Category: ideas

Matthew Yglesias: “Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other.” This may make sense for hard-copy journals, but on the Web, “it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious.”

New studies “suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Some words really do evoke [Humpty Dumpty’s] ‘handsome’ rotundity. Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement.”

“It’s a word that has been misused by everyone from fashion stylist Rachel Zoe to President Obama, and linguists predict that it will continue to be led astray from its meaning. There is a good chance the incorrect use of the word eventually will eclipse its original definition.”

Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano: “[H]umans suffer … consequences of living in a time and place we didn’t evolve to live in. … And by peering into the brain, we can learn a lot about why we are good at some things and why we are not very good at others.”

“I know that in my parents’ time, memorization of huge lists of facts and figures and Shakespearean sonnets was standard, because that was the criteria by which knowledge was judged. But what difference does it really make if I can’t remember when the War of 1812 was?”

“What is boredom? Is it a mood, an emotion, an affliction, a form of social protection, a gateway to the essence of the self, the human condition, or a modern affectation? These are questions that have concerned philosophers and thinkers dating back to the Enlightenment, not least because boredom occupies territory that overlaps with capital letter concepts like Being and Time.”

“It’s often said that a good caricature looks more like a person than the person himself. As it happens, this notion, counterintuitive though it may sound, is actually supported by research.”

It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past – or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously.

“Some people are troubled that information gleaned online plays too large a role in their fact-access process, yet this reliance on external memory seems to bother them less if the information resides in the brain of another person.”

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.