Category: ideas

“Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years. It won’t die out completely, but ‘religion will be driven toward extinction'” in these nations.

“Few existing buildings can be retrofitted to net zero, but huge cuts in energy use are possible now at low cost. An apartment in a conventional building oriented to harvest winter daylight and reject summer heat can save more than 50 percent of the heating and cooling energy needed to keep occupants from frying in a typical single-family house designed with slabs of glass facing the sun.”

“When Ashkan Soltani, an online privacy research and consultant, analyzed “third-party tracking beacons” on 50 of the most-visited sites, they dumped an average 64 tracking technologies (i.e. cookies and web bugs) onto users’ computers.”

Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory and “co-founder of the online learning site Memrise, argues that our brains are wired to remember bizarre and debauched mental images like nothing else.” And those images fit right into the ancient Greek technique called the Memory Palace.)

“In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all. According to Nielsen Media, even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.”

“A series of studies in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics provide some insight into why managers seem to prefer handing out pink slips rather than lowering salaries. In experiments where workers were randomly assigned to receive wage cuts, they retaliated by slacking off.”

“According to the research article, these advancements will help scientists understand key mechanical principles central to insect flight and control. Eventually, that knowledge could lead to the development of low-power micro air vehicles that perform functions such as mapping, surveillance and search-and-rescue operations.”

“Twenty percent of art can now be explained by neuroscience. That, at least, is what V.S. Ramachandran thinks.” But what of the other eighty percent? And how much of it could get lost in the search for neurological explanations for humans’ experiences with art?

“The nature of the self, identity, and human values used to be the preserve of philosophers, but over recent decades psychologists and neuroscientists seem to have thoroughly colonised the territory. … [But] on the big questions about who we are, recent research has told us a great deal about the physical basis for the emergence of the sense of self, but next to nothing about what a self actually is.”