Category: ideas

“Look behind the salads, sausage rolls and bite-size pizzas and it turns out that buffets are a microcosm of greed, sexual politics and altruism – a place where our food choices are driven by factors we’re often unaware of.”

In our Gregorian calendar, from year to year, “New Year’s Day – or any other notable fixed date, from your birthday to Christmas to the Fourth of July – moves forward in the week one day (and two in leap years).” Now an astronomer and an economist have come up with a new, stable calendar which will keep all those dates on the same day of the week.

“Acts of communication, by themselves, aren’t especially interesting. We’ve always had protests, riots, and revolutions, and the people who carried them out have always found ways to spread the word. If the medium for those communications shifts from word of mouth, to printed flier, to telephone, then to texts and Twitter, what does it really matter? Technology becomes an important part of the story only if it’s changing the nature of the events — and the nature of the social groups that are carrying them out.”

“We prefer being in groups of others who are similar. We like people who agree with us on issues, we even like people who imitate our own body movements. So, enjoying being in a group isn’t always the same thing as creating the most effective group.”

We’re still a long way from real “artificial intelligence” – developing computers that can replicate the cognitive processes of the human brain. Yet, argues Colin Allen, with robots ever more able to complete certain tasks without real-time human input, it’s time to start considering how to program them not to act immorally.

“Animals are adjusting their communication. They’re changing the way they speak. Their accents might be changing, but to what degree is this changing the number of young they have and how well they survive?”

“We’ve constructed our $2.5 trillion health care system around the belief that we can find the underlying causes of illness, the invisible triggers of pain and disease. That’s why we herald the arrival of new biomarkers and get so excited by the latest imaging technologies. If only we knew more and could see further, the causes of our problems would reveal themselves. But what if they don’t?”

Wasn’t the printing press was the crucial factor in the rapid spread of Martin Luther’s ideas through Europe? Not exactly, and certainly not by itself.: the real key was the social networks that passed around “the new media of their day – pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts … Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message.”

“You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and … five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? … Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis.”

“When you receive multiple gifts, you engage in what the researchers call “piecemeal processing”: you evaluate each gift separately. And so anything chintzy brings down the perceived value of even the nicest present. In short, buy something nice and let it stand for itself.”