Category: ideas

Several ideas born in science fiction became reality this year.

“Does fairness come standard with every newborn, or is it something that we (hopefully) develop as we mature? Here’s a multimedia attempt to answer that question.”

Philosopher Simon Critchley looks at “the meaning of faith, freedom, happiness and the diabolic satisfaction of our desires” as laid out by The Brothers Karamazov‘s Grand Inquisitor.

“Maps have always related and realigned our history; increasingly, we’re ceding control of that history to the cold precision of the computer. With this comes great responsibility.”

“In many ways social gifting shrouds purchasing in a cloak of generosity, since the social streaming context removes the gaucheness of sharing these gifts. Yet these new social features also signal a culture where broadcasting our behaviors – whether gifting or other digitally shared activities – becomes the norm rather than the exception.”

“Children have played with dolls for millenia. It was a good run.”

Now we – and our 3-year-olds – want tablets instead.

The process of simulation “generates artifacts that don’t appear in the real world and that we have to remove. So we started to think about what sort of artifacts might appear if we lived in a simulation.” (Apparently, we don’t.)

“Why, for centuries, have people struggled to spell? Because English spelling is horribly hard. It is not just that we have ‘for’ and ‘four,’ ‘stake,’ ‘steak,’ and ‘mistake.’ We also have ‘peak,’ ‘peek,’ and ‘pique.’ ‘Horrid’ has a double consonant in the middle, ‘timid’ a single one. ‘Prefer’ has one ‘f,’ ‘proffer’ two.”

How to move your product (tastefully) from a nice web page to an in-the-flesh experience? Hire designers, of course.

“The life of the mind has its intrinsic methods and rewards. It is concerned with the true, the beautiful and the good, which between them define the scope of reasoning and the goals of serious enquiry. But each of those goals can be faked, and one of the most interesting developments in our educational and cultural institutions over the past half century is the extent to which fake culture and fake scholarship have driven out the true varieties. It is important to ask why.”