Category: ideas

Howard Gardner: “Given little or nothing new in the human firmament, traditional morality – the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ as outlined in the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule – should suffice. My view of the matter is quite different. As I see it, human beings and citizens in complex, modern democratic societies regularly confront situations in which traditional morality provides little if any guidance.”

“Tools are liberating design, but so are people. We have become participants on social platforms that allow us to collaborate and customize and create, and in the process we’ve become expert collaborators, customizers, and creators.”

“The males do all the serenading, lustful for females, each of whom waits in the dark loins of the night, listening with ears in rather odd places — on the abdomen or the front legs. A female homes in on a winged dude, lured by his siren song.”

With this printer, that’s just what you want.

Because it’s stupid.

“What’s unknown, but fascinating, is how media and especially touch screens, might shape — or warp — children’s attention span, language development, and dawning understanding of concepts.”

“As we think through the role that algorithms should play in our lives–and the various feats of automation that they enable–two questions are particularly important. First, is a given instance of automation feasible? Second, is it desirable? Computer scientists have been asking both questions for decades in the context of artificial intelligence.”

Among the laureates were researchers studying why coffee closhes in a cup while you’re walking (the fluid dynamics prize), doctors who showed that MRI machines can find brain activity even in dead fish (the neuroscience prize), a Russian company that can convert old ammunition into diamonds (the peace prize), and, for the acoustics prize, the inventors of a jamming device that can stop blowhards from bloviating. (No, they don’t mean Miss Sweetie-Poo.)

Well, besides the fact that most American meat-eaters regularly consume only chicken, beef, pork and turkey. (And this is an American phenomenon.) Jackson Landers looks at the question from the viewpoint of evolution and thinks the question may not be entirely bogus.

“Take the number of computers on the planet–several billion–and multiply by the number of transistors in each machine–hundreds of millions–and you get about a billion billion, written more elegantly as 1018. That’s a thousand times larger than the number of synapses in the human brain (about 1015).”