Category: ideas

“Providing the best evidence yet to back up a decades-old theory, researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science report a link between a mother’s attitude toward parenting and the political ideology her child eventually adopts. In short, authoritarian parents are more prone to produce conservatives, while those who gave their kids more latitude are more likely to produce liberals.”

“How did the 5 million to 10 million blocks, some weighing more than 1500 kilograms, reach Angkor? Researchers report in a paper in press at the Journal of Archaeological Science that when they examined Google Earth maps of the area, they saw lines that looked like a transportation network.”

“What good does running such a small campaign do you? Publicity, for one thing. An almost guaranteed success, for another.”

3D printers are here. And they’ll revolutionize how we get stuff. Like this guitar: “The body is plastic with minor pieces printed in silver and stainless steel. It’s unique in that it may be the first 3D-printed acoustic guitar.”

“Marketing taps into shared ideals between brands and customers to encourage trends, ideas, and behaviors to spread. If we understand what makes a meme stick–inspire a purchase, encourage word-of-mouth, or change behavior or opinion–we can repeat that stickiness.”

“Yes, modern culture can be hollow and self-absorbed and obsessed with consumption, but the competitive pressure to be more real, more authentic, and less conformist is no less exhausting or misguided.”

“Google’s learning software is based on simulating groups of connected brain cells that communicate and influence one another. When such a neural network, as it’s called, is exposed to data, the relationships between different neurons can change.”

“We scoured the data for evidence that Monday was bluer than Tuesday or Wednesday. We couldn’t find any.”

“Nothing is more important to the future of humanity than the freedom to make new ideas,” says poet and teacher Dorothea Lasky. And “the act of writing poetry is important for the creation of those new ideas.”

“Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear?”