Category: ideas

“What if a house had the built-in capacity to evolve? What if it could grow or shrink, or the rooms could be reconfigured, without hiring contractors and tearing out walls? An emerging movement of architects suggests that we need to start conceiving and designing houses in a new way: Not as immutable objects, expensive and painful to alter, but as flexible structures that can adapt to the inevitable changes in their owners’ lives.”

“An autograph gives people who feel intimate with celebrities something tangible to possess, a personal touch. It’s a form of cultural tourism more than anything else… but there is also a magical side to it. The most relevant concept here is manna, sacredness in the form of a power that permeates people and also crucially the things they touch.”

The IdeaFestival, which has been around since 2000, “brings together creative thinkers from different disciplines to connect ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology and education… Whether it is a festival, a concert, a speech, a convention or a book, creative thinkers say, you have to actively look for inspiration, and that takes time.”

“A paradox of human life is that the evolutionary forces that have made us cooperative and empathetic are the same ones that have made us prickly and explosive… the paired emotions of gratitude and vengeance helped us become the ultrasocial, ultrasuccessful species that we are. Gratitude allows us to expand our social network and recruit new allies; vengeance makes sure our new friends don’t take advantage of us.”

“Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna… but not [in] the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.”

A new documentary remembers Badshah Khan (né Abdul Ghaffar Khan), who “was called ‘The Frontier Gandhi’ and built an Islamic parallel to Gandhi’s violence-eschewing ideals of compassion for one’s enemies and peaceful resistance to oppression as a means of overcoming it.”

“Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.”

Their song from 1977 “Stayin’ Alive” has the perfect number of beats per minute by which to perform cpr. Research says it contains 103 beats per minute, close to the recommended rate of 100 chest compressions per minute.

“Babies as young as five months old can distinguish between upbeat and gloomy music, providing more evidence that the brain’s ability to detect emotion develops early, researchers report… Scientists already knew that babies can distinguish between elements of music like pitch and tempo, Flom said, but until now, no one had studied if they could also notice the difference between types of emotion.”

“Let’s assume that a very few people in the world share the same strange belief, say that the moon is made of green cheese. Through a process of self-selection, they find each other on the same forum… Soon, they will assume that everyone shares this conviction because only the true believers air their views and the rest stay silent.”