Category: ideas

Deep Springs College is not your typical outpost of higher education. The all-male school is part college, part working cattle ranch, and, in a unique twist on the usual power dynamic, the 26 students more or less run the whole operation. “From the slaughtering of cows to the hiring of faculty, the day-to-day operations of the school are borne on the backs of 18- and 19-year-olds.”

Einstein’s theory of relativity is almost 100 years old. So how to celebrate and at the same time shed a little light on how to understand it? “The Institute of Physics has asked a contemporary dance company to produce a new work marking the centenary of the 1905 publication of Einstein’s most famous and important ideas. The show will be premiered at Sadler’s Wells theatre in May 2005, and if London audiences are wowed, a national tour is planned. ‘Dance is an expressive medium. It will be ideal for abstract concepts like the theories of Einstein on everything from tiny atoms to the dynamics of the whole cosmos’.”

Movies use borrowed music to telegraph extra-musical ideas – most of them never intended by the original composers. Movies offer a peek “into the contemporary American unconscious, into the way mass culture understands, or misunderstands, high culture. The pop associations are an important part of the music’s meaning, even if the composer never intended his music to work this way.”

“A new type of thinking machine that could completely change how people interact with computers is being developed at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories.The idea is to figure out ways to make humans smarter by improving human-hardware interactions…”

Human evolution has been rapid and sophisticated. But “where do we go from here? Have we attained perfection and ceased to evolve? Many geneticists think that is very unlikely, though few find it easy to say where we are headed or how fast. Until the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, people used to live in small populations with little gene flow between them. That is the best situation for rapid evolution, said Sewall Wright, one of the founders of population genetics. But Sir Ronald A. Fisher, another founder of the discipline, argued that large populations with random mating — just what globalization and air travel are helping to bring about — were the best fodder for rapid evolution. Which of them is right? No one really knows.”

“In the first study of its kind, three experts in the study of written language have described the common characteristics that caused three famous scripts – ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern cuneiform and pre-Columbian Mayan – to disappear. ‘Thousands of languages have come and gone, and we’ve studied that process for years. But throughout history, maybe 100 writing systems have ever existed. We should know more about why they disappear’.”

Toyota plans this fall to unveil a car that parks itself. Journalists who have test-driven the car report it works. “Self-driving systems have been in research laboratories for years. Automotive experts expect the car to make splashy headlines when Toyota officially unveils it to the public next month. It will initially be offered as a high-end feature for the $20,000 Prius, a model that uses an electric motor to assist a gasoline engine to conserve fuel.”