Category: ideas

“For a decade and a half, the belief that sports teams were economic drivers helped persuade cities and states to shower billions of dollars on major league sports teams, most of it to build state-of-the-art stadiums.” But “a small community of economists who have taken up and methodically rejected many of the claims made about the economic benefits of major league sports teams: that they create jobs or bring money to local businesses or otherwise spur economic growth.” So why are cities still falling for these arguments?

“I now have more entertainment in my diet than I could ever possibly hope to consume. If entertainment was food, I’d be stuffed. I’d be grossly overweight. What does it all mean, you may ask. What are the implications of having so many choices? Well, for starters, it means I have to be very selective…”

“Violence no longer informs me. It no longer has the power to teach. It is a one-note song I’ve heard so many times it has lost its power to stun or impress or delve deep. It now merely tears at the fabric of the soul, punches holes in the anima, scrapes its knuckles on the pavement of hate, and you can shrug and roll your eyes and go watch The Hills Have Eyes or Saw II or even play some hi-res shockingly ultraviolent video game and enjoy the brutal escapism and wallow in the bloodshed while pretending it’s not slowly, quietly blackening your world view like a smoker sucking down another carton of Marlboro Reds, but deep down, where the meanings are, I think maybe, just maybe, you might be seriously mistaken.”

Seth Lloyd believes that “the universe is a gigantic quantum computer. When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you’re hacking existing systems. You’re hijacking the computation that’s already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else’s computer.”

Computers aren’t good at making intuitive choices. But a new “hunch engine” promises to improve things. “When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed — a starting point — and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees. Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor.”

we’ve wanted to be “cool” now for 50 years. “No other cultural phenomenon in the United States has lasted so long. None has determined so powerfully how we want to be thought of. And even the geekiest among us, the proudest and most combative of misfits, lepers with ulcerated noses forever pressed to the glass, have at one time or another allowed it to influence their decisions. It is that much an American standard.”

Every artist, actor, writer, and musician talks about it, but what is this mysterious thing called ‘inspiration’? “If you are a religious believer of any denomination you know, or at least you have words for, where your inspiration comes from, however mysterious it may seem… But for the more secular-minded there is not much language to talk about inspiration without beginning to sound a bit mystical, reliant on some powerful source or force that can’t quite be named but can’t quite be ignored.”

You think music is all about the sound? Nope. In Seattle, interpreters perform at concerts to translate for deaf fans. “The craft is harder than it sounds: At its best, it’s being prepared and knowledgeable enough to communicate the essence of an artist’s lyrics over the actual words. By law, venues must provide interpreters upon request. And while local ticket sellers report just a handful of requests a year — typically for big-name events — it’s been particularly busy for KeyArena, which has trotted out U2, McCartney and the Stones.”

“Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression; its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements.”

Can video games help stave off old age? Millions of Japanese believe so. “Players have to complete puzzles as quickly and accurately as possible, including reading literary classics aloud, doing simple arithmetic, drawing, and responding rapidly to deceptively easy teasers using voice-recognition software. The player’s “brain age” is then determined. A physically fit, yet cerebrally past-it 30-year-old might be told after his first few attempts that his brain is into its 50s; a retired woman could, over time, end up with a brain age 20 years her junior. The challenge, to reduce one’s brain age, is proving addictive among Japan’s baby boomers.”