Category: ideas

“The product of four years of development, Wolfram Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.”

“A new study of 3654 Vietnam War veterans finds that men with lower IQs are more likely to suffer from dozens of health problems – from hernias, to ear inflammation, to cataracts – compared with those showing greater intelligence. This offers tantalising – yet preliminary – evidence that health and intelligence are the result of common genetic factors, and that low intelligence may be an indication of harmful genetic mutations.”

“Our brains don’t see everything – the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules.” Says Teller (of Penn and), “If the audience asks, ‘How the hell did he do that?’ then the experiment was successful. I’ve exploited the efficiencies of your mind.”

“Free will resides in a place toward the back of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests. When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless.”

“Let’s just skip over the customary jokes about 40-year-old virgins who still live in their parents’ basements. Klingon speakers have heard them all. But the insults don’t bother them, because they know … that Klingon is a sophisticated, extremely complex language that very few can master … Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable [linguistically].”

“According to new research, … [c]reative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity.”

“Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way.”

An admiring look at the man behind such ideas as the Nod Office (a sleep-in cubicle), the Dashboard Toaster Oven, the Self-Shortening Sedan (makes parking in tight spaces a snap!), Automobile Abandonment Zones (for bailing out of a traffic jam and onto a train), Homes Purchased by the Room, and so on.

“[S]ocial psychologists have begun to study what they call the holier-than-thou effect. They have long known that people tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes — to overestimate their standing in class, their discipline, their sincerity. But this self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment … and new research is helping to clarify when such feelings of superiority are helpful and when they are self-defeating.”