Category: ideas

How about music controlled just by thinking about what it should sound like? “The brain operates in the same units sound waves are measured in — hertz. You’re getting raw data from the prefrontal cortex but feeding it through software — a little bit from the left hemisphere and a little bit from the right.”

“A September 2005 study by Basex Inc. estimated that interruptions from e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging and other electronic communications cost U.S. companies $588 billion a year. It estimated that interruptions constituted 28 percent of the average knowledge worker’s day.”

“In the movies amnesia is bizarre, and thrilling. The star is usually a former assassin or government agent whose future depends on retrieving the bloody, jigsaw fragments that restore identity and explain the past. Yet in the real world, people with amnesia live in a mental universe at least as strange as fiction: new research suggests that they are marooned in the present, as helpless at imagining future experiences as they are at retrieving old ones.”

Anthropolists have been studying why some New Orleans communities were wiped out in the hurricane and others weren’t. “Anthropology, if it does anything well at all, is able to understand communities — the key values and concepts that hold them together and make them persist over time. In this instance, it helps us understand what leads certain groups to survive — and others to be washed away.”

Look down at your desk. Is it messy? Feeling bad about that? Well don’t. According to “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder”, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, “a clean desk really does signify an empty mind. Office messiness tends to increase sharply with increasing education, increasing salary, and increasing experience, they write.”

Arts groups, particularly successful ones, are extremely susceptible to cults of personality surrounding their most visible leaders. Andrew Adler says that the star power of some arts leaders actually works against the long-term sustainability of the groups they lead, because such organizations frequently fail to plan for a future without their stars.

Hitler comedy has officially arrived in Germany, and no one quite seems to know whether such a thing represents progress or regression in the way Germans relate to the historical horrors of the Third Reich. “Just a few years ago, painting Germany’s biggest villain as comical was almost unthinkable in Germany. [But] few have complained that Jewish director, Dani Levy, went too far by portraying Hitler as a bed-wetter or showing him barking like a dog. Instead, critics have grumbled that he didn’t go far enough.”

Eskimos have 48 different words for “snow,” right? Actually, no, they don’t, regardless of what your junior high English teacher told you, and by the way, there is no such language as Eskimo. “Anthropologists [have been] throwing around all kinds of figures for the number of words Eskimo supposedly [have] for snow without any facts to back them up.” Various efforts are underway to debunk the myth, but linguistic misinformation is often quite hard to counter, especially once the general public believes it knows the truth.

“Insights into our procrastinating ways may help explain why humans struggle with long-term problems that require immediate solutions such as climate change and mounting public debt. And by reducing human motivation to a formula, powerful computer models can be put to work to predict our choices (and perhaps create avatars that will successfully mimic us in online worlds).”

“Should the outrage of residents of America’s richest cultural cities over the sale of a painting on the open market be given the same weight as that of indigenous Peruvians deprived of ancestral Inca artifacts by tomb-raiders?”