Category: ideas

“Brain science “will eventually begin to influence how the public views justice and responsibility. And there is no guarantee, he added, that its influence will be a good one.”

“At the Wikimedia Conference in March, a German coalition proposed that Wikipedia become the first digital World Heritage site. A petition was drafted, declaring Wikipedia “a masterpiece of human creative genius.” Unesco was not impressed.”

“A recent paper, along with other experiments, shows that a person’s innate abilities may matter just as much. In other words, some people have qualities that, when combined with practice, make them ‘naturals’.”

A Bangladeshi immigrant in Brooklyn who opened a fast-food place he named after the President was mystified by the ensuing protests; he thought he was paying a compliment. Chicken restaurants in Hong Kong and China have had similar experiences. Yet, as Jesse Bering observes, “the issue of why, exactly, the juxtaposition is so verboten isn’t entirely clear, even to most [Americans].”

“If the listeners knew that the sound was fingernails on the chalkboard, they rated it as more unpleasant than if they were told it was from a musical composition. Even when they thought it was from music, however, their skin conductivity still changed consistently, suggesting that the physical part of the response remained.”

“Historians discover that the devil in the ancient texts is not nearly as frightening as the one who gives us the shakes in movies.”

“Humanity’s recursive ways of thinking are more elaborate than those of other animals, but some other animals do think recursively as well. Can the degree of difference explain the origins of human thought, language and civilization?”

“If universities have a primary purpose it is as forums of open curiosity and rigorous criticism, as microcosms of democracy and free inquiry,” says British commenter Tim Adams. “Students should be totally immersed in the here and now of what they might be capable of, and making money from it should not only be the very least of their concerns, but all the more likely the less thought they give to it.”

“Watching an artist draw is like watching magic,” says the man behind the idea for those fantastic animated British lectures. Take a 750-page book, distill it to a speech – and then expand it to a video of artist Andrew Park illustrating the speech? That’s worth millions of hits, and a lot of knowledge.

Operating independently has some benefits, but perhaps not enough. “Like research papers, it seems that people require peer review in order to gain credibility, too.”