Category: ideas

“Social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.”

The first thing the researchers discovered is that there was no detectable difference in the response of visual areas to Rembrandt and “school of Rembrandt” works of art. The key word in that sentence is “detectable.”

“A team of software engineers [is] developing open-source software to turn cheap wireless access points and Android smartphones into nodes on the network, which could then be used by dissidents to evade censorship and to spread low-cost connections everywhere around the world. Proponents of the plan include the U.S. State Department.”

Alvin Plantinga “has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers who, if they haven’t succeeded in persuading their still overwhelmingly unbelieving colleagues, have at least made theism philosophically respectable.”

“Connected to a computer, BodyWave can tell when someone is paying attention and sound an alarm when they aren’t. Something like this can also be used in cars — for instance, sounding an alarm if a driver’s attention drifts.”

The most popular reader-submitted prediction came from Roy in Italy, who wrote that by 2020, “Google will provide everyone with the ability to communicate with everyone else, regardless of the specific language they speak, via their smartphone, with real-time language translation.”

“Basing their concern in part on graphic physical evidence of how brain cells adapt to meet new demands – and wither in the absence of such stimuli – a growing chorus of neuroscientists worry that the “expert reading brain” will soon be as obsolete as the paper and ink it once fed on. And the thing that replaces it (“the Twitter brain”) will be a completely different organ.”

“Email has also profoundly influenced the kinds of people we interact with. … [We] exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least. Perhaps it’s a new colleague, or a friend of a friend, or a total stranger writing out of the blue: Email makes these exchanges possible.”

“Playfulness helps us get to more creative solutions. It helps us do our jobs better. And it makes us feel better when we do them.”

Just wow: “Cambridge University has published more than 4,000 pages of Newton’s most important works on a new digital library website. They include the scientist’s own annotated copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.”