Category: ideas

Volkswagen’s idea (fleshed out at thefuntheory.com) is that if you make something that’s good for people – like taking the stairs instead of the escalator – fun, people will actually do it. Their latest demonstration project is turning the stairs in a Stockholm subway station into a giant piano keyboard; step on a key and get a note. And it’s working.

“What’s more dangerous: a playground jungle gym or your office chair? As it happens, … [you’re] 85 times more likely … to fall to your death from a chair. Thats one of the many odd pairings waiting to be discovered in The Book of Odds, an online statistical encyclopedia launching tomorrow.”

“Whatever” easily beat out “you know,” which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were “anyway” (at 7 percent), “it is what it is” (11 percent) and “at the end of the day” (2 percent).

Developers have created “a program that instructs the camera to take two rapid shots if a frame has both dark and light parts. One shot exposes correctly for the dark; one shot exposes correctly for the light. The program then merges the two images into one, taking the best parts from each. And what if a camera could do the same thing for focus — take three shots, focusing on different things in each frame, and merge them into one crystal-clear shot?”

Juggling boosts the connections between different parts of the brain by tweaking the architecture of the brain’s “white matter” – a finding that could lead to new therapies for people with brain injuries.

“[W]hile we now associate the [overload] phenomenon with the internet, the printing press had a comparable effect. Until its invention, most literate people … could manage to read literally everything they could get their hands on.” The 17th century’s information management guru was one Mo. Colbert, “the patron saint of modern bureaucrats.”

“Newly published research provides a possible answer. Americans, it turns out, are more likely to be paid by the hour than workers in most industrialized nations. And people who get paid an hourly wage are more likely to link well-being to income.”

“A study of seven terminally ill patients found identical surges in brain activity moments before death, providing what may be physiological evidence of ‘out of body’ experiences reported by people who survive near-death ordeals. … [T]he spikes occur[ed] at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration.”

“Most domesticated mammals are really rather different from their wild ancestors: they often have a radically different body shape, frequently sport unusual fur patterns or markings, and it is not uncommon for them to be able to breed all year round.” These traits all seem to be by-products of genes that predispose animals to be tame.