Are cities urban anymore? Or are the suburbs moving in? New buildings across the country are offering parking, private entrances, “parks,” and other perks of suburban life – downtown. Yes, “these new buildings are designed for a very narrow slice of the population — those who can afford to spend multiple millions of dollars on a home — but it’s a slice of the population whose purchasing decisions affect all city dwellers.” – The New York Times
Category: ideas
We’ve Long Imagined Artificial Beings. It Was A Useful Exercise. But Now We’re Close To Seeing It Become Real, Will We Be Disappointed?
Ian McEwan: “The ancient dream of a plausible artificial human might be scientifically useless but culturally irresistible. At the very least, the quest so far has taught us just how complex we (and all creatures) are in our simplest actions and modes of being. There’s a semi-religious quality to the hope of creating a being less cognitively flawed than we are.” – Edge
Your Kid’s Smart. Brilliant Even. Chances Are (S)he’s Going To Fail Big Time. Here’s How It Happens
There are those whose abilities are missed by the limitations of IQ tests. And there are the many exceptional children who face barriers in later years because they never developed the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace or the wider world of social activity. – 1834 Magazine
Noise-Canceling The World: What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones
“To those who lived before headphones, it might seem as though I want to exist in the world without actually being part of it. And to some extent, that’s true. Urban Millennials like me don’t inhabit a world that allows for much privacy. We’ve been squeezed into closely packed offices, closely packed subway cars, and closely packed apartments. Everyone else’s noises are constantly everywhere, so your head is the only personal space you can get. Granted, I share it with Brian Eno and Twin Shadow, but at least the choice is mine.” – The Atlantic
E.O. Wilson On Creativity In Science And Humanities
“Science tends to advance sometimes in major jumps. Something is discovered, some mystery is solved, some system is for the first time understood and can be duplicated. When that happens, science moves quickly. I started thinking: What moves the creative arts? I thought, maybe a scientist could say something useful to innovators and masters of the humanities. I thought the next big thing could be at the interface of science and the creative arts.” Chronicle of Higher Education
Why Do Artists Tend To Be More Liberal? Study Says Their Brains Work Differently
“A recent study finds that such people are particularly good at imagining events that are far removed from their current reality. That imagination is, in a sense, their superpower, and it allows them to empathize with a wider range of people.” – Pacific Standard
Why Making Things Easier Actually Makes Some Things Much More Difficult
Tech has sold us on the idea of making things easier, of reducing the friction in our lives. But friction is how we sharpen up, get better, figure things out. It turns out that making things easier can make the bigger picture more difficult. – Medium
There’s A Reason For That: Understanding The Age Of Enlightenment
“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” – New York Review of Books
How Belief Turned Into Opinion
‘The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.’ Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain. The demands imposed on Christians by inquisitors and Puritans alike proved too much for many of them. Dissidents emerged in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who emphasised the subjectivity of religious conviction. Belief was to become opinion. – History Today
Train The Brain: How Neurofeedback Can Make Us Believe
“By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states.” – Aeon