We’ve all heard the argument: e-mail, instant messaging, and the online universe in general are killing the written word, and producing a generation of multitaskers who can’t put a simple, well-crafted, correctly punctuated sentence together. But as one linguist points out, what the internet has actually done is to get more people reading and writing than ever before, and the strange informal quirks of much of that writing are not a harbinger of literary doom. “The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language, of course — they gathered when printing was introduced in the 15th century.”
Category: ideas
Rise Of The Arty Class
“Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere – artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we’ve often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.”
Hockey & Haydn: Civic Assets That Come At A Big Cost
What does the work stoppage at the St. Louis Symphony have to do with the cancellation of the National Hockey League’s season? “Symphony orchestras and hockey teams have a much higher profile than their market clout would otherwise warrant… For orchestras and hockey teams are both considered civic assets, evidences that a community is sophisticated and ‘major league.’… Consequently, there are more and more orchestras and more and more professional hockey teams in smaller communities whose resources are insufficient to sustain them in difficult economic times.”
Looking For Quality In A Quantitative World
This year’s Academy Awards emcee, Chris Rock, recently caused a minor flap when he declared the idea of giving out prizes for artistic achievements to be “stupid” and antithetical to the very idea of art. It’s awfully hard to deny the logic of Rock’s position. “The idea of slapping a ‘best’ label on artistic endeavor is understandable; we live in a society that insists on quantification. And everyone likes to be a winner. But it’s also like trying to hold smoke in your hands… it’s easy to report the box score — everyone understands winning and losing. It’s more difficult, however, to delve into the game to find out why something succeeded or failed.”
A Machine That Measures Thrills
“What thrills us depends on our personal hopes, fears, loves and desires. But now a British designer, working with a computer scientist, is creating a machine that can measure the experience of thrill. The hope is to create an industry-standard measure that can be used to gauge thrilling experiences, and, ultimately, dynamically modify such experiences in real time. For computer gamers, the prospect is tantalizing.”
See Color Through Music
A blind student who needed to read colored maps has developed software that helps him see the colors by translating them into musical notes. The software “assigns one of 88 piano notes to individually coloured pixels – ranging from blue at the lower end of this scale to red at the upper end.”
Sahara’s Lush Pre-Desert Life Recorded In Rock Art – Now It’s Endangered
“Before the last Ice Age, the Sahara was even larger and more inhospitable than it is today. Then, some 10,000 years ago, a shift in climate brought rainfall. In the ensuing years of plenty, a pastoral way of life thrived. The desert came back with a vengeance about 3,000 years ago and, as the remaining surface water supplies dwindled, the inhabitants were forced to dig for it below the ground.” The changes were recorded in rock art, but that art is in dancer of being destroyed by oil exploration in Libya…
Hey, Remember The ’80s? Um, Yeah. They Sucked.
Right on schedule, the 1980s are huge again, the way every decade seems to be once we’re 20 years removed from it. But even as the national gurus of the zeitgeist hype the greatness of overwrought bands like The Cure; cheesy, predictable sitcoms “with a twist” (see Diff’rent Strokes); and screeching hair bands with their guitar pedals set permanently on stun, a remarkable reaction has been establishing itself in the wider population: near-complete indifference. In fact, it isn’t going too far to suggest that consumers have realized that all the marketing in the world can’t make the 1980s seems like a culturally important decade, when it was so clearly an era of materialistic greed and shallow, self-serving ear candy.
Viab-le Construction
If robots can construct buildings, why shouldn’t they be able to improvise on the job, creating form as well as function? That’s the idea behind conceptual architect François Roche’s design for an automated construction worker known as a ‘viab’. “A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable – merely viable – made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton’s output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment.”
Free For All (And Count The Returns)
Open source is the free distribution of software or information. But why give it away? “The characteristics of information — be it software, text or even biotech research—make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a “non-rival” good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use. Better still, there are network effects: ie, the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user. Best of all, the existence of the internet means that the costs of sharing are remarkably low. The cost of distribution is negligible, and co-ordination is easy because people can easily find others with similar goals and can contribute when convenient. The question is, can sharing be used to supply more than just information?”