Category: ideas

Results are in from “a team of Princeton scientists who thought there might be a causal relationship between the speed of a person’s thought and their willingness to embrace dangerous behavior, such as illegal drug use and unprotected sex.” The answer? Possibly yes.

As tourists plan to flood London with people for the Olympics, what should they know? A.A. Gill: “London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren’s churches and ushered in the Georgian city. London can see the dead, and hugs them close. If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

Robots, avatars, virtual screens – they’re all blending technology with the real world…

“Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever.”

“In this time of economic uncertainty, creativity is one of those great swooning words, more upbeat than “innovation” its more sober biz-speak cousin.”

“Thomas Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy. Indeed, he quickly moved away from the “shift happens” conception of paradigms as bundles of beliefs, emphasizing instead that they’re examples of good scientific practice that researchers apply in their daily work.”

“Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying.”

“A research team led by psychologist Boaz Keysar reports using one’s second language reduces or eliminates certain biases that otherwise infiltrate our decision-making. Specifically, our aversion to potential loss — a bias that can lead us to pass up promising opportunities for potential gains — diminishes as we ponder options in a language learned later in life.”

“I’m content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue.”

“In her playful film, Lines of Thought, Aldworth attempts to answer a befuddling question: how do you describe how it feels to think? It may seem an impossible task, but Aldworth conveys it perfectly. A fast-moving line flits from place to place in a sketched brain – speeding through neurons, pinging through cortices.”