Category: ideas

Across the UK, public debates are drawing huge crowds, speakers’ series are mobbed, and lectures are pulling in fans. The art of public talk and debate has bloomed again as people seek out others to talk. Why is this happening? One theory: “Email cuts you off, in one way, and yet it also links us all up. People are separated as they sit in front of their screen, but they are also much more quickly alerted to what’s happening out there. Public debates have become more attractive because the old places for meeting, like pubs, had grown too noisy.”

Chinese archivists are trying to save an ancient language created just for women. “Nushu, meaning women’s script, was held so securely by its speakers and writers that women used to burn manuscripts to keep them away from men, or they would bury items containing Nushu with female friends upon their deaths. The language’s origins are unclear, but most scholars believe Nushu emerged in the third century during a time when the Chinese government prohibited education of women.”

The brain’s cortex contains “at least 30 billion neurons with 1 million billion connections between them; counting one a second, it would take 32 million years to count them all. There are also multiple brain regions, 200 types of neurons, even large-scale neuronal deaths. How does such an object function, let alone give rise to consciousness?”

How did humans develop such big brains? It could be because our jaws got smaller and weaker, says a new theory. “A mutation 2.4 million years ago could have left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles, the team reports in this week’s Nature1. Lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, the researchers say.”

The American National Corpus, an “annotated body of over 10 million words” is being released. “If the dictionary is like the drawer with bugs on cards, the corpus is the jungle. The ANC collects blocks of text from newspapers, books and conversations so words and phrases can be viewed in their natural habitat – that is, in an American English context.”

“Coca-Cola is perhaps the most successful American brand ever. Each day, about 1.2 billion servings of Coca-Cola products are consumed around the globe. Coca-Cola is remarkably well-established in the world’s wealthiest consumer market. The company’s 2002 annual report noted that the average consumer in North America ‘enjoys at least one serving of our products every day.’ But once you have the entire population of the world’s richest nation using your product at least once a day, what do you do for an encore?”

If it is true, as Jimmy Carter once asserted, that nations can find themselves in a state of collective malaise, there is no doubt that Germany in 2004 would qualify as downright sickly, at least as far as its own residents are concerned. Strangely, when viewed from an objective standpoint, Germany doesn’t seem to be any worse off economically, culturally, or politically, than most other European nations, but England and France “do not seem to be in quite the despairing mood that Germany is in. Is the difference perhaps, as some have been saying, Germans just enjoy complaining? Or does it run deeper?”

The English like their mythologies to work out, to resolve themselves. But Wagner doesn’t let you do that. “Bluntly, he’s a critical component of our culture. We are compelled to make sense of why Wagner deploys myth to prove our own moral uncertainties.”

“A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.”

“With personal bankruptcy filings at historic highs, a growing number of grass-roots organizations contend that the phenomenon is fueled, at least in part, by the explosion of legal gambling in the United States over the past quarter of a century.” And here’s data to back up the claim – a study shows that bankruptcy rates are highest where casinos are.