Category: ideas

A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.

“While the broad story of luxury’s fate in the contemporary market is often told as a steady decline from class to mass, the brand is an example of an equally pronounced countertrend: lux-ing up previously workaday products.”

Maybe not. Take a look at comedy performers. “People usually talk about how the Internet destroys intellectual property,” says Christopher Sprigman. “But here the Internet enforces intellectual property. It helps to protect creativity by shaming pirates.”

A new film focuses on the (mostly) true story of the debate team at a historically black college in the 1930s, and the college is hoping that the movie will help revive its own sagging fortunes. “The film’s director and star, Denzel Washington, recently pledged $1 million to restart Wiley’s now-defunct debate team… [And] the latest windfall has extended beyond the college’s debate legacy.”

Scandals over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports always provoke outrage and disgust from fans. But take a look at plenty of professionals working outside sports, and you’ll find a seemingly endless parade of “performance-enhancing” drug use. From musicians popping beta blockers to poker players swallowing attention deficit drugs, artificial enhancement is everywhere.

“Humans have so far sent four messages into space intended for alien listeners. But they have largely been made up of mathematically coded descriptions of some physics and chemistry, with some basic biology and descriptions of humans thrown in.” The problem? “After reading it, they will be none the wiser about us humans and our achievements. In some ways, we may have been wasting our telescope time.”

The digital age has been driven by the ability to make smaller and smaller chips. “Preparing for the day they can’t add more transistors, chip companies are pouring billions of dollars into plotting new ways to use the existing transistors, instructing them to behave in different and more powerful ways.”

“Contemporary science — a topic that Americans supposedly find dull — is drawing substantial crowds month after month, even on topics as nerdy as gene sequencing and dark matter” at science cafes around America.

When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain. In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories. And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.”

“As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches — much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like. This raises some obvious questions. If people are sorted into enclaves and niches, what will happen to their views? What are the eventual effects on democracy?”