Category: ideas

“Sure, your memory is weak and your knowledge fleeting, says the optimist, but this is a problem with an ancient solution: just write it all down! Thing is, we actually have it backwards: writing isn’t memory’s savior so much as it is the prime suspect in its murder.”

“The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard.”

“Developing successful, revenue-generating subscription models for the digital content of arts organisations has to be explored. Just as Spotify and Last.fm are in different ways exploring subscription or ad-based models for streaming music, so a ‘cultural’ subscription model needs to be explored, providing access to multiple platforms across different devices.”

Diane Ackerman: “Is no mood safe from marketing and manipulation, you may wonder? Apparently not. They can ambush your animal senses, whatever state your brain may occupy, no matter if you’re in the dumps or riding high. If the meringuelike hand cream doesn’t entice you one day, the Eiffel Tower-shaped box might on another.”

“Once the British left India, Anglo-Indian died a natural death. In its place came a chutnified Indian English that mixes American and British versions of the language with vernacular words and syntax and direct translations of phrases. A glimpse of the breadth of influences in contemporary Indian English can be found at the delightfully-named Samosapedia.”

“The first thing the researchers discovered is that office conditions matter. A lot. In particular, the risk of death seemed to be correlated with the perceived niceness of co-workers, as less friendly colleagues were associated with a higher risk of dying.”

“Studies on a group of children trained to use a ‘mental abacus’ suggest the technique frees mathematics from its usual dependence on language.”

When a UBC linguist posted an online questionnaire asking for people who were studying the language invented for the gentle blue people in James Cameron’s sci-fi juggernaut, she received hundreds of replies from all over the world, including 11 written in Na’vi.

“Political pressure isn’t necessary to force the use of real names online because users will take that step on their own. Nothing has accelerated the trend more than the success of social networking sites like Facebook, where users voluntarily reveal not only their names, but often photos, birthdays and sometimes even intimate details of their lives.”