Category: ideas

As one correspondent (a lawyer, naturally) told researcher Kevin Dutton, “Psychopathy (if that’s what you want to call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation, it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren’t up to the job of protecting us.”

“When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared.” (And a lot of other info about the design of the UPC.)

Not always: “Digital technologies are primarily being applied to nuts-and-bolts issues of institutional survival, maintenance and growth. … Less useful is the digital capacity for education, artistic creation and collections management.”

“The size of Twitter is on the order of the size of the Internet, just in tweets instead of web pages.” How will the LoC make the archive searchable?

Maria Konnikova: “What I found … was that it would be hard work indeed to even begin to approximate the essence of the detective’s approach to the world: his ever-mindful mindset and his relentless mental energy. Holmes was a man eternally on, who relished that on-ness and floundered in its absence.”

“New research suggests that stepping away from the shiny Apple product and into the woods can have a big impact on creativity and problem-solving.”

“In the ever-evolving view of scientists, philosophers and other scholars, there really is no single, implacable entity called infinity. Instead, there are infinities, multiplicities of the limit-free that come in a vast variety of shapes, sizes, purposes and charms.”

“As glorious as working remotely may sound, research shows that it doesn’t always reach expectations.”

“The intellectual discussion about the possible path of the French revolution often took place in what we might call “slow media” today: newspapers and books. They were read and shared by the French elite in its attempt to seize the revolutionary process and reshape society. Is Facebook ready to play a similar role today?”