“When we learned that witches did not exist, we threw out the category. So why do we cling to the discredited notion of race?”
Category: ideas
Could The Right Software Recreate A Dead Language?
A team of researchers in Vancouver and Berkeley “posits that dead languages could be reconstructed by feeding modern successors into computer programs configured to build extinct languages word by word.”
Overwhelmed By Work? New Research Says Relaxing Makes You More Productive
“A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.”
Does The Moon Have An Airport Code Yet?
Commercial moon flights might be on their way … if you and a friend have $1.5 billion to spend.
Stop Blaming Liberal Arts Majors For The Economy
“If liberal arts majors ‘didn’t learn much in school,’ as Jane Shaw put it in the Wall Street Journal, why haven’t they always had trouble finding work? Are there just more of them now, or is this lack of learning just a recent phenomenon?”
Suggested: Humans Were Already Sophisticated Artists 40,000 Years Ago
“Its thesis is that 40,000 years ago, when humans migrated from Africa into a comparatively temperate Europe, and were then caught for thousands of years amid the freezing temperatures and furry beasts of the last great freeze, something miraculous happened. Art appeared: art so sophisticated, it proves that the cognitive faculties we value so highly today were fully evolved tens of thousands of years ago (the works here were made between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago).”
Speaking Texas German (Yes, There Is Such A Thing)
“A century ago, more than 100,000 people in a large swathe of south central Texas spoke the dialect. To the uninitiated, it sounds like a strange mishmash of English and German. Today, perhaps 8,000 people can speak it, the youngest of whom are in their 60s.”
People Swap Genes More Readily Than They Do Folk Tales
“A new study of how it changed shows that people who came from different language groups – or who lived a few hundred kilometres apart – were more likely to have children with each other than to exchange their version of the story.”
There’s No Such Thing As Everlasting Love (According To Science)
Instead, argues one research psychologist, love consists of “micro-moments of positivity resonance.”
What The Ancient Greeks Could Teach About Gun Control
“One of the guns used to murder children and adults in Newtown, Connecticut, was an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that’s similar to a weapon used in war by American troops. A weapon of war was turned on innocents at home. That would have shocked the ancient Greeks. The pioneers of citizen armies were also pioneers of withdrawing weapons from the places of civilized life.”