Giles Fraser: “As a good communist, atheism had always been my unexamined default position. And because Nietzsche was so passionate an atheist, I had my defences down to his unusually intense religiosity and elliptical desire for salvation. Which, I suppose, is how the question of God crept under my intellectual radar.”
Category: ideas
Flying, And Living, Solo, Within The Constant Chattering Stream
“In prosperous societies, where social media is common, social lives are affordable and accessible, and families are no longer a financial necessity, is the era of communal living over and done? If so, are we losing our ability to be intimate, or are we simply evolving into creatures with different needs?”
Pirate Bay Founder Tells Content Companies ‘Innovate Or Die’
Peter Sunde: “We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry. Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.”
Not Fade Away: Genius Older Artists Persist In Being Geniuses
David Hockney’s big Royal Academy show, Leonard Cohen’s new hit album, Woody Allen’s big success with Midnight in Paris – turns out that many artists, if they get to live that long, don’t let age wither their talents.
Who Made The Rubik’s Cube, Defining Game Of A Generation?
Erno Rubik, of course. And it all started as foam.
Making More Makers – And Moving On From Marshmallow Cannons
Joey Hudy, the boy who impressed President Obama with his marshmallow cannon, is a self-identified “maker.” What’s that? “Makers start with that simple idea to do something, which is why we call it DIY – for ‘do it yourself.’ Soon, however, they find out that there are lots of people like [them] out there.”
When Medical Ethicists Think Too Hard
“Is it really morally wrong to kill someone? That question, strange enough on its own, is downright bizarre when it’s asked in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In ‘What makes killing wrong?’, a paper in the Journal‘s January issue, [two scholars] argue that there isn’t, fundamentally, anything wrong with killing another person. Killing is only incidentally bad because of one of its consequences: ‘total disability’.”
Your Brain: Jolted Into Remembering
“Researchers have found that sending an electrical jolt to a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory improved people’s ability to learn — and remember — their way across an unfamiliar landscape.”
You Know What The Trouble Is With Confidence?
It’s “a completely unreliable guide to decision making. … [We’re] often confident in our intuitive judgments even when we have no idea what we’re doing. And to make matters worse, we tend to evaluate the reliability of other people’s decision making on the same basis – if they’re confident, they must know what they’re talking about.”
Good Urban Design Makes People Happy (Social Science Says So)
From a study of polling data published last year in Urban Affairs Review: “We find that … [cities] that provide easy access to convenient public transportation and to cultural and leisure amenities promote happiness. Cities that are affordable and serve as good places to raise children also have happier residents.”