Category: ideas

Yes, those crafty maker-types built a Rube Goldberg machine – for Peeps. With a little Wile E. Coyote thrown in.

Yes. It’s important to provide discounts for younger and less educated audiences, but, says an arts marketer, cash mobs could resist the culture of Groupon and day-of-show discounts, and say “This is important. This has value.” (And help the arts at the same time.)

“The fringe of physics is not a sharp boundary with truth on one side and fantasy on the other. All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled.”

“[If] the sexual revolution has really made women as happy as feminists say, a few elementary questions beg to be answered. Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like ‘The Case for Settling’ and ‘The End of Men’? Why do websites run by and for women … ooze such despair about relations between the sexes?”

“Here’s the thing about revolutions – there is no taking them back. You may review history and wish that it had gone the other way; perhaps you always longed to be a British colonist and regret the outcome of the American Revolution. Or maybe you liked the idea of a man behind a horse and plow and feel that the Industrial Revolution was all a big misstep. But personal laments are only that: personal. They cannot change what has been done.”

“It seems to me that aesthetics, criticism, musicology and law are real disciplines, but not sciences. They are not concerned with explaining some aspect of the human condition but with understanding it, according to its own internal procedures. Rebrand them as branches of neuroscience and you don’t necessarily increase knowledge: in fact you might lose it.”

From an 1847 textbook by New York state schoolmaster S. W. Clark “emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. A Practical Grammar was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all.”

Ada Louise Huxtable recounts how the 1811 Master Plan of Manhattan was created (ingeniously) and implemented (tortuously), and she considers what the city has gotten from it (besides gridlock).

Folks tend to be surprised, for instance, that Nixon was a loving husband and father or that saintly, generous-to-a-fault old Tolstoy harshly rejected his illegitimate son. Why do we tend to assume that people have unified and consistent characters? Some social psychologists and philosophers have been working on (and, of course, arguing over) explanations.

“I’ve observed that scientists tend to think and perceive logically by using their training and observational skills — of course — and are thus often psychologically insulated from the possibility that there might be chicanery at work. This is where magicians can come in. No matter how well educated, or how basically intelligent, trained, or observant a scientist may be, s/he may be a poor judge of a methodology employed in deliberate deception.”