Category: ideas

“In this new world, our political parties (“a two-and-half-horse race”) scarcely begin to reflect the variety of people’s wishes and views. The bigger the state, the less able it is to respond to this new environment, and therefore the less likely to survive.”

“‘I was walking in the street with my wife. I was just caught by … the call on my cellular phone. I saw the code ’46’ for Sweden … I could not believe it.’ – Quantum physicist Serge Haroche”

“Is photography a way of documenting the world that has an inherent ‘truth-claim’ on the real? Or is it, as Steichen suggested, essentially graphic, a technique for creating a certain kind of image?”

“A decade after being left to fall into decline, the seven-storey warehouse at Speirs Locks, just off the M8, has undergone a dramatic transformation into what is claimed to be Britain’s biggest single creative industries hub.”

“In tense situations heart rates increase, we breathe faster, muscles tighten, attention focuses for quick and effective responses to threats. But if the brain knows there’s no real danger, it experiences this rush of adrenaline as enjoyable”

“The MusixCube, as you may have guessed, is a riff on the Rubik’s Cube. But rather than unraveling the puzzle, tapping and twisting its surfaces takes you down a strange, fun path of musical creation.”

Faux-content clutters the internet, gaming search engines to make more money off of ads. What’s next for those who want useful information?

“Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking into narrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, one obsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind.”

New research “found that the level of mental stimulation a child receives in the home at age 4 predicted the thickness of two regions of the cortex in late adolescence, such that more stimulation was associated with a thinner cortex. One region, the lateral inferior temporal gyrus, is involved in complex visual skills such as word recognition.”

“It’s about 2 metres long, made of tough spruce wood and carved into a sharp point at one end. … At 400,000 years old, this is the world’s oldest spear. And, according to a provocative theory, on its carved length rests nothing less than the foundation of human civilisation as we know it, including democracy, class divisions and the modern nation state.”