Category: ideas

“Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused.”

It is simply not possible for all Americans to earn college degrees, and insisting that they really should is neither a wise nor a particularly humane solution.” And if all Americans did graduate from college, then college would no longer be any guarantee of a good job and a decent living (or rather, it would be even less of one than it is now).

“To many thoughtful people, and especially to those who are unwilling to derive their morality from a religion, it appears unavoidable. … Relativism is not always a coherent way of responding to the rejection of a certain class of facts. When we decided that there were no such things as witches, we didn’t become relativists about witches.”

What happened to modern medicine giving us longer lives? Why aren’t we getting any older?

“Only one in twenty formally employed Americans works consistently from home, but the fact that so many of us could work fills demographers’ eyes with visions of empty cubicles and broadband-blazing living rooms.”

“The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal — or faster-than-light — propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said. It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.”

“The adults were consistently better in everything we measured… When asked to apply the rule to new words, the 8-year-olds performed no better than chance, while most 12-year-olds and adults scored over 90 per cent. Adults fared best, and have great potential for learning new languages implicitly.”

“These days, many scientists believe that it’s the underlying organization of the brain that matters most when it comes to smarts. But according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE, bigger noggins may have trickled through evolution’s passageway not because of reason and intellect, but due to exercise.”

“The physics of the twentieth century, with its Alice in Wonderland landscape of black holes and quantum cats, would have seemed impossible, even ludicrous, from the orderly standpoint of the nineteenth. This squishy, fuzzy post-Newtonian physics, in turn, has given birth to technologies and consumer products that would have seemed like rank impossibilities to the likes of Verne and Maxwell.”

“Historically, people have relied on physical hive minds made up of friends and colleagues to help them remember specific details, a phenomenon social psychologists call transactive memory. The study authors propose that the Internet now fills this role, becoming the ultimate know-it-all friend whom we can access anytime.”