Category: ideas

Are we really on the verge of inventing machines that will bee able to tell what you’re thinking? “So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention. In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.”

“At first glance, the connection between those who loot antiquities and those who collect, trade, and preserve them seems the stuff of academic seminars and journals. Yet such is the allure of ancient treasures that, since the 1970s, this relationship has spawned global treaties, inflamed Third World nationalism, created a secretive Washington bureaucracy, and triggered federal prosecutions. To some, this international cooperation reflects the ability of the world’s nations to unite to protect an endangered world resource. To others, it demonstrates the hazards resulting when “feel-good” multinationalism collides not only with the sovereignty of the United States but with the basic human desire to surround oneself with objects of beauty.”

“For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. You have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.”

“Copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. What do we do? We extend the copyright term repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. The US goes from fourteen years to the author’s life plus seventy years. We extend protection retrospectively to dead authors, perhaps in the hope they will write from their tombs. Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.”

So Google is going to digitize vast stores of the world’s books. “Most librarians and archivists are ecstatic about the announcement, saying it will likely be remembered as the moment in history when society finally got serious about making knowledge ubiquitous. But some of the same people believe Google’s efforts and others like it will force libraries and librarians to reëxamine their core principles—including their commitment to spreading knowledge freely. Letting a for-profit organization like Google mediate access to library books, after all, could either open up long-hidden reserves of human wisdom or constitute the first step toward the privatization of the world’s literary heritage.”

“For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you’re guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the Left Behind series, America’s much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments.” But even the jaded and secular Tina Brown has to admit that Catholicism has made itself look awfully alluring over the weeks since the death of Pope John Paul II. But the election of Cardinal Ratzinger has sent what remains of the ‘religious left’ scurrying right back into hiding. “Secularists, humanists and quiet worshipers of an unpoliticized God have felt beleaguered, frustrated and unfairly disrespected. There’s no energy on the non-zealot side of the cultural debate. There’s no Voltaire, no Clarence Darrow, not even a Lenny Bruce to balance the stifling, censorious religiosity.”

For a century, scholars have been trying to read a vast trove of ancient Greek and Roman texts. “Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.”

As we learn more about how the brain works, we are starting to understand how moods and feelings are controlled by brain chemistry. So what happens to pschoanalysis – talk therapy – that has been popular since Freud? “Advances in neurology, and especially in pharmacology, have called such therapy into question. When psychological and emotional disturbances can be traced to faulty brain chemistry and corrected with a pill, the idea that sitting and talking can treat a problem such as clinical depression might seem outdated.”

Freedom of speech is under attack on American college campuses. “On one campus or another, speech that is discomforting, embarrassing, flirtatious, gender specific, inappropriate, inconsiderate, harassing, intimidating, offensive, ridiculing or threatens a loss of “self-esteem” is banned by speech codes.”

The US has been a world leader in basic research for generations. But budgets for that research on many levels is being cut. Many scientists fear that “the United States unwittingly may be positioning itself for a long, steady decline in basic research – a key engine for economic growth – at a time when competitors from Europe and Asia are hot on America’s heels.”