It’s the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics. Will it ever be solved? “With a pedigree linking many of the greatest names in the field, the Riemann Hypothesis runs like a river through vast swaths of seemingly distinct mathematical territory. Andrew Wiles himself has compared a proof of this proposition to what it meant for the 18th century when a solution to the longitude problem was found. With longitude licked, explorers could navigate freely around the physical world; so too, if Riemann is resolved, mathematicians will be able to navigate more fluidly across their domain. Its import extends into areas as diverse as number theory, geometry, logic, probability theory and even quantum physics.”
Category: ideas
Backtracking On The Mozart Effect
“The ‘Mozart effect,’ which was first suggested in a study in 1993, showed that listening to 10 minutes of Mozart before a spatial skills test appeared to improve performance. Scientists soon reported a ‘Schubert effect’ and even a ‘Stephen King effect’; hearing lively prose from the author before spatial tests also appeared to improve scores. Now researchers are discovering why the so-called Mozart effect happens, and they are finding that the benefits of music lessons may have been overstated.”
Reducing Ideas To Slides (The Quickest Way To Kill Ideas?)
“Slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”
Embracing Your Inner Geek
Ordinary people are forced to learn more and more about technology. “Time and again, attractive new technologies have trickled out of the labs and into homes and offices, forcing ordinary users to develop skills that once would have seemed far too advanced for them. Early automobiles were so unreliable that drivers carried tool kits and learned to fix the balky machines. Early radio sets were handbuilt by avid hobbyists. ‘This is all part of a fairly predictable pattern. Folks have been doing that since the days of telegraphs and radios and televisions. There’s a real love of technology, and people want to get inside and tinker with them’.”
Is Technology Progress Threatened?
“The defining political conflict of the 21st century is shaping up to be the battle over the future of technology. Fortunately, technological progress doesn’t just have opponents; it also has boosters. The rise of neo-Luddism is calling forth self-conscious defenders of technological progress. Growing numbers of extropians, transhumanists, futurists and others are entering the intellectual fray to do battle against the neo-Luddite activists who oppose biotechnology, nanotechnology, and new intelligence technologies.”
The Forgotten Everyday Details
“Biography of the long-lost past poses special problems. The most basic knowledge proves elusive, often never recorded in the first place. It’s one thing never fully to know your subject’s thoughts and dreams. It’s another to visit a room, intact after 350 years, where a beam of sunlight shining through a prism produced the most famous optical experiment in the history of science, and still fail to find out whether there had been glass in the windows.”
Network Failures Are For Arts Too
Network failures don’t occur just in electrical power grids, writes Andrew Taylor. “Just think of the network of organizations, funders, and associations that create, present, support, and deliver the arts across America. These organizations and individuals are mostly running at over-capacity (long hours, low pay, bad computers, etc.). They are more interconnected than they know. Many are showing signs of burning out. And most of the generators that kept them going are cutting back or cutting out (state arts agencies, national foundations, individual donors, earned income, volunteer labor, etc.).”
More Of Our Own…
We all pay lip service to the idea of diversity – of ideas, of people. But David Brooks writes that most people want to stick to their own. “Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.”
First Words… 2.5 Million Years Ago?
“Recent evidence suggests we may have started talking as early as 2.5m years ago. There is a polar divide on the issues of dating and linking thought, language and material culture. One view of language development is that language, specifically the spoken word, appeared suddenly among modern humans between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago and that the ability to speak words and use syntax was recently genetically hard-wired into our brains in a kind of language organ. This view of language is associated with the old idea that logical thought is dependent on words.”
Seeing Trumps Listening?
Has our ability to see and interpret images surpassed our ability to hear and translate sound? “Perhaps there simply are more pictures available for our brains to interpret than there are sounds, or perhaps we are wired to process visual data especially quickly and efficiently. Scientists do know that the part of our brains that deciphers optic signals is larger and more developed than any other part of the cerebral cortex. Some think that when our brains translate aural input into sounds, they do so in a temporal fashion. It’s as if each sound were a soldier marching in formation past a reviewing stand.”