Category: ideas

“One of the leading themes of current philosophy is that the notion of objectivity is utterly illusory. This is not some post-modern pose: the subjectivity of scientific knowledge has been proved with mathematical rigour. The upshot of these proofs is that data merely serves to update our pre-existing beliefs, and that its impact on those beliefs depends on such touchy-feely concepts as trust. There was a time when philosophers would have been content to point all this out, and then sit back with a smug smile. No longer…”

“If the computer is bringing such momentous intellectual gains, where is the evidence of it? Only 42% of the 2003 freshman class in the California State University system were proficient in math and English. SAT scores, reading levels and other measurements of achievement reported by the press show a steady decline and a consistent lowering of levels of understanding, knowledge and abilities, most markedly since the God-like computer came on the scene. Certainly there are social, cultural and economic reasons for some of it, but the most basic cause may be neurological.”

“The teachers and scholars of the Modern Language Association have been studying written and spoken language for 120 years. One of their recent projects created a map of where languages are spoken in the U.S., based on the 2000 census. The map holds some great nuggets of information.”

“Scientists are developing ways of capturing human movement in three dimensions which would allow music to be created with the gesture of an arm. It would eliminate the need for music technicians to twiddle hundreds of knobs to achieve the perfect sound. The technique could also be used for scrolling a webpage, especially useful for people with limited mobility.”

Since 9/11, the mainstream media can’t get enough of the question: ‘Why do the terrorists hate us?’ The answers tend to divide along political lines, but there is very little question that many in the Muslim world view the West as decadent, materialistic, imperialist, and dangerously secular. “But how did such ideas develop? One surprising source turns out to be a little-known group of 20th-century European intellectuals. They passed these ideas on to small groups of ardent followers, but their books and pamphlets gradually shaped a worldwide subculture of belief and devotion.”

When a power-hungry boss, an overzealous coach, or a powerful politician uses his perceived authority to slap down an underling, most people would label the guy a jerk, a bully, or worse. But Robert Fuller is taking it one step further, accusing such types of “rankism,” a serious social injustice which points up the need for society to begin tearing down traditional structures of rank, or at least to demand better treatment from those in authority. Fuller, a prominent physicist and past president of Oberlin College, is proposing some controversial societal changes to combat rankism, including the abolition of university tenure.

Bogota Colombia’s mayor had an unusual approach to getting citizens to behave. He hired mimes to “follow, imitate and mock citizens who committed public incivilities like jaywalking, picking pockets and driving recklessly. So successful were the first mimes that 400 more were trained as “traffic mimes” to monitor pedestrians at street corners. Just how the good citizens of Bogotá responded to mimes holding up signs chiding their manners, I cannot say. To my knowledge no mimes met an untimely end. But the experiment was successful enough to be replicated in Lima, Peru.”

With 35-hour work weeks and two months annual vacation, Europeans work much less than Americans. “From the 1970’s until recently, Europe followed a philosophy of less is more when it came to labor, with the result that Europeans work an average of 10 percent fewer hours a year than Americans.” But the realization is dawning that less work might not be working. “We have created a leisure society, while the Americans have created a work society. But our model does not work anymore. We are in the process of rethinking it.”

“One of the hardest things in art, outside of creating it, is to be that very first person who looks at an unknown and his or her work and says: I like it. Any idiot can second the motion. But to look at an unknown and say, ‘You, yes you, you are worthy’—that is different. That means taking a risk, to say yes where probably dozens have already said no. It is also what changes the course of an art form. And this is why I sometimes nurse the suspicion that the real gatekeeper of American literature is not the publisher, not the critic, and not Jack Warner’s fabled ‘schmucks with Underwoods’—i.e., writers. No, it is the schmuck with a Rolodex: the literary agent.”

Microsoft, that imperialist of the information-technology world, has actually succeeded in patenting the human body as a computer network. What Microsoft is proposing is to use the skin’s own conductive properties to transmit the data needed to create a network. And the firm does not stop at people. A ‘wide variety of living animals’, it says, could be used to create computer buses, as they are known technically, in this manner.”