Category: ideas

It can be creepy to feel extra alone when pods are enjoying concerts, drive-in movies, and more. But: “As we slowly adapt to living with the pandemic, many of us are realizing that the connection we miss to art and entertainment is as powerful as it is to our social relationships. It’s art, after all, be it a concert, a theater, a museum or even a theme park, that helps us make sense of or simply survive the moment we’re living in.” – Los Angeles Times

The contemplative life hits us as a kind of sudden derangement, ripping us out of the fabric of life, driving us into libraries, bookstores, and campus events in desperate efforts to meet fellow travelers. But when we get there, we find that our eccentricity, roughness, and lack of training in academic gentility make such relationships impossible. Letters go unanswered, invitations withheld, applications rejected. – Chronicle of Higher Education

Anthropologists have long told us that, as a species neither particularly strong nor fast, humans survived because of our unique ability to create and cooperate… What is new is the extent to which so many civic and corporate leaders – sometimes entire cultures – have lost sight of our most precious collective quality. – Aeon

Participants prefer experiences with happy endings to experiences that became slightly less enjoyable towards the end. Thanks to their work with fMRI imaging, Martin Vestergaard and Wolfram Schultz are also able to suggest some of the mechanical underpinnings of this preference by showing that different parts of the brain preserve and process different pieces of information from the same experience. – Wired

By cracking the genetic code, we have become able to harness the machinery of living cells to do our bidding by assembling new macromolecules of our own devising. As we have gained an ever more accurate picture of how life’s tiniest and simplest building blocks fit together to form the whole, it has become increasingly tempting to imagine that biology’s toughest puzzles may only be solved once we figure out how to tackle them on physics’ terms. – Nautilus

Today’s suit is an important rejection of the claim that the internet can only operate efficiently with monopolistic gatekeepers. Explicit in the Justice Department’s suit is that the internet is less innovative when power concentrates in a small handful of companies. – The Atlantic

Richard Ovenden’s thesis is that books can be destroyed literally, as they were by the Nazis, or symbolically, when their contents are either made unavailable or systematically robbed of their authority. As he states, in an era of fake news and “alternative facts”, it is hard not to conclude that “the truth itself is under attack”. – The Critic

In 1560, Cosimo I de’ Medici, who later became the grand duke of Tuscany, wanted a building in which both the administrative and judiciary offices of Florence could be under one roof. So he commissioned the building of the Uffizi, which in Italian means “offices.” – The Conversation

“Some have tried to identify ways in which we can discern if we are simulated beings. Others have attempted to calculate the chance of us being virtual entities. Now a new analysis shows that the odds that we are living in base reality—meaning an existence that is not simulated—are pretty much even. But the study also demonstrates that if humans were to ever develop the ability to simulate conscious beings, the chances would overwhelmingly tilt in favor of us, too, being virtual denizens inside someone else’s computer.” – Scientific American