Category: ideas

“Guatemala’s Mayan people accused the government and tour groups on Wednesday of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world for monetary gain. ‘We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles,’ charged Felipe Gomez, leader of the Maya alliance Oxlaljuj Ajpop.”

“Put it in terms of DVDs, a yottabyte would require 250 trillion of them. But we’ll eventually have to think bigger, and thanks to a presentation from Shantanu Gupta, director of Connected Intelligent Solutions at Intel, we now know the next-generation prefixes for going beyond the yottabyte: a brontobyte and a gegobyte.”

“One widely held theory suggests that a single brain region acts as a centralised timekeeper – possibly in the basal ganglia or cerebellum. However, a study now suggests that timekeeping is decentralised, with different circuits having their own timing mechanisms for each specific activity. The finding could help explain why certain brain conditions affect our sense of timing.”

“Scientists understandably don’t have much patience for the notion of extrasensory perception. Yet evidence persists in the psychological literature that people’s bodies sometimes unconsciously ‘predict’ unpredictable future events. These visceral responses don’t appear to be the result of sheer chance.”

“Therapies that claim to make gay people straight are hateful and dangerous, but banning them won’t win over their supporters.”

These days the OED can list “bootylicious” and people barely blink. (Maybe they snicker.) “A half-century ago, when G. & C. Merriam Co. announced its new dictionary, Webster’s Third, there was an incredible outcry. It became known as ‘the permissive dictionary’ and provoked what was probably the greatest language controversy in American history.”

“No one publishes a city, they publish a magazine or a book or a news site. If we’ve thought about our readers reading, we’ve imagined them at the breakfast table or curled up on the couch … or in office cubicles running out the clock. No one knows how to create words and pictures that are meant to be consumed out there in the world. This is not a small problem.”

“Anybody can overlay digital text, video and graphics onto the physical world for others to see later. Most major cities are teeming with these digital annotations.”

A group of scientists set out to discover whether physically attractive people also have appealing character traits and values, and found, according to Lihi Segal-Caspi, who carried out part of the research, that “beautiful people tend to focus more on conformity and self-promotion than independence and tolerance”.

“Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have restored an 1878 recording of a political reporter reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Old Mother Hubbard.’ It is the oldest recording of an American voice. The discovery has one Explainer reader wondering: How do we know how people pronounced words before the recording age?”