“If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.”
Category: ideas
Using Philosophy To Battle Addiction
“Philosophy has a long, stable relationship with reason and more specifically, the relationship between reason, emotions and the will. Addiction seems to involve a total abdication of reason, a messy tangle of emotions and a lack of will.”
Better Parking Lots, And Lives, Through Design
“Beyond greener designs and the occasional celebrity-architect garage, we need to think more about these lots as public spaces, as part of the infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, places for various activities that may change and evolve, because not all good architecture is permanent.”
Before DNA, Before RNA, There Was TNA (Not To Mention GNA)
What are the basic building blocks of life? The genetic soup of the early Earth still has a lot more to teach us – and that might include yet more nucleic acids for high school students to memorize.
Whimsical, Cute Art – Quit It! There’s No There There
If you love Miranda July’s movies or Jeff Koons’ Puppy, get a life. “If I see one more knitted effing toy at a gallery, I may take a needle and hurt the next ‘craft practitioner’ foolish enough to offer me a cupcake.”
Collective Genius: The Internet Is For Citizen Science, And Maybe A Whole Lot More
A thousand, or thousands of, amateurs at keyboards can help astronomy, math and a whole bunch of other fields. But they won’t produce the works of Shakespeare. Can collective genius ever address art or literature? Maybe, says author Michael Nielsen.
Too Much Information! And What We Can Do About That
“Even before the invention of the printing press – when the distribution of information depended upon teams of scribes working with pen and ink in monastery libraries – the fear of too much to know, too much material too widely and swiftly disseminated, was already threatening to overwhelm our orderly sense of understanding.”
Architects Face Up To Facts: Humans Still Want To Live In Trees
Surveying new buildings and public spaces designed to look like the forest, an architecture critic wonders, “Why should tree metaphors appeal to architects? Why should they be useful, even good, for people?”
Pshaw – Neuroscience Can’t Explain Great Art
“Neuroaesthetics may be a very new field, and neurology may be relatively contemporary, but aesthetics has been studied for millennia. What use can these results be put to? If the blood doesn’t flow as predicted to someone’s brain when they look at a Turner, do we conclude that the scientific paradigm is wrong, or that something is wrong with that individual’s capacity for aesthetic appreciation?”
Who’s Responsible For England’s Culture Of Drunkenness? (The Toffs, Of Course)
“The debate about problem drinking and how to stop it nowadays centres mostly on the working-class young. They are highly visible – and audible – as they clog city centres on Saturday nights. But … Philip Withington, a Cambridge historian, argues that it was the educated elite who taught Britons how to drink to excess.”