Category: ideas

“The possibility of boredom only emerges once enough people have the security, leisure, and comfort to complain that security, leisure, and comfort aren’t everything. This coincides with, and is reinforced by, the rapidly expanding market for novels, with their reminder that one’s life could be much more interesting than (alas) it usually is.”

“The concept that 10,000 hours of practice can make one an expert in a field – an idea developed by psychologist Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers – has become prevalent enough” that Scientific American asked an MIT researcher if the theory could be tested empirically.

“From reality television to dumb-and-dumber films, contemporary entertainment often amounts to watching stupid people do stupid things. New research suggests such seemingly innocuous diversions should have their own rating: LYI. As in: Watching this may Lower Your Intelligence.”

Take, for example, a devout Evangelical Christian man who is battling homosexual desires, which he feels powerfully but are, he sincerely believes, sinful. How can be he his “authentic self”? Does that self reside in his erotic desires or his deepest spiritual beliefs?

“The debate between repair and enhancement is long-standing in medicine (and sports, and education, and genetics), though it gets louder and more complicated as technology advances.”

“Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am – was coined by René Descartes in 1637…. [His maxim] turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly. So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it’s beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny.”

By going through three centuries’ worth of German household inventories, a team of researchers “has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico?”

“The inability of adults to remember the earliest years of childhood–also known as infantile amnesia–has been the subject of speculation for more than a century.”