Category: ideas

At least one credit card giant “is tinkering with a new prototype that’s going to make racking-up ginormous credit card debt as easy as sitting on your futon, watching tube and snapping your finger. Quite literally.”

“Neri Oxman, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and her graduate student Steven Keating are aiming for more than just small objects. They want to print out a whole building.”

“Is the glass half full or half empty? A gene variant usually considered to make people more gloomy could also help them see the positive.”

“Think of Lorenz’s six criteria for cuteness, and puffins score a clear five out of six with their large heads, low-lying eyes, bulging cheeks, short limbs and clumsy movements. It’s little wonder that even nonbirding visitors to the North Atlantic or the North Pacific oceans want to see puffins.”

“The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.”

“It seems footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and can identify people with 99.8 per cent accuracy.”

“Now we are profoundly immersed in the tortuous, commercially controlled currents of postmodern design and thought, and its weapons of mass psychic deconstruction. Has this made our lives richer in meaning, or just richly vacuous?”

“They’ve created a 3-D printer that not only prints food, but it let’s creative chefs whip up nearly any imaginable design with the most choice of ingredients.”

“Playing music seems to delay the decay in an aging brain’s central auditory processing system.”