“The Internet, with all its top-speed awesomeness, has rendered hundreds of pastimes and proclivities (sports trivia, porn acquisition, late-night song lyric competitions) much less challenging. For me, though, the most distressing side effect of Web-based instant gratification is the death of the treasure hunt.”
Category: ideas
Surprising News From the Farmyard: Sheep Are Actually Smart
“Over the past few decades, evidence has quietly built up that sheep are anything but stupid. It now turns out that the humble domestic sheep can pass a psychological test that monkeys struggle with, and which is so sensitive it is used to look for neurological decline in human patients.”
Our Brains Are Getting Smaller (No Cause For Concern)
“Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, puzzling scientists who argue it is not a sign we are growing dumber but that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient.”
Artificial Intelligence – The Battle Between Human And Machine
“As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience–spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting–and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are.”
Where Physics Meets, and Misses, Philosophy
Alva Noë: “Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow do not succeed in murdering philosophy in their recent book The Grand Design. Nor do they even try. Perhaps this is because they believe, as they blandly announce on the first page, that philosophy is already dead. But the joke’s on them.”
Astrology Declared a Science Under Indian Case Law
“The Bombay high court dismissed a public interest litigation seeking action against bogus astrologers, tantriks, … and the like.” The judges’ decision states that “the Supreme Court has already considered the issue and ruled that astrology is a science.”
Transliterating Birdsong Into English
“Some of these sounds are hard to imagine, given only the transcription on the page: Would the kddddrrddi of the summer tanager sound different with another d more or less? Likewise, distinguishing the br-r-r-r-rt of the dicksissel from the brrt of the bank swallow and the tsip of the lark sparrow from the tsiip of the chipping sparrow must take a practiced ear.”
How IBM’s Supercomputer Plays Jeopardy
“Developed over four years at an estimated cost of more than $30 million, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer, Watson, will face the quiz show’s grand masters, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in two games to be aired [this month]. … [Yet] doubts remain about how well Watson can process the endless subtleties of human language.”
Google Earth Reveals Thousands Of Archaeological Treasures In Desert
“Almost two thousand potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia have been discovered from an office chair in Perth, Australia, thanks to high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth.”
Is Anthropomorphizing Hard-Wired Into Humans? Is Religion?
“The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states … But there’s absolutely no question that we’re much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom.” Is that ability the reason we assign feelings and motives to inanimate objects? (My computer is cranky today.) Is it why we believe in god(s)?