Category: ideas

The 28.5-pound, $825, five-volume Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition is out, containing more numbers and comparisons than you can shake a stick at, all purporting to paint a useful picture of America Then & Now. But Joel Garreau says that “what it is, really, is a marvelous walk through a bizarre notion — that America, our culture and values, indeed our reality — can be described in numbers.”

Scientists have discovered that playing music helps Parkinson’s patients move better. Now a new study will try to pin down how and what music works. “We will start with metronome patterns and move up to ballet music, marches and popular music that is very dance-oriented and popular music that is not — all those types.”

Within New York’s famously provincial cultural scene, the world has always begun and ended with Manhattan. Good things could happen in the other four boroughs, of course, but until you’d made it in Manhattan, you weren’t really going to be taken seriously. So can it really be possible that Manhattan has suddenly become, well… uncool? “Is hipness a zero-sum solution? If Heath Ledger digs Boerum Hill and the Bronx is busy with poetry readings, does that mean Manhattan is becoming the plodding parent to these boisterous boroughs?”

For years cryptographers have been trying to solve the code in a sculpture that sits at CIA headquarters. “But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake. A previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed was correct for years isn’t. The new information, including what the mistaken text really says, is creating a buzz among enthusiasts who’ve been obsessed over the sculpture for years.”

Nintendo’s Brain Age software promises to make you smarter. “Developed in partnership with Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, the game promises to help you keep your brain in tip-top shape through daily exercise. As you complete the exercises, the game charts your daily progress and calculates how “old” your brain is according to the results.”

“Though the world’s diverse societies are continuously interacting, the process is producing a variety of hybrid regimes rather than convergence on a single model. Yet a belief that a universally accepted type of society is emerging continues to shape the way social scientists and public commentators think about the contemporary condition, and it is taken for granted that industrialization enables something like the way of life of rich countries to be reproduced everywhere.”

Scientists are working on a computer that could be controled by brainwaves. “We are dreaming of something like a baseball cap with electrodes in the cap that can measure the brainwaves. People could just put on the cap and have a wireless connection from these electrodes to a computer and they can play video games.”

Wonder how the shapes of everyday objects get their designs? “Once we start to look, we will find no shortage of suggestions of living forms in the furniture and houses around us. There are penguins in our water jugs and stout and self-important personages in our kettles, graceful deer in our desks and oxen in our dining-room tables.”

The classic “Physics for Poets” classes at universities are an attempt to give liberal arts majors a smattering of science. But, writes Edward Morley, “despite the effort we put into providing classes that are both relevant and informative, I am troubled by the subtext of these classes. By their very existence, these classes send two damaging messages to students in other disciplines: first, that science is something alien and difficult, the exclusive province of nerds and geeks; and second, that we will happily accommodate their distaste for science and mathematics, by providing them with special classes that minimize the difficult aspects of the subject.”

“Speed kills. That used to refer to the dangers of driving too fast, and sometimes to the drug. Now it more ominously refers to the unhealthy pace at which we live our lives, coerced by rampaging technology into cramming as much as possible into our waking hours. This isn’t good for an individual’s well-being. But even if you’re indifferent to everyone’s need for a little wa, the bean counter in you should appreciate this: It’s also counterproductive.”