Category: ideas

Scientists say they can use a brain scanner to tell whether one person trusts another person. “The results suggest that a brain region called the caudate nucleus lights up when it receives or computes data to make decisions based on trust.”

We’re in a new era of globalization, writes Thomas Friedman. “We are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We’ve tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South.”

The Internet and its fermentation tank of constantly emerging technologies makes it unclear what ‘winning’ means anymore. It’s called right and wrong. It may seem quaintly old school to suggest that people should stop downloading culture without paying simply because it’s the right thing to do. But that may be the best option available. For starters, if “the people” don’t solve this problem themselves, Congress will, and you won’t like the solution–unless you enjoy the tax code.

Sports are beloved by fans largely because of the opportunities they present for dramatic finishes, for those heart-in-your-throat moments of great success and even greater failure. One of the greatest sports cliches is “You couldn’t have scripted it any better.” But of course, you usually could have, and the entertainment industry does so on a regular basis. Perhaps as a result of the inherently similar qualities of drama in sports and in entertainment, the line between the two worlds has blurred considerably in recent years. “Sports events are more and more about the personalities and subplots… Meanwhile, entertainment has become all about competition.”

Well, here we are again, Daylight Savings Time, and for what? For whom? Nobody knows, it would seem, and those who think they do are almost invariably wrong. Daylight Savings is there to help farmers? Nope. They hate it. Foisted on the nation by a meddling, monolithic federal government? Not true, either. “The custom rests on an illusion: that we are doing something to time — yielding an hour in the spring, recovering it in the fall. Of course, it’s not so.” And as with so many wacky ideas firmly entrenched in the American mind, this one can be traced back to that king of deep thoughts and strange utterances, Benjamin Franklin.

French president Jacques Chirac is unhappy that Google dominates his country’s internet searches. Google’s French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. So Chirac has asked his culture minister to create a home-grown French search engine. What’s wrong with le Google? “The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. ‘I do not believe’, wrote [the culture minister] in Le Monde, “that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google’s success.”

What constitutes a proof in the modern age? “Two recent examples of how computers have been used to prove important mathematical results illustrate how the field is changing…”

“The internet is changing the entertainment business from one that is driven by hits to one that will make most of its money from misses. This is good news for consumers, because it means more choice, and we all like things that will never make the best-seller lists for CDs, books or movies. And although it might sound strange, this “new economics of abundance” is already the basis of the net’s most successful companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Google.”

People in the arts spend a great deal of time bemoaning the lack of governmental support, but is the ignorance of politicians really a great surprise? After all, the arts are everything that politics isn’t: subtle, nuanced, full of deep ideas and gray areas, and imbued throughout with a belief in the intelligence of the audience. “The [UK’s] Labour party used to justify its support of the arts rather as a 19th-century curate’s wife might advocate distributing informative pamphlets to the deserving poor, by their social usefulness… This approach, of course, swaps the robe of the wizard for the coat of the social engineer: it robs art of its chance to enchant.”

“The quietest place on Earth makes its claim less than a block from a bustling liquor store, adjacent to a city bus stop, under the flight path of jumbo jets, and not far from a playground that hosts a daily scream fest worthy of earplugs. And yet, there it is: the anechoic chamber at [Minneapolis-based] Orfield Labs, an office-size studio used for testing sound equipment. Engineers tested the chamber not too long ago and found, or rather didn’t find, sound. What they didn’t find measured below the threshold for human ears, 0 decibels, and was as quiet as negative 9.4 decibels, an absence so profound that a person standing in the room for more than a few minutes would begin to hear his or her own ear making noise as their brain struggled to understand what was happening.”