Category: ideas

Ben Yagoda argues that placing the period or comma outside the quotation marks – the British style – is no longer a copy error in the US. And that’s because it makes sense.

Kurt Andersen: “Minimizing civilian casualties and harvesting intelligence aside, [President Obama] knew that a commando raid, if it worked, would make for a far, far better last chapter. The stories we tell and retell – fictional, nonfictional, hybrids of the two – really do inform important choices we make. They matter.”

The Zombie Research Society reminds us that “because Spring naturally brings with it a sense of renewal and hopefulness, May is the perfect month to emphasize continued vigilance in the face of the coming zombie pandemic.” All month, “the society says, people are encouraged to wear a gray ribbon, ‘to acknowledge the coming danger’.”

Irshad Manji: “Today, what Islam needs is not more ‘moderates’ but more self-conscious ‘reformists.’ It is reformists who will bring to my faith the debate, dissent and reinterpretation that have carried Judaism and Christianity into the modern world.”

“The thinking goes something like this: Outsourcing platforms like Mechanical Turk have made it easy to tap into an online workforce. These platforms have interfaces that allow computers to post jobs and collect the results. So why not write software that uses online workers to perform specific tasks?”

Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand or even conceive of, say, quantrum mechanics or arts administration, there are surely countless ideas and phenomena in the universe that are beyond the abilities of the human brain. “But the limits in knowledge and understanding that we do recognise are, if anything, cause for celebration. … We may never be able to know everything, but discovering what we cannot know usually leads to us knowing more.”

“Real robotics is a science born out of fiction. For roboticists this is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because science fiction provides inspiration, motivation and thought experiments; a curse because most people’s expectations of robots owe much more to fiction than reality.”

“Nouns replace nouns, verbs replace verbs, and so on. If “Obama” were a verb instead of a noun (as in, the Democrats are going to Obama the GOP in 2012), we would be substantially less likely to confuse it with the noun “Osama.”

“Human beings like to think of themselves as possessing unique capabilities such as being able to use tools, employ a language with syntactic rules and process complex mathematical equations. Aristotle argued that only people could reason. Yet the development of ever more powerful and complex computers has chipped away at these claims.”

In a new paper, two cognitive scientists argue that humans “actually didn’t evolve to help us find the truth; it evolved to help us make, win, and evaluate arguments.”