“In a world dominated by smarter and smarter gadgets, one of the dumbest machines on earth is making a quiet comeback. Invented in the 1950s by an artificial-intelligence expert, the device is known as the ‘useless machine.’ … [Its] sole purpose: You turn it on, and it turns itself off.”
Category: ideas
The End Of The Car?
“New automobile registrations have plateaued in the U.S, even as the population has continued to grow. Rising gas prices have made some housing patterns predicated on the car unsustainable. Twentysomethings are now less likely to own cars and say they’re less enamored of them.”
How Dogs Think Like People
“Dogs are the only species that have been identified to date that learn words in the same way as human children – by using inferences. … The second thing is that they make use of human gestures at a similar level of flexibility to young infants.”
The Rise Of Conference Culture
The Convention Industry Council says that conferences attract more than 200 million attendees a year–that’s a lot of lanyards. Everyone seems seduceable, from music lovers and techies (South by Southwest kicked off this week in Austin, Texas) to overachievers looking for epiphany (one attendee at last month’s TED tweet-preached, “If you’re not leaving your cynicism at the door, you’re doing it wrong”).
The Piano You Can Lift With One Hand
“Aesthetically, it is a strange beast; futuristic black, ultra-clean, with a keyboard made from black silicon – it looks as if it were beamed to Earth from a fetish club in the future.”
How Does An Earworm Really Work? [VIDEO]
“Danish design agency Benny Box has created a short animated film — called Jazz that nobody asked for – that serves as an ‘ode to all those unwanted songs out there, that have nowhere to go.'”
The Internet Is For Learning (Duh, Mom and Dad!)
“Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant and part of the fabric of their social lives, where they are making choices about how, when, and what to learn, without it all being mapped for them in advance.”
Why We Shouldn’t Just Accept Technological Change
“Technological defeatism–a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there’s nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms–is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We’ll come to pay for it very dearly.”
The Odd Things Big Data Tells Us
“They crunched the numbers, and they found out that cars that were orange tended to not have breakdowns compared to other colors of cars … So why might this be? Well, we can sort of concoct different scenarios.”
Do We Innovate Or Are We Pulled By Innovation?
“Man appears not as the primary driver of progress but as a hurried passenger, scrambling to keep the pace, able at most to pull the steering wheel a few degrees into a different direction and thus enforce a slight course correction.”