Teller (of Penn and): “I’ve never found puzzles attractive. Why would you deliberately expose yourself to stress and frustration? You put in effort that you could have used to write a novel or cure cancer, and you come out with nothing but the solution to a previously solved problem. What’s the point? Why torment yourself?” (His Thanksgiving tablemates explain.)
Category: ideas
Human Beings Are ‘Meaning Machines’
“[P]eople look for the meaning of human life, and would be glad to find it ‘out there’, ready made, a transcendent meaning that surpasses mere animal existence. This is to get things backwards. We are the ones who bring meanings into the world, and then, looking around, find them there.”
Why Religious People Tend to Be Happier
“It’s not their spirituality, belief in heaven, or even the ritual act of praying or going to a house of worship that leads the pious to happiness. Rather, the study found, it’s the close friends people gain through their religions that makes a difference.”
The End Of Privacy?
“Here’s a prediction: Two words that will be incomprehensible a generation from now are “secret” and “private.” They will wither like “ether,” “phlogiston,” “the celestial music of the spheres” and so on, and for the same reason. They will no longer describe anything in our world. For better and/or worse, human beings are outgrowing their privacy and secrecy.”
How Not to Succumb to Post-Nietzschean Nihilism
“God is dead … in a very particular sense. He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live. Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.” Sean D. Kelly finds alternative ground in, of all places, Melville’s Moby-Dick.
World’s Available Internet Addresses Will Be Used Up In January
“The currently used Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) manages about four billion addresses and has reached its limit, experts said.”
Internet Inventor: The Internet Is In Danger
“The Web as we know it is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments–totalitarian and democratic alike–are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.”
Computer Calculates The Most Boring Day Of The 20th Century
“Computer programmer William Tunstall-Pedoe has calculated that to be the most objectively dull day since 1900. On that day a general election was held in Belgium, a Turkish academic was born and an Oldham Athletic footballer called Jack Shufflebotham died. Apart from that nothing much happened.”
Do We Think of Certain People as Natural Victims of Violence?
Judith Butler’s recent book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? “suggests that by defining people as residents of war zones, we have, so to speak, zoned them for war. We don’t grieve their deaths, and the call for nonviolence is shouted down because we haven’t recognized their lives as fully livable.”
This Is Your Brain on Schadenfreude
“Schadenfreude registers in the brain as a pleasurable experience, a satisfaction comparable with that of eating a good meal. … During the course of evolution, humans likely developed the instinct to notice, and profit from, the weaknesses of their competitors.”