Category: ideas

“Proverbial sayings such as ‘we’re all human’ reduce feelings of regret and hypocrisy after men get into trouble. But new research finds they don’t have the same soothing effect on women.”

“[A] provocative article just published in Mother & Baby magazine has acted like kerosene on a conflagration. The author … wrote that she bottle-fed her babies because: ‘I wanted my body back … They’re part of my sexuality too – not just breasts, but fun bags’.”

One reader “is so outraged that the profession of philosophy would accommodate my reflecting on Lady Gaga, nay, my going so far as to write a book called How to Do Things With Pornography, that he called for the discipline itself to ‘vanish in the stampede toward majors in technology and business’.” Nancy Bauer explains herself.

“Jacobs had a tendency toward sweeping conclusions based on anecdotal information, and some of them were overblown and/or oblivious to the facts. Perhaps most graphically, Jacobs predicted that the grand arts center planned for the Upper West Side of Manhattan would fail. But Lincoln Center turned out to be a great success … More revealingly, the Greenwich Village she held out as a model for city life has become some of the highest-priced real estate in New York City.”

Ron Rosenbaum: “Let’s get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer. … Indeed agnostics see atheism as ‘a theism’ – as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.”

“On the face of it, it would seem not to be,” says the editor of AskPhilosophers.org, which receives thousands of queries. A journalist weighs in on the side of Plutarch, who said that philosophy must combine “fun with serious effort” and should be taught at dinner parties.

When the texts are divided into 12ths, “‘significant concepts and narrative turns’ within the dialogues are generally located at their junctures. Positive concepts are lodged at the harmonious third, fourth, sixth, eight[h] and ninth ‘notes’, which were considered to be most harmonious with the 12th; while negative concepts are found at the more dissonant fifth, seventh, 10th and 11th.”

“A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.”

Digital images are composed of square pixels. But blow them up and images get chunky and ragged. Now the inventor of the first digital image has an idea to fix the process…