Category: ideas

“If something has been around longer, it must be better. New research suggests we hold onto that bias even in instances where quality has nothing to do with longevity.”

“Until recently, no one actually tried to measure the increasing difficulty of discovery. It certainly seems to be getting harder, but how much harder? How fast does it change?”

“Though we’re accustomed to classifying people as good or evil, … [more fundamentally,] we categorize the entities we encounter as either ‘moral agents’ – those who act, who are deserving of praise or blame – or ‘moral patients’ – those who are on the receiving end of good or bad deeds.” And we tend to assume that moral agents are “relatively impervious. It’s hard to picture Gandhi whimpering over a bruised knee.”

“If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity … Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a 10,000-member team that runs a multibillion dollar atom smasher. It takes ever more money, more effort, and more people to find out new things.” Why is this?

“Archaeologists have translated almost every language humans have ever used. Yet eight or so elusive languages remain a mystery. Until now, researchers have not successfully used a computer to assist with deciphering languages. … But now researchers from MIT and USC have designed a computer system that does successfully model the logic and intuition of a human to decipher a language.”

“The first time I had a Milky Way after years of candy sobriety, I was jolted by the Madeleine experience of the thing. I was transported back to childhood pleasures – the leap into the neighborhood pool, the afternoon spent at the movies, the whispering with girlfriends at the back of the school bus. Since then I have made an effort to reacquaint myself with candy, in part out of a desire to reconnect with that primal past, and in part because, well, candy tastes really good.”

“Put briefly, I’m here thanks to Galileo. Because Galileo suffered, there was a need to do something to show that the church is not against science. It was in large part to change the image of the church – to show the world that it is not against science but encourages and promotes it – that Pope Leo XIII refounded the observatory in 1891.”

“Shifty eyes long have been thought to signify a person’s problem telling the truth. Now a group of University of Utah researchers … re using eye-tracking technology to pioneer a promising alternative to the polygraph for lie detection.”

“Divorced from context, most two- and three-year olds might as well be colorblind; certainly they look that way when asked to correctly identify colors in a line-up, or accurately use color words in novel contexts. ….This is seriously bizarre when you consider all the other things that children at that age can do: ride a bike, tie their shoes, read the comics, and – mistake a blue cupcake for a pink one? Really?” (Yes, and it’s worse for English-speakers.)

“Pink means ‘girl’ in a way so direct that no other color comes close. But when you start to look at the roles pink plays in American culture, the story becomes a lot more complex. … To understand how Americans use pink, both embracing it and subverting it, is to realize how we feel about femininity. Once you notice that, there’s no turning back.”