Category: ideas

Why is it so easy to say something in an e-mail or on a blog without having the slightest idea how it will come across to the reader? Turns out there is “a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. … And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.”

“Quite a dilemma. A man needs to feel intellectually superior to a woman to express his virility. But a woman can’t find sexual fulfillment with an intellectual man. So what’s an educated woman to do? Even if she finds an educated, high-achieving man secure enough to accept her as an equal, he’ll be too uptight to satisfy her.”

“Of the estimated 7,600 languages known in the world today, half are endangered and could be lost forever within a few decades. The extinction of ideas we now face has no parallel in human history, and most of the world’s languages remain undescribed by scientists. So we do not even know what it is we stand to lose.”

“America has been surprisingly fertile ground for Nietzsche’s ideas, ever since he was first translated into English, in 1896. This is more than a little counterintuitive, because Nietzsche challenged pretty much everything America embodies or represents, including the ideal of equality, reverence for Enlightenment rationality, and belief in God.”

“Hyperlink theory may seem like inside baseball, but the stakes are high. The ad revenues of many Web sites depend on how many times they can get you to put your mouse on a link and click it, thus spending more time within the site, racking up more page views, seeing more ads. More than that, links are the very fabric of the Web. The easy connectivity they provide is what defined the Web and made it so popular.”

Did you get flowers for Vanentine’s Day? Where’d they come from? “Our blooms are more likely to have been raised in high-altitude flower factories in Ecuador or Colombia, dunked in chemicals, flown to Miami and distributed to wholesale markets around the country. A rose cut on a Monday morning in the shadow of a snow-capped volcano might find its way to a Manhattan florist the following Friday, and then be good for a week or more with a little care.”

“The ‘fear of ideas’ that has taken root in the United States since September 11, 2001, with the refusal to grant visas to a number of academics and intellectuals, most of whom are Muslims, strikes at the very heart of American democracy. The muffling of critical opinion should be of immediate concern to all freethinking individuals. To accept such a state of affairs is to accept that the United States, in the name of the ‘global war on terror’ and national security, requires all citizens to think the same way.”

All this cool technology seems so… freeing. But after a while, you start to notice that artists are captive to the designs of the interfaces. Take movie trailers: “So just what is it that makes today’s movie trailers so absurdly inflationary? Are we living in the Golden Age of Stupid Impact? And, if so, might software have something to do with it?”

The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.

Researchers have found that rats who are sleep deprived produce fewer brain cells. “They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus.”