Category: ideas

“When so much information is available, it makes sense for websites you visit to filter it using information about you, your interests and your friends. Essentially, you trade personal information in return for more useful results. But this neuters the internet’s potential to break down social barriers between people or groups who might otherwise not connect with each other.”

Jessa Crispin, a/k/a Bookslut: “There are mistresses, and there are homewreckers. We often believe that the only thing distinguishing one from the other is revelation. The mistress is the hidden, secret lover, but the homewrecker is the same woman splashed on every tabloid cover with her baby – his or not – suddenly labeled ‘love child’ in alarmingly large and yellow type.”

“A major difference between the brain and a supercomputer is that the brain handles memory and processing at the same time — on what is essentialy a parallel circuit. But even the best computers are built with physically separate ‘memory’ and ‘processing’ components.”

“The irony of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it sounds modern … [but] the symptoms have been around for hundreds or thousands of years.” The Iliad “may be the first work of literature based on combat stress. But Samuel Pepys may be the earliest historical figure diagnosed with PTSD in a formal paper.”

“If you rebuild an area [of the brain], you somehow have to get it to talk to the surrounding areas. The adult stem cells might actually facilitate the communication between existing brain cells and new ones, enabling doctors to one day reboot the silenced cells of a brain.”

“Peter Atkins, a British chemist and science writer, offers an intriguing answer to those questions. To understand how something can come out of nothing, he writes, you have to appreciate the fact that ‘there probably isn’t anything here anyway’ — that ‘at a deep level there is nothing’ in the universe, really.”

“Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the nom de plume, and rarely talked about, is its power to unlock creativity — and its capacity to withhold it.”

Although many animals, including dogs, parrots and apes are known to interpret and construct “sentences”, and recognise human words for individual objects, Kentaro Abe says that only his finches have been shown to have a form of grammar in their utterances. Similar claims have been made for whale song, however.

“In fact, experts say, there is plenty of scientific data to support the new labels, including evidence from some 30 nations that have been using graphic imagery to discourage tobacco use for as much as many as 10 years or more.”

Anthropologist Laura Fortunato “used current patterns of language and marriage to determine when monogamous marriage got rolling for Europe and much of Asia. It turns out that this kind of marriage is much older than anyone had thought … [and] likely established itself for a very modern reason.”