Category: ideas

A 100,000 new books published in a year? 120,000? 175,000? Yikes – who can keep up? And yet, gentle reader, who wants to keep up? How many books can you read in a year? How many books are actually worth reading in a year? Fear not, Chickens Little, your innate taste will save you!

“A lot of art, especially of the past, has set out to be beautiful; a lot of art, especially of the present, has set out to be ugly. Or, if not ugly, then at least workaday in its surface sheen, for fear that too much beauty might distract from whatever hard truths the film or painting or composition wishes to tell us. And yet there has been a kind of semi-guilty underground cult of beauty that has persisted through our ugly times.”

In 1998, Germany undertook to reform its spelling. Six years on, there are big forces at work to change back to old spellings. “Backers of reform say simplification of spelling is badly needed to make life easier for schoolchildren; rolling back now would cause chaos in the classroom and cost millions. Critics say the overhaul has failed and Germany could become a land of dyslexics. Both sides have a point…”

“It seems that words for exact numbers do not exist in all languages. And if someone has no word for a number, he may have no notion of what that number means. While there is no dispute that language influences what people think about, evidence suggesting it determines thought is inconclusive.”

Is there really much relationship between boxing and philosophy? Well… “The deeper you get into the fights, the more you may discover about things that would seem at first blush to have nothing to do with boxing. Lessons in spacing and leverage, or in holding part of oneself in reserve even when hotly engaged, are lessons not only in how one boxer reckons with another but also in how one person reckons with another. The fights teach many such lessons — about virtues and limits of craft, about the need to impart meaning to hard facts by enfolding them in stories and spectacle, about getting hurt and getting old, about distance and intimacy, and especially about education itself: Boxing conducts an endless workshop in the teaching and learning of knowledge with consequences.”

“The world has forgotten that literary ‘happenings’ were once an essential ingredient of all ancient athletic festivals; for those well-rounded Greek crowds, the 90-pound-weakling writers could be as compelling an attraction as the beefcake that paraded stark naked around the stadium. In fact, we should thank the first Olympics for several crucial breakthroughs in the Western literary tradition—including the pioneering act of self-promotion by a celebrity-hungry author.”

A new study into exercise-induced fatigue shows that “the brain’s ability to judge the position of limbs is distorted when muscles are fatigued. Before this research, scientists believed athletes’ ‘clumsiness’ after a strenuous performance was caused by damage to sense organs in the muscles.”

The guerrilla art movement is all about creating art – movies, music, visual, publishing – outside the established channels of production. “Two forms in particular seem perfectly suited to the guerrilla ideal. In the activities of admirably resourceful musicians and film-makers, one sees the same broad approach: the skilful use of technology (the internet, mobile phones, digital video), along with a desire to slip free of the schedules of studios and record labels.”

Artists like success of course. “But what about being trapped by success? Being widely admired and richly rewarded for something you do, but secretly wishing to do something entirely different?” A surprising number of artists harbor ambitions beyond their renown…

Okay, so handwriing analysis has a bit of a hinky reputation (can you really tell I have problems with my mother by the way I cross my T’s?) But a new method promises accurate interpretation of handwriting. “Their method employs holography. This technique makes three-dimensional images from the interference patterns of two laser beams used to scan an object—in this case a sample of handwriting. When the holographic information in an image is transferred to a computer, that image can be interpreted as a series of troughs of varying depths, denoting the pressure of the pen strokes used to make them.”