Category: ideas

What, then, can we make of the anomaly that the elite liberals arts education so coveted today by the rich or those seeking to get rich consists largely of diatribes against the rich? – Washington Post

In online forums, well-meaning parents agonize over what instrument to pick for a child, because she is too young to pick for herself and will fall irredeemably behind if she waits. But studies on the development of musicians have found that, like athletes, the most promising often have a period of sampling and lightly structured play before finding the instrument and genre that suits them. – The New York Times

A study of nearly 7,000 older Americans found that, over a four-year period, people who felt their lives had meaning were less likely to die than their counterparts who lacked that conviction. “Purposeful living may have health benefits,” a research team led by Aliya Alimujiang of the University of Michigan writes in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The new paper by Samsung’s Moscow-based researchers shows that using only a single image of a person’s face, a video can be generated of that face turning, speaking and making ordinary expressions — with convincing, though far from flawless, fidelity. – TechCrunch

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the human brain. It’s where the sensible mature stuff happens: long-term planning, executive function, impulse control, and emotional regulation. It’s what makes you do the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do. But its neurons are not fully wired up until your mid-20s. Why? – Nautilus

While virtue theory – the construction of a moral framework around the ideal of “the good life” and related character traits – dates back to Ancient Greece, it has been commonly associated with religion. And this helps to explains why it has fallen out of fashion since the Enlightenment.But are there signs of that movement being reversed? – Irish Times

The results suggest that “ordinary variations in room temperature can affect cognitive performance significantly, and differently for men and women,” write co-authors Tom Chang of the University of Southern California and Agne Kajackaite of the Berlin Social Science Center. – Pacific Standard