Category: ideas

“Anyone can design almost anything – from clothes to plastic toys – using digital software. Anyone can send those designs to factories, because machines, both big and small, speak a common programming language, G-code, and there’s instant messaging software which translates between English and Chinese in real time, breaking down another barrier to communication.”

Researchers “believe that human memory didn’t evolve so that we could remember but to allow us to imagine what might be … suggesting that every time we think about a possible future, we tear up the pages of our autobiographies and stitch together the fragments into a montage that represents the new scenario” – but corrupting some of those fragments in the process.

“The researchers find that 30% to 40% of adults are highly guilt-prone, and these tend to be nice folks. Guilt-proneness correlates to all kinds of positive traits, including sincerity, fairness, modesty, agreeableness and conscientiousness.”

“Our autobiography is pieced together from the many events in our lives – but we pick and choose which ones to include.”

“Museum officials in Johnson County, Kan., propose spending $34 million to create the National Museum of Suburbia, a faux suburb where visitors could wander through a model ranch-style home, wonder at an exhibit of lawn furniture and topple pins on a re-created bowling lane.”

“Of all the ideas from the heady days of internet futurism, none is as fraught as “price discrimination,” the practice of charging different rates to different customers for the same product. Price discrimination is a mainstay of the travel industry, where airlines and hotels try all manner of tricks to try and figure out who’s willing to pay more and charge them accordingly.”

“For artists, especially, the only way to not be used by the Internet is either to not use it, which is ridiculous, or to make something out of it. Later, you can worry about what it makes you.”

“Have passion, yes, but acknowledge that side projects are still work. They shake things up, just like switching up your workout helps you stay one step ahead of your torpid metabolism. They scramble the synapses. It’s bracing stuff.”

“There is nothing more wondrous about humanity than what we can do when we work together with optimism. That’s what Exploration Day would mean to us.”

“At some point in recent years, it has stopped being a necessary and inevitable intermediary between people – a means by which individuals communicate with each other, putting a little bit of their personality into the form of their message as they press the ink-bearing point on to the paper. It has started to become just one of many options, and often an unattractive, elaborate one.”