Category: ideas

How does persuasion work? For one example, look at the way James Baldwin took on William F. Buckley in front of an audience of conservative white men – and beat him in a debate, 540-160.

These shoes were made for planting – canola seeds in nuclear waste zones of Japan.

But joy is – or so says a longtime NPR guest.

“I think most people assume that when you feel stumped, you should just give up, that that’s a sign the problem is just too hard for you. But it’s also a sign that your standard method of trying to solve the problem just isn’t working so it’s also a cut to your brain to really start searching for much more remote associations for far-fetched ideas, for real speculation.”

“The Crowdfund Act, which passed the Senate last week as an amendment to the larger Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, would let anyone invest up to 5 per cent of their annual income, or $2000, in a project or firm that is listed on a crowdfunding website. People earning more than $100,000 a year would be allowed to invest 10 per cent of their income.”

“But decades of research in psycholinguistics reveal that speech errors are rarely this incriminating. The vast majority of them come about simply because of the sheer mechanical complexity of the act of speaking. They’re less like Rorschach blot tests and more like mundane assembly-line mistakes that didn’t get caught by the mind’s inner quality control.”

“It may seem surprising, but in this age where geographic mobility and instant communication have increased our exposure to people outside of our neighborhoods or towns, American regional dialects are pulling further apart from each other, rather than moving closer together. And renowned linguist William Labov thinks there’s a connection between political and linguistic segregation.”

The contenders: Philadelphia, Boulder, Portland, and Austin.

The news comes from a study titled “Caffeine Enhances Real-World Language Processing: Evidence From a Proofreading Task.”

A new London exhibit on the brain “confronts its visitors with the gulf between our hard-won knowledge about the form of the brain and our as-yet-meagre understanding of its function.”