Category: ideas

“This coyness is not just the consequence of particular cultural or moral views. ‘It is the rule across all kinds of human societies,’ says cultural anthropologist Frank Marlowe of the University of Cambridge.”

“According to a new study, the people who most strongly believe that the political system is dividing into two extreme camps with little to say to each other themselves have relatively extreme views. It’s an interesting form of projection: You don’t think the other guy necessarily agrees with you, but you think he shares your own degree of partisanship.”

Paul J. Zak: “Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men.”

“Languages all across the world have what’s called grammatical gender, which means simply that nouns get divvied up into different categories or ‘classes.’ Sometimes those categories are called masculine and feminine, like in Spanish, although for some other languages the categories have nothing at all to do with natural gender or biological sex.”

A team of Israeli researchers found “that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil” – and those plants responded. “Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication?”

“While they’re partly driven by a craving to get out of their screens — and sometimes tiny living quarters — and into the real world of physical contact, they’re also working around a dissatisfaction with traditional political and media discourse, according to Mark Winston, director of SFU’s Centre for Dialogue. Newspapers and TV don’t bring people in touch with each other like this.”

“Among all of the animals, we probably uniquely are aware that we’re going to die. … And this is terrifying. So we are very keen to hear any story that can allay this fear and say death isn’t what it seems, and we can just keep on going indefinitely.” Author Stephen Cave lays out the four paths humans follow in search of (only sometimes metaphorical) immortality.

“Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere ‘smart city’ — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention.”

“Instead of producing an image, Richardson’s camera produces a printout of a description of that image. It works like a regular camera — point and click to shoot — but what’s captured in the viewfinder is sent to the anonymous workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who are paid $1.25 per image to write a brief description. When they submit their description, typically a few minutes later, the camera prints it out.”