Category: ideas

Barbara Ehrenreich: “Everyone knows that you won’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour unless you’re a ‘positive person,’ and no one becomes a chief executive by issuing warnings of possible disaster… [F]or those at the very top of the corporate hierarchy, all this positive thinking must not have seemed delusional at all. With the rise in executive compensation, bosses could have almost anything they wanted, just by expressing the desire.”

A Caltech scientist, using eons-old yeast recovered from a weevil trapped in ancient amber, “now brews barrels (not bottles) of pale ale and German wheat beer through the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.”

“Pleasant scents give rise to pleasant dreams, and foul smells turn fantasy to phantasmagoria: so concludes a small, unreplicated and wholly plausible study on odor and dreaming.”

“Eight years and $200 million in the making, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, or Empac, resembles an enormous 1950s-era television set. But inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say.”

“The road was completed this month as part of an ad campaign for Honda. It’s engineered to play the overture — also known as the theme to The Lone Ranger — at perfect pitch for motorists driving Honda Civics at 55 mph. But neighbors aren’t amused.”

“It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. The pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training.”

The goal is to incorporate the African locust’s “sensory-input routing methodologies” in a car, making it smart enough to avoid hitting people. “If we could trace how the locust is able to avoid each other, maybe we could program our cars not to hit pedestrians.”

“Subjects rated the pain as being a third less intense while they were viewing the beautiful paintings, compared with contemplating the ugly paintings or the blank panel. Electrodes measuring the brain’s electrical activity suggested a reduced response to the pain when the subject looked at beautiful paintings.”

“In recent years a new technology has emerged: computer programs that will drill through it all to pick out patterns and trends — information that may be useful to marketers, politicians, employers, doctors, matchmakers or national-security analysts. Such programs are extraordinarily sophisticated, and their creators need to be very clever indeed.”

“A new course in music policy starting at the University of Edinburgh this month aims to open students’ eyes to the politics of sound, teaching them about who is allowed to make music, and who is allowed to hear it, and why.”