Category: ideas

“This is most probably because the increase in neural activity weakens the fly’s life-support systems, they speculated. This would explain why flies, like most other animals, have hardly developed their neural capacities.”

For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity.

“The majority of scientists and thinkers in this area now consider life extension and even medical immortality possible and likely. Not long ago, most would have said it was out of the question, that death at or well before the absolute maximum age of something like 122 was inevitable.”

“It is no great leap to see our shopping malls as the successors to Paris’s arcades. Covered, privatised spaces of artifice and consumption, the mall is perhaps the symbol of our civilisation. Everything we now build, from airports to motorway service stations, museums to cities of culture draws inspiration from those visions of limitless consumption.”

“The art of complaining is very hard to master. To complain about things in my experience is always lowering. Who wants to draw attention to the fact you have been slighted? Isn’t that in itself a form of failure? Complaining stylishly and with grace and/or flair seems virtually impossible. A good complaint requires both a lightness of tone and high-handedness, humour, collusion from the other party and a quiet tenacity. This is a lot to muster when you’ve just been disappointed.”

“Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world’s biggest problems. The proposed solutions were developed by more than 50 specialist scholars over the past two years and were presented as reports to the panel over the past week.”

Ray Kurzweil “sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.”

“It’s estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember, although you know that it begins with the letter ‘T.’ Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail. Researchers have located the specific brain areas that are activated during such moments.”

“End-time thinking – the belief in a world purified by catastrophe – could once be dismissed as a harmless remnant of a more superstitious age. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism, prophets of apocalypse have become a new and very real danger, argues Ian McEwan.”

“A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.”