Category: ideas

“At the storage density achieved, a single gram of DNA would hold 2.2 million gigabits of information, or about what you can store in 468,000 DVDs. What’s more, the researchers also added an error correction scheme, encoding the information multiple times, among other tricks, to ensure that it could be read back with 100% accuracy.”

“Since society abandoned walking en masse for riding in upholstered comfort atop a metal box harnessed to a series of small explosions, we hardly pay attention to how we walk. But … researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.”

“In his new book, … Diamond questions the practice of psychologists who base their claims about human nature entirely on people from WEIRD – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic – societies. … So far, this sounds pretty much like an embrace of the cross-cultural diversity that we anthropologists work to understand, even to celebrate. So what’s the backlash all about?”

“Comparing the DNA of dogs and wolves shows that dogs’ ability to easily digest carbohydrates, originally from starch in scraps left behind by humans, helped enable their domestication.”

“The Luddites, then, were pragmatists. They were proto-trade unionists. They were fighting for their rights and their livelihoods in the only way that was available at the time.”

“Beyoncé’s performance makes us nervous when juxtaposed with the earnest idealism of the inauguration. … [Her] fakery, it seems, implies some larger fakery at the heart of the whole enterprise. … We don’t want to be reminded that we’re watching mere mortals who might trip on their way to the podium, stutter through the oaths of office, shiver in the cold, or worse, err in judgment and lead the country on the wrong path.”

“Brains and neurons obviously have everything to do with consciousness but how such mere objects can give rise to the eerily different phenomenon of subjective experience seems utterly incomprehensible.”

“It may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades.”

“Are we on the cusp of aggregating utilitarianism into new tyrannies of scale? Is there a threshold where Big Pushpin is incontrovertibly better than small poetry, because the numbers are so big, they leave interpretation behind and acquire their own agency.”

“To evaluate a religion, we need to distinguish the three great human needs religions typically claim to satisfy: love, understanding, and knowledge. Doing so lets us appreciate religious love and understanding, even if we remain agnostic regarding religious knowledge.”