Category: ideas

There was a time when young artists got their energy from opposing the establishment, being subversive. So what’s happened? “Maybe today’s innovators have realised that there is little point in putting a lot of effort into being an embittered outsider youth rebel out to impress a few friends at some esoteric club.”

People in a group are much less likely to help someone in need than if they’re by themselves. “Research at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich suggests even when accompanied by another person, individuals are more likely to intervene if the situation is dangerous or violent.”

Disney and McDonald’s could be teaming up to offer digital entertainment with your Happy Meal. “Patents filed by Disney reveal plans to drip-feed entertainment into a portable player while the owner eats in a restaurant. You only get the full programme by coming back to the restaurant a number of times to collect all the instalments. McDonalds could use the system instead of giving out toys with Happy Meals, suggests Disney’s patent.”

“Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century. They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.”

There’s research to say that’s what people are afflicted with. But “the data that exist come from people with short attention spans, the kind who participate in focus groups and telephone surveys relied on by corporate research. Guess what? SAS in, SAS out. Well-educated, successful people with good incomes and long attention spans don’t waste time on focus groups or telephone marketing surveys. They’re too busy reading books, serious magazines, and long-form journalism.”

The world’s tallest skyscraper – in Taiwan – specially built to withstand earthquakes, may be causing more quakes because of its immense weight. “The pressure of the building’s 700,000 tons on the ground may be leading to increased seismic activity. The tremors could be a direct result of the loading of the mega-structure.”

Everyone talks about the importance of first lines in novels. “But they aren’t really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.”

Presented last week to city leaders, the $117-million project would involve injecting seawater under Venice to raise it 30 centimeters (12 inches) in 10 years. “Our hypothesis entails drilling 12 holes, each 30 centimeters wide and 700 meters long, within a 10-kilometer radius around the city. Each hole will pump seawater into the ground beneath Venice. At 700 meters below ground there are sand formations saturated 100 percent with water, which will expand if we put more in. This would generate an increase in volume and the raising of the floor.”

A pharmaceutical group thought it would hype its products by commissioning a novel. “The plan was to commission a fictional thriller to hype the dangers of buying prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies. But now the authors have rewritten their novel to make a drug company the villain, and PhRMA wishes it had never heard of the idea.”

“It is what neurologists call the hard problem: how does physical matter give rise to subjective experience? How does meat – the goo of the brain – become mind?” says Gordon enthusiastically, talking at 100 miles an hour during a break in rehearsals. “It is an absolutely crucial question because at stake is our identity and what it means to be human. We live with the illusion that behind every face is a self. It is the essential quality that we impose upon each other. But science tells us that it is an illusion and nothing more. In reality, the self is a story we are told by our brains. We are a fiction.”