Category: ideas

“Is stinginess harmful to your health? Newly published research suggests the answer may be yes – if your tightwad tendencies arouse feelings of shame.”

“All the poets who loved colorful street life, starting with Whitman and Baudelaire, knew that the unforeseen was one of the inherent qualities of the beautiful. We come face to face with someone, or we catch a peek at them from the corner of our eye and the camera in our heads clicks, suspending the image.”

Take Nietzsche’s “What does not kill me, makes me stronger,” for instance. “What’s been mistaken here is a resolution for a fact. As a simple statement of fact, that is not true … Unfortunately, a lot of people are made much weaker by their misfortunes.” And lightning does strike the same place twice, and so on.

“When people are under chronic stress, they tend to smoke, drink, use drugs and overeat to help cope with stress. These behaviors trigger a biological cascade that helps prevent depression, but they also contribute to a host of physical problems that eventually contribute to early death.”

“Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.”

“Think not just of written words but of images, artworks, videos, songs, craft how-to pages and on and on. Surely it’s the case that never before have so many creators offered so much to so many for $0. A result, in effect, is a gift glut.”

“A growing number of countries are trying to create an elite group of “global universities” that are capable of competing with the best American institutions.”

The “research suggests rhythm (say, in the form of a drum beat, which continues to play a role in military rituals) helps you to quickly understand what it is you’re looking at. This could save your life if you spot a shape that could be either a lion or a rock, and its advantages multiply if you and your hunting partners come to such crucial realizations simultaneously.”

“A small band of economists has been studying how height, weight and beauty affect the likelihood of committing – or being convicted of – a crime. Looking at records from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, they have found evidence that shorter men are 20 to 30 percent more likely to end up in prison than their taller counterparts, and that obesity and physical attractiveness are linked to crime.”

Two UC-San Diego professors reported “that while defining wisdom is subjective, there are enough similarities in definition across time and cultures to suggest that wisdom may come from just the right balance between our more primitive brain regions and our more recently developed brain functions.” Subsequently the two did a meta-study in an attempt to define the concept of wisdom.