Category: ideas

“Ordinary people with no special skills can use tongue clicks to visualize objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings, according to acoustic experts at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain. […] Martinez and his colleagues are developing a system to teach people how to use echolocation, a skill that could be particularly useful for the blind and for people who work under dark or smoky conditions, like firefighters – or cat burglars.”

“There are many reasons that I wish I had played Dungeons and Dragons, or any RPG for that matter, when I was younger. Sure, it wouldn’t have garnered me much in the way of cool points, but I’d ostensibly revoked mine at the door by dressing like a hippie and burying my face in books.” The game requires doing simple math, and connecting that with the fun of role-playing means D&D players get good at it.

“It was supposed to be a two-semester community artistic social experiment for a Carnegie Mellon University art class, videotaping hip late-night crowds discussing what was on their minds while they ate waffles. But the combination of homemade treats and homegrown reality show has proven to be an unusual recipe for success since Waffle Shop opened its doors last fall.”

“Giving something away means that a lot of it will be wasted. But because it costs almost nothing to make things, digitally, we can afford to be wasteful. The elaborate mechanisms we set up to monitor and judge the quality of content are, Anderson thinks, artifacts of an era of scarcity: we had to worry about how to allocate scarce resources like newsprint and shelf space and broadcast time. Not anymore.”

“A series of catastrophic failures seems to suggest that the internet is rather more vulnerable to accidents, earthquakes or misplaced ships’ anchors than people thought. At tens, perhaps hundreds, of places around the world, the net seems to be hanging by a thread. It badly needs upgrading, but clearly we can’t just tear up sections of the network and rebuild them from scratch.”

“When the world started to go digital 15 years ago, clever people in the music and film businesses were frightened because they knew how much easier it would make copying. But some of it is entirely unexpected. Wikipedia and open-source software, for instance, are the products of something that has floored economists – that people enjoy doing, and will do for free, all sorts of things that other people regard as work.”

“There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks. To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not.”

“The idea that Christians go to heaven upon dying isn’t found in the oldest books in the New Testament, such as the letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark. In this excerpt from the new book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright suggests that early Christianity adopted the idea from a competing religion in the Roman Empire.”

Because “people need something to talk about. The human desire to find common ground in conversation pushes us to discuss already popular people,” says a Stanford professor. To test this hypothesis, the research team turned not to the unquantifiable Paris Hilton and her ilk, but to the statistics-rich realm of professional baseball.

“Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin’ it – the architects of McDonald’s strategy in France were French.”