Category: ideas

The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, observing that the word information is “exhibiting significant linguistic productivity,” have completely revamped the entry for the word. “Information, n., now runs 9,400 words, the length of a novella. It is a sort of masterpiece – an adventure in cultural history.”

“Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word ‘science’ from a statement of its long-range plan.”

A growing area of cognitive science is based on the idea that there “is no more reason, from the perspective of evolution or learning, to favor the use of a brain-only cognitive strategy than there is to favor the use of canny (but messy, complex, hard-to-understand) combinations of brain, body and world.”

“The world’s computer network is ultimately a physical entity, onto which other forms of communication — film, telephone, television, radio — are starting to migrate. This is what media executives mean by ‘convergence.’ It seems likely to help big companies get even bigger, and arguably offers the potential for even tighter control of information than existed in the past.”

“The Turkish government is rushing to legally protect the country’s national anthem after realizing Turkey does not actually own the copyright on the work.”

The discipline “embodies much more than fighting. In fact any ability resulting from practice and cultivation could accurately be said to embody kung fu. There is a kung fu of dancing, painting, cooking, writing, acting, making good judgments, dealing with people, even governing.”

“[If] you want to fend off the flab, pushing thoughts of mince pies out of your mind might be counterproductive: indulging thoughts of eating a particular food may help us to eat less of the real thing.”

“You don’t know the answer, and then you ‘concentrate’ (whatever that means), which induces some mysterious biochemical reaction, and then you are transformed into a different state of being – a state of knowing something you didn’t know moments before.”

A new study “found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.” One of the researchers says that “the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections.”

NY Times puzzlemaster-in-chief Will Shortz and a group of puzzle constructors at Brown Univ. talk about how (and why) it’s done. (For instance, “[the] trick with black squares is to put them under letters that often end words, like T’s and S’s.”