Category: ideas

“New research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.”

“The wine world wants its experts; some inevitably come forward to claim the mantle; and then expert and amateur demur, apologizing for the hierarchy of authority on the grounds that no one can really say that one wine is superior to another.”

“The report states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.”

The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed “blissful public congregation,” as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place.”

“Three five-year-old chimpanzees have soundly defeated nine university students while playing a computer game that tests numerical memory skills, according to a paper published today in Current Biology.”

“Ageing may be as important to electronics as it is to good wine. A plastic transistor doubles its performance if simply left to sit at room temperature for a week.”

“Google won’t disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.”

A “chart mapping the performance of older people at memory tests shows they didn’t do as well. ‘The old have a problem with this. They don’t modulate as much … they have a harder time ignoring information.”

“Neurological breakthroughs attributed to turn-of-the-century artists range from the maddeningly vague to the absurdly specific. We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions.”