Category: ideas

A new study reports that the brain responds when you use your cellphone. “When the researchers looked at the brain during phone emissions, they found ‘an excitability increase in the exposed left hemisphere’ as compared to the non-exposed side of the head and the sham exposure. The effect lasted up to one hour after the end of exposure.”

“As a graduate student, as a course instructor, I have come to the conclusion that I welcome the arrival of the world — in the form of ubiquitous contemporary technology — into the stultified environment of higher education. I must also welcome these new methods of cheating because, perhaps, only under the pressure of this now powerfully armed student revolt will high school teachers and college professors finally begin to adapt to new realities and begin to actually teach and facilitate learning and assess students in real and relevant ways.”

“Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains. The productive potential of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts is attracting the attention of old-line businesses, too. For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to the network.”

What is it about lists? People seem addicted to them. “For lists today, no matter how titillating, are like pornography: Once the guilt sets in, you can’t escape feeling dirty for having lingered over them. It wasn’t always thus.”

Architecture may be the only artistic pursuit left that we really argue about. That isn’t to say that people don’t have musical, artistic, and theatrical preferences, but architecture remains “a subject that is fraught with genuine conflict, and it seems to have acquired an extraordinary capacity to make all kinds of people extremely angry about issues that range from the most intensely personal to the most diffusely political.”

Contrary to popular belief, Germans do have a sense of humor, as any native speaker can tell you. But translating English humor to German never seems to work, and the language itself may just be the reason. “At a rough estimate, half of what we find amusing involves using little linguistic tricks to conceal the subject of our sentences until the last possible moment, so that it appears we are talking about something else… But German will not always allow you to shunt the key word to the end of the sentence to achieve this failsafe laugh… The German language provides fully functional clarity. English humour thrives on confusion.”

Americans are supposed to be devout, even over-the-top, religious devotees. But we’re also buying the supposedly sacrilegious DaVinci Code as fast as the copies can be printed. What gives? “The attitudes that make Americans so ‘religious’ are the same ones that have made them such a ready market for the Da Vinci flimflam.”

Imagine you’re a Briton spending a few years in America, starting somewhere around the beginning of 2003. Two years removed from the 9/11 attacks, and a few months shy of the invasion of Iraq, how did America look to an outsider? “I have always found America exciting; but, for better or worse, never exceptional. Its efforts at global domination seemed like a plot development in the narrative of European empire rather than a break from it… The fact that it is a big country, which, like any complicated and interesting place, is full of contradictions, is axiomatic. But it is rare to see a political culture and counter-culture so enmeshed, confused and evenly balanced (in numerical terms, at least) that it is impossible to tell which is which.”

Musician and rock critic Stephin Merritt has lately become a target of several of his fellow critics, who have branded him a racist. Merritt’s crime? Making a list of his favorite songs that included no black artists, disliking modern hip-hop, and saying that he liked the song, “Zip A Dee Doo Dah.” The flame war has ignited a debate over the line between musical taste and the wider culture. Or as one writer put it, “If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone’s civil rights.”