Category: ideas

Scientists are trying to measure it in an experiment with the Boston Pops. “Instead of his usual suit jacket or tuxedo, conductor Keith Lockhart will wear an armband and a black Lycra top that looks more like a biking jersey. They will both be wired with a series of sensors that will measure his heart rate, movements, muscle tension, and other physiological evidence of emotion. Five musicians will be similarly wired to measure how they react to his conducting and to playing the music. In the audience, some children and adults will wear these same sensors on their arms and fingers, allowing their bodies to tell the scientists what kinds of emotional intensity they are feeling.”

“Late tonight — specifically, 123 seconds after 1:00 a.m. — the time and date, for the first time in all of humanity, will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.”

General Motors launches a website where visitors can make their own ads for an SUV. Of course many of the ads ridicule the vehicle. Think GM’s mad? Hardly. ‘We’re engaging consumers in this two-way discussion. It’s creating buzz and people are learning about the product.’ In just two weeks, more than 21,000 ads have been created. Visitors have emailed them to others 41,000 times. There have been 250,000 unique visitors to the site and over 2.4 million page views.”

“Brain-wave typing could become reality in just a few years. It would open up a world of communication with caregivers and loved ones for people disabled by ALS, cerebral palsy or high-level spinal-cord injuries. With little or no muscle control, communicating clearly, or even at all is difficult, if not impossible. Researchers in the brain-computer interface, or BCI, Group at New York State Public Health Department’s Wadsworth Center are enrolling patients in trials of a system that could enable them to send e-mail and communicate using their brain waves.”

Who drew most of the prehistoric cave paintings that have been discovered? Teen age boys. “The theory contradicts the idea that adult, tribal shaman spiritual leaders and healers produced virtually all cave art. It also explains why many of the images drawn in caves during the Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, somewhat mirror today’s artwork and graffiti that are produced by adolescent males.”

“Electronic multitasking isn’t entirely new: we’ve been driving while listening to car radios since they became popular in the 1930s. But there is no doubt that the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers, when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season’s finalists all at once. That level of multiprocessing and interpersonal connectivity is now so commonplace that it’s easy to forget how quickly it came about.”

“Economics is loosely defined as choice under scarcity. After all, in the real world, there’s only so much to go around. You can’t always get what you want, and unfulfilled desires give rise to markets. But in a game world, there’s no inherent reason for scarcity. Game designers have given us plenty of utopias where we can have all the mithril we want, to buy whatever we want whenever we want it. Problem is, those worlds turn out to be dull.”

“Perhaps the use of muzak is in part a reflection of our preoccupation with gloss and spin – buff up the surface, attend to every external area of presentation and, with luck, anything goes underneath. But more than this, the use of muzak is pernicious because it is manipulative. Its effects, like those of the constant bombardment of sexual imagery, are insidious. We should be under no illusions: the power of music to manipulate our emotions is well known and widely exploited. And formulaic muzak stimulates only the very shallowest of our emotions, arousing or lulling our surface senses to order.”

“The trouble with brainstorming is that it reduces people into impersonal little thought bites, little sound bites. It doesn’t allow them to access their imagination the way they can with avatars, and it doesn’t allow personal emotional investment. Its emphasis on nonjudgmental positivity prevents animus and its bitter, exciting battles. Brainstorming, with its image of storm troopers from faceless military platoons or free-associating advertising drones, encourages hivemind rather than originality.”

Germany comes out on top in a new study, followed by the Netherlands. Researchers say “that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc.”