After a decade of archaeological study, a team of scholars believes that the huge stone monument was built to mark the end of a longstanding east-west divide between the peoples of neolithic Britain.
Category: ideas
Is Twitter Killing The Way We Write?
“The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism. Outside of Twitter, a coercive blogginess, a paradoxically de rigueur relaxation, menaces a whole generation’s prose (no, yeah, ours too).”
Is It Better To Be Prolific Or Slow (We Mean Thorough, Of Course)
“For an artist to remain relevant and part of the cultural conversation, no matter how degraded they might consider that conversation, they can’t stand along the wall at the party only to step into the fray every five years, deliver a profundity and then retreat. … But myself, I’ve always admired artists who see themselves not as loiterers but sharks, never stopping, always moving, if only to circle back.”
What Is This Thing Called Love? And Why Is It Still So Damned Confounding?
“May we all — the women, anyway — put down the self-help books that haven’t exactly been doing us any good anyway. Love is a greater thing than arranged marriage, and it’s a greater thing than daddy issues and attachment theory. It can transcend it all, as long as you know what the true barriers are.”
A Language Dies Every 14 Days
“The Earth’s population of seven billion people speaks roughly 7,000 languages…Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers. Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear.”
The Long, Slow Rise Of The Fork
Knives and spoons go back to antiquity, but the fork didn’t arrive in Byzantium (from Persia) until the 11th century, and made it to France only in 1533. It took even longer for the fork to shake its image as dainty and unmanly.
Why Are Humans So Curious?
“From the perspective of evolution this appears to be something of a mystery. We associate evolution with ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ traits that support the essentials of day-to-day survival and reproduction. So why did we evolve to waste so much time? Shouldn’t evolution have selected for a species which was – you know – a bit more focussed?”
How Major Universities Are Transforming Learning Online
“The first online course from MITx earlier this year had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. In fact, it isn’t far from the total of all the students who have ever been there since the 19th Century.”
Merge: Noam Chomsky On The Cognitive Function That Made Language Evolve
“You got an operation that enables you to take mental objects [or concepts of some sort], already constructed, and make bigger mental objects out of them. That’s Merge. As soon as you have that, you have an infinite variety of hierarchically structured expressions [and thoughts] available to you … a second-order theory of mind, so you know that somebody is trying to make you think what somebody else wants you to think.”
Why Do Nigerian E-Mail Scammers Write Such Obviously Bogus Messages?
“The question many people have asked themselves after receiving an email like this is: Who would fall for this crap? … Why, given the scam is relatively well known these days, would a scammer still purport from Nigeria or from another West African nation given the association of advance free fraud with the region? In retrospect the answer to this question is obvious.”