Category: ideas

“Lethal warfare drove the evolution of altruistic behaviour among ancient humans, claims a new study based on archaeological records and mathematical simulations.”

“Abstract numerical thought is the ability to perceive numbers as entities, independently of specific things. It can be demonstrated by the human capacity to link a certain number of objects to the same number of sounds, irrespective of what the specific sounds or objects are. But whether this ability is innate or learned through culture or language wasn’t known.”

“Researchers who tickled 25 juvenile apes – including three human infants – and recorded the sounds they made say that laughter seems to be shared by all great apes.”

“8. ‘Role-playing games are just for people who can’t deal with real life.’ – There are, sadly, still a lot of people who think anyone who plays D&D must live in his parents’ basement and bathe once a month. Such people must be put straight, and immediately!”

“Practice, if simply viewed as repetition, does not make perfect but merely permanent,” notes the report, published in the journal Psychology of Music. In contrast, the authors assert, “Individual attention to novel distinctions and subtle nuances appears to alter the process of creative ensemble performance and lead to music that is more enjoyable to perform and hear.”

“The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 1011 web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain. The brain is something very complicated we don’t understand – yet we rely on it. The web is very complicated too and, though we built it, we have no real data about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on it.”

“Skinny men have new reason to celebrate. Well, kind of. Beefcakes may be able to attract women by rippling their muscles, but the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite, a new study finds.”

“I was so committed to learning how to play and to get over my near-terminal seriousness that I actually took a course: ‘Play for Grown-ups.’ The teacher, a professional recreator, had us hanging from monkey bars and flirting with eternity on a jungle gym from the first night.”

“One could look at the media universe, where mass-based broadcasting has been replaced by niche-based narrowcasting, for a parallel. (If Esperanto is a failed broadcast medium, Klingon is a highly successful narrowcasting one). More broadly still, the entire modernist project of utopianism, which produced [Esperanto inventor] Ludwik Zamenhof as surely as it produced Karl Marx, has become disreputable.”