Category: ideas

“Activity in brain regions that normally deal with negative emotions and self-awareness are dampened when we process ideas about death.”

“A German study finds our preferences regarding the placement of bedroom furniture reflect the safety concerns of our distant ancestors. According to the paper, … our choice of room layout is remarkably consistent with the physical environment prehistoric men and women preferred.”

How invading Aryans, an ex-Roman soldier nicknamed “Herman the German,” the mighty Rhine, Martin Luther and Otto von Bismarck helped create der deutsche Sprache as we know it today.

“The Avidians replicated themselves for nearly 100 generations, “living” and “dying” in the cell. Then one evolved a computer instruction to move forward. When it landed in an energy-richer cell, it reproduced more rapidly. Many thousands of generations later, some of its descendents were seen following the food gradient to its source, where concentrations were highest.”

Jessa Crispin: “Celebrity is a weird gig. It used to be the place of well scrubbed, heavily managed stars. Now the barriers are down, anyone can be famous for a little while if they are OK with being outrageously idiotic, and people confuse notoriety with fame … Yet it’s still a game everyone wants in on. People are desperate to be torn to shreds by the masses.”

“Uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, it is looking increasingly likely that our brains are not something to write home about after all. One group of researchers has scrutinised the primate archaeological record and concluded that the human brain has evolved just as would be expected for a primate of our size.”

“[E]veryday life is based on ‘basic’ beliefs for which we have no good arguments. There are, for example, no more basic truths from which we can prove that the past is often a good guide to the future, that our memories are reliable, or that other people have a conscious inner life. Such beliefs simply – and quite properly – arise from our experience in the world.”

In “more tightly controlled corners of the internet, especially iPad and iPhone apps, are gradually supplanting the open Web as means of publishing and online networking.”

“With the internal combustion engine on its way out, though, the acoustic fog created by cars, buses and trucks will finally lift and other sounds of the city will emerge. Will we like what we hear?”

A team of researchers “‘found that women view men in red as higher in status, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder. And it’s this high-status judgment that leads to the attraction.’ Red appears to signal rank in virtually all cultures.”