Category: ideas

“Huge swathes of the Western Amazon were cleared 600 years ago, though back then it wasn’t for logging, it was to make way for an urban network of towns, villages and hamlets. This means that decent chunks – some 20,000 square kilometres – of the Western Amazon forest is not, strictly speaking, what could be called “virgin” forest. It is what took over after local cultures were wiped out by European settlers and imported diseases and their towns and villages were left untended.”

Dr. Vernor Vinge’s “seminal essay in 1993, The Coming Technological Singularity, which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Dr. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.”

“German and Czech biologists have shown that cattle, along with deer, instinctively stand in a north-south direction. They appear to possess a sixth sense of magnetism. After studying Google Earth satellite images of cattle herds, along with their own observations of roe deer, the researchers realized that the animals routinely stood along a north-south axis.”

“They’ve identified a pea-size region in the brain that reacts more strongly to faces than it does to cars, dogs, houses or body parts. The evidence is overwhelming that there is a specialized system dedicated to processing faces and not other objects.”

Why do humans, “alone among species, have art. The attraction to stories, plays, paintings and music — experiences with no obvious evolutionary payoff — is puzzling. Why does the brain contain reward systems that make fictional experiences enjoyable?”

“At night when our brains are unplugged from our senses and error-correction is off, we dream furiously. And so it is with 21st-century physics. Undeterred by experimental data — it would take a particle accelerator as big as the galaxy to test some of the latest cosmological contrivances — theorists have found a new role as entertainers, scientific Scheherazades.”

Brain mapping shows that the areas for emotional and executive functions are interconnected physiologically. (Executive function governs our ability to start, stop, plan and execute actions.) Because of that, thinking positively helps to create new connections between neurons in the brain that support motivation and effort — now and in the future. As a basic concept in neuroplasticity states: “Cells that fire together wire together.”

Six years ago, Gavin Menzies “caused apoplexy among historians with his controversial theory that vast fleets of Chinese adventurers in multi-masted junks beat Christopher Columbus to the Americas and mapped the entire world centuries before the European explorers.” Now he contends that “the Chinese, once again sailing under the eunuch Admiral Zheng He, sparked the Italian Renaissance and that Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions were directly influenced by Chinese technical drawings.”

Every human culture has a tradition of music. So is there something in our genetic development that explains the attraction?

“Lotteries and gambling have been around for centuries, but randomness does now seem to be seeping out into more areas of life. Perhaps it’s an indicator of our wealth. We have large music collections, can afford to buy almost any food the planet produces and travel all over the world. The entertainment options on offer to us are almost unlimited. Trying to make an informed choice between all possible alternatives would take too long: they’re all good, so why not pick one at random? But is this a warning sign of terminal decadence?”