Category: ideas

“If the idea of grown men and women discovering and collecting music using a cute little avatar sounds absurd, you probably haven’t watched Jesse Schell’s DICE talk. In the future, he claims, everything will be a game. It’s either a horrifying Orwellian vision of the future or an indication that we’ll all be more amused in the years to come, depending on how you look at it.”

The Great Stalacpipe Organ is “a unique instrument that uses cave formations to make music. Conceived and built in the 1950s by mathematician Leland Sprinkle, the organ produces tones using rubber-tipped mallets to strike stalactites as its keys are played. It took Sprinkle three years and 2500 tries to find the right 37 formations to serve as natural chimes, ranging over five octaves.”

“Depressive disorders may have a beneficial mechanism behind them; dreams may be meaningful after all; and hysteria – now called conversion disorders, and by which they mean the physical expression of emotional trauma – may actually exist. This may not totally redeem Freud from his sex-obsessed cokehead crackpot reputation, but this is his territory.”

“The ethnic makeup of an area changes due to increased immigration, and support for social welfare programs declines. As ‘outsiders’ move in, high-minded notions of compassion and equality give way to an every-man-for-himself ethos. What is it with those Swedes, anyway?” It may be neural mirroring.

A series of studies has suggested that obesity, excessive drinking, depression and other behavior-related ills can be “socially contagious,” spreading from friend to friend like a flu virus. Yet, “[l]ong before the advent of germ theory, the word contagion – which means ‘to touch together’ – was sometimes used to refer to the transmission of behaviors and ideas, especially dangerous ones.”

“As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.”

“Wood, as fuel and building material, is the unsung hero of the technological developments that brought humanity from a bone-and-stone culture to the Industrial Revolution.”

Are individual humans really autonomous actors making (more-or-less) deliberate choices? Or are those choices merely links in causal chains that couldn’t have come out otherwise? Are we free agents or just bunches of neurons and electrical signals? Many scientists tend to think the latter, but worry that telling the public would encourage or excuse anti-social behavior.

“Architects design their buildings in 3D software packages and pass them to Thinglab to print scale models. When mobile phone companies come up with a new handset, they print prototypes first in order to test size, shape and feel. Jewellers not only make prototypes, they use them as a basis for moulds. Sculptors can scan in their original works, adjust the dimensions and rattle off a series of duplicates (signatures can be added later).”