Category: ideas

“Of course, cynicism is neither wholly good nor bad. It’s easy to see how you can be too cynical, but it’s also possible to be not cynical enough.”

Physicist Adam J. Frank on his encounter with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Sitting there, book in hand, not understanding what I had just read I had to ask myself: is this any different than my experience with physics? … But what does it mean for a poem to be hard? Is it the same thing as when science is hard?”

Barbara J. King: “Doing a radio interview recently, though, I was reminded that some dog owners are still convinced that dogs don’t think, but instead act on instinct and live tethered to the present, in a moment-to-moment way.”

In a study published last month in the journal “Plos One,” Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami, claims that a special class of sounds occurring in almost all of the languages of the Caucasus may be due to “the direct influence” of the region’s high altitude.

“At times like these, philosophers are of limited use because when they have talked about dying they have tended to focus on what it means for the one who dies. … A much more useful philosophy would help us to prepare for the deaths of others. I have never been sure that philosophy does a good job of that. But perhaps a philosophical outlook can help us make sense of death when it comes close to us.”

“A decade of research on power and behavior show there are some predictable ways people react to power, which can be simply defined as the ability to influence others. While power in governments and across the world can come at incredible costs, in a lab, it’s surprisingly simple.”

“Recent brain research has shown that the moderate ambient noise of café chatter and espresso machines, in the range of about about 70 decibels, fosters creative work … Coffitivity plays an audio feed of the optimal noise level of clinking cups and people talking. It also makes recommendations on the volume at which to overlay your own music for maximum concentration.”

Over the decades, many observers have excoriated Arendt for, in describing Adolf Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal”, letting him off the hook for his war crimes. In fact, she never did any such thing. Roger Berkowitz seeks out the origins of the misunderstanding.

“It turns out you can’t put all the blame on those complimentary cocktails. Newly published research suggests at least part of the answer involves the slot machine’s music and sound effects.”