Category: ideas

“Increasingly, British views of Australia – especially as expressed by the middle-class commentariat – take as their starting point the idea that Down Under symbolises all that is cultureless, naive and vulgar.”

“Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science.” Researchers say that “most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.”

“Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of cognitive liberty.”

Is this eco-conservation gone crazy? Maybe not. “In this perfect system, each unit of energy consumed would be somehow offset. Every industrial byproduct would reassemble into something useful and benign. Every beam of sunlight, scrap of garbage, and flush of the toilet would be pressed into service. No exceptions. Humankind would make obsolete the very concept of waste.”

What does Sophocles’ “Philoctetes” have to teach medical students about their troubled patients and themselves? “We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine,” said a director who staged a reading for some first-year Cornell students. “They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?”

“In the past, scientists had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements before those movements appeared. But researchers at Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people’s decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity – in this case, adding versus subtracting.”

“According to various surveys conducted since 1990, half of all Americans can’t name even one of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the cornerstone of the New Testament. A majority can’t name the first book of the Bible (Genesis). This suggests a curious unfamiliarity with a text that two-thirds of Americans believe contains the answers to all of life’s questions. This ignorance about basic religious and Biblical matters crosses all sorts of sectarian lines.”

“An arch-conservative cardinal chosen by the Pope to deliver this year’s Lenten meditations to the Vatican hierarchy has caused consternation by giving warning of an Antichrist who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”… The choice of Cardinal Biffi raised eyebrows in the Vatican, given his sometimes eccentric views. The cardinal gave a warning of the coming of the Antichrist during his two decades as the Archbishop of Bologna, and said that an ‘invasion’ of Muslim immigrants was undermining Europe’s Christian values.”