Category: ideas

“Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.”

Wikileaks gives whistleblowers opportunity to publish secret documents. “After 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world.”

The first cathedrals, theaters and concert halls, researchers now theorize, may have been inspired by musical performances held in caves.

You could say that perfectionism is a crime against humanity. Adaptability is the characteristic that enables the species to survive–and if there’s one thing perfectionism does, it rigidifies behavior.

“One year after they met for the first time, 52 college freshmen were asked to rate their relationships with each other. By a significant margin, the first relationships they made were often the closest.”

“It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe. English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint.”

“There was nothing mad, however, about Fuller’s objectives: He just wanted to invent devices that would help humankind and protect the planet (which he dubbed, no kidding, “Spaceship Earth”).”

“The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned.”

A new brain study shows that thinking happy thoughts could help dampen cravings.

“Language is one of the best data-compression mechanisms we have. The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings. The entire literary canon may be smaller than what comes out of particle accelerators or models of the human brain, but the meaning coded into words can’t be measured in bytes. It’s deeply compressed. Twelve words from Voltaire can hold a lifetime of experience.”