Category: ideas

So the landmark Poincare problem has been solved by a mathematician, and there’s much rejoicing across the land. But “it won’t help anyone build a bridge, aim a rocket, crack a code, or privatize Social Security. Mathematicians, no dummies, like to point out that, in some unspecified future, Perelman’s theorem might pitch in to help with these problems in ways that aren’t obvious now. But its real significance is like that of the fact that a times b is equal to b times a; it’s a basic structural statement about how the world is organized. If you prefer order to chaos, that’s something worth caring about.”

The usual movie production formula is to raise the money to make it, then hope it sells enough tickets to make a profit. But Robert Greenwald has turned the formula upside down – he raised money from fans first, thn set about distributing it…

“In just a few million years, one area of the human genome seems to have evolved about 70 times faster than the rest of our genetic code. It appears to have a role in a rapid tripling of the size of the brain’s crucial cerebral cortex, according to an article published Thursday in the journal Nature.”

Ever notice how many college graduates aren’t doing the jobs they were trained for in college? Was their education a failure? Not necessarily. College taught them how to think. So is there a danger in demanding that colleges measure the specific results of the courses they are teaching?

Trivia books have become a publishing phenomenon. “Each tidbit or bound collection of factoids may be so insignificant that calling it trivia is almost an honorific. However, this growing genre signals a profound trend in America: The rise of Jolt Culture, which combines our quest for information — this is, after all, the Age of Information — with our lust for immediate gratification.”

Japan’s relaxed attitude about copyright has allowed a flourishing of fan-created art and literature. “That it not only exists but thrives is a testament to Japan’s relaxed attitudes on copyright, which have facilitated a flowering of both creative and commercial activity. American media companies, take note.”

A Russian mathematician solves one of the great proofs an then disappears. “Mathematicians have been waiting for this result for more than 100 years, ever since the French polymath Henri Poincaré posed the problem in 1904. And they acknowledge that it may be another 100 years before its full implications for math and physics are understood. For now, they say, it is just beautiful, like art or a challenging new opera.”

As The Da Vinci Code movies falls off movie screens, a blockbuster that failed to meet expectations, and the book on which it’s based also ends a long run on the best-seller lists, Jack Miles has some reflections on a cultural phenomenon and what it says about our times…

How do people use the internet? Studies are fine, but who knows whether people are being truthful. AOL though, released data on how its users search the internet, and it hasn’t taken long for some enterprising person to categorize the searches and make some observations on how people search.

Pushy parents are an unpleasant and unavoidable fact of modern life, but some experts say that the phenomenon is spiralling out of control, and kids are caught in the crossfire of adult one-upsmanship. “Where your three-and-a-half-year-old attends nursery school determines the rest of his life… from this school, he gets into the top primary, the top prep, the top public school and then, of course, Oxford and a brilliant career.”