Category: ideas

“A study of more than 5,000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoked marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t.”

“Australian scientists have found how to switch hunger on and off using a molecule that targets the brain — a discovery which could stop weight loss in terminally ill patients or produce weight loss in the morbidly obese.”

“Boys and girls are different because their brains are different. This idea has driven bestsellers, parenting articles, and even – increasingly – American education. The problem is, a hard look at the real data behind these claims suggests they are simply untrue.”

“The books you read at a certain age can put you on the wrong path, even though you don’t recognize it at the time. You are too naively ambitious to get much out of them — or too naive, perhaps, not that it makes much difference either way. And by the time you realize what you should have read, it’s too late. You would understand things differently, and probably better, had you made different choices. You would be a different person. Instead, you wasted a lot of time.”

“It’s all the rage these days: crackpot proposals to automatically police the internet for copyright violations, stopping them even before they occur. From YouTube’s promise to find and stamp out copyright infringing uploads to the counterproposal from the motion picture studios and Microsoft to find and stamp out infringing uploads, everyone is getting in on the act. The problem is, it’s all lies, wishful thinking and irresponsible promises.”

Here’s a list…

Dubai is famously attempting to transform itself into the preeminent Middle Eastern destination city with architecture and art, and Philip Kennicott sees a larger message in all the progress. “Architecturally, despite all the dissonance, the strange juxtapositions of the vulgar and the sleek, the blue-chip buildings next to the shabby high-rise clad in garishly colored glass and surmounted by a pagoda folly, the emirates are essentially an advertisement to an increasingly wowed world: Look at what enlightened, corporate, efficient and non-democratic government can do.”

“Berlin continues to exert a glittering if, to some, reptilian fascination. It will always be haunted by Hitler’s ultimate evil. But it still breathes the giddy air of the 1920s — campy, wicked and darkly fun — and has become a new world center of youth culture and la vie de bohème. Today it is also a power center for the new Europe and an ever more ambitious building site for architecture rebuilt or eagerly modern. The latest testimony to that fascination is Berlin in Lights, a 17-day festival in New York.”

“The legal profession in America is taking an increasing interest in neuroscience. There is a flourishing academic discipline of “neurolaw” and neurolawyers are penetrating the legal system.”

Researchers have discovered the part of the brain that controls optimism. “When participants imagined positive future events relative to negative ones, enhanced activation was detected in the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala, which are the same brain areas that seem to malfunction in depression.”