Category: ideas

Jeff Weinstein: “Are there things we’re actually happy to see disappear, stuff we’re thrilled will never breathe again? The social media were born to answer exactly this sort of knotty question.” And goodness, they did. (Typewriter ribbons. Rolled fax paper. Girdles. New Math. All English food before 1989.)

“It’s hoped that inspiration will be reciprocal, with scientists and artists paired up so that each will benefit from the other’s world view, benefitting CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) research as much as its cultural programme.”

“Ben Fry is bringing information design into the digital age by helping designers think like programmers, and vice versa.”

“If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

“The fact is that there is a higher concentration of psychiatric illness in the city than in the country. There is increased risk for anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and schizophrenia. Of course, there are lots of possible reasons for this. … But there is also some evidence that living in a city can ‘bring on’ mental disorders.”

“Try to fight your sense of rising panic: robot heads like this could soon be serving you in restaurants and serenading you with music.”

“Studies looking at the brains of people playing a fairness game found very different responses between Buddhist meditators and other participants.”

“Now there’s a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it’s called ‘anticipated reproach’. … The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard.”

“Anything that’s going to have an impact over the next decade—that’s going to be a billion-dollar industry—has always already been around for 10 years.”

“If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding.”