Category: ideas

Boomer dad after his Millennial daughter’s wedding weekend: “Their community is much wider than mine and my wife’s. Kate, Philip and their friends don’t move on when they move to new cities. They simply add on.”

Gorgeous colorful images of brains “are not what they seem. They are not photographs of the brain in action in real time.”

Prof. Yuichi Higuchi argues that reading the same manga over and over again helps children master reading comprehension, while anime can develop children’s critical thinking (if parents discuss the cartoons with them).

“No single idea,” wrote the American intellectual Robert Nisbet in 1980, “has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization.”

“The candidate is asked to handle an abstracted ‘gotcha’ situation, where thinking quickly is often more important than thinking well” – not what one wants in a programmer.

“It follows that things are much more likely to catch on if they are associated with someone who is well known for one reason or another – even if the association is erroneous, as in the case of those Twain and Einstein misquotations. This raises the question of whether what is said is as important as who said it.”

“How the hell did the Zombie Apocalypse become a ubiquitous all-consuming (no pun intended) meme? What is it about the story of hungry undead that keeps it from ever dying? … Here, at the dawn of a new age of planetary limits, zombies are our greatest teachers.”

“Our research provides the first empirical evidence that parents sometimes want their child to fulfill their unfulfilled ambitions – for example, that they want their child to become a physician when they themselves were rejected for medical school.”

Researchers “found that a level of ambient noise typical of a bustling coffee shop or a television playing in a living room, about 70 decibels, enhanced performance compared with the relative quiet of 50 decibels.”

“The BigBrain is the first ever brain model in 3D which really presents a realistic human brain with all the cells and all the structures of a human brain.”