Category: ideas

“The drone will track the GPS signal from that person’s transponder down. When it is close by, it will trigger an alarm on the transponder. When the person looks up, they will see the quadrocopter descending and will be able to take their sculpture.”

Because subjectivity. (And memory.)

“‘The vast increase in capacity to synthesize and sequence DNA can be applied to store significant amounts of data,’ said pioneering synthetic biologist Drew Endy at Stanford University. … ‘If you wanted to have your library encoded in DNA, you could probably do that now.'”

“We seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions–we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic.”

“Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right – sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There’s a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information.”

“Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations.”

“From ethical quandaries to the very nature of existence, science fiction’s most famous texts are tailor-made for exploring philosophical ideas. … But science fiction doesn’t just illuminate philosophy – in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts.”

“If you think Venn diagrams are just a bunch of interlocking circles, think again. Pushing this iconic branch of mathematics to its limits reveals just how varied – and beautiful – these diagrams can be. This gallery showcases some of the wilder possibilities, including the most recent breakthrough in Venn geometry – the first simple, symmetric diagram to encompass a whopping 11 sets.”

“You might not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the train will come to take us there. Somewhere, in some server basement right now, it is probably working on some aspect of your life tomorrow, next week, in a year’s time.”

“Probability wise, near misses aren’t successes. They are indicators of near failure. And if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster. Rather than celebrating then ignoring close calls, we should be learning from them and doing our very best to prevent their recurrence. But we often don’t.”