Google searches (which we almost never cite). That information then begins populating the search results of Google, Bing and other search engines, making it seem more reliable as it spreads further.”

But “Trees” isn’t even the worst of it. “Most of [Kilmer’s] efforts fairly drip with piety, even when the subject is as mundane as New Jersey mass transit.”

“From Vancouver’s False Creek neighbourhood to Ottawa’s riverfront to disused port lands in New York, landscape architects are remaking marginal areas of major cities into parks with a combination of ecological, social and aesthetic purposes.”

“Proving the existence of the afterlife is, of course, beyond the scope of science. But something physical might be able to explain the phenomena of near death experiences, according to a new finding by a team of neuroscientists from the University of Michigan. They observed, at least in the brains of rats, a sudden surge of electrical activity that continues for roughly 30 seconds after clinical death.”