June 2010
3 posts
Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology... →
Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family. His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”
Futuristic mega-projects by Shimizu | Pink... →
Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corporation has developed a series of bold architectural plans for the world of tomorrow. Here is a preview of seven mega-projects that have the potential to reshape life on (and off) Earth in the coming decades.
March 2010
1 post
February 2010
1 post
For the Soul of France | Book Review: WSJ.com →
Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they’re hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city’s spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica that looks like a digitized pre-Raphaelite set from...
January 2010
2 posts
Cut This Story! | The Atlantic
→
One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.
The Americanization of Mental Illness |... →
Americans, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures… For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental...
December 2009
2 posts
Twilight of the American newspaper by Richard... →
A scholar I know, a woman who is ninety-six years old, grew up in a tin shack on the American prairie, near the Canadian border. She learned to read from the pages of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room schoolhouse. Her teacher, who had no more than an eighth-grade education, had once been to Chicago—had been to the opera! Women in Chicago went to the opera with bare shoulders and long gloves, the...
It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality by... →
For many, living a moral life is synonymous with living a religious life. Just as educated students of mathematics, chemistry and politics know that 1=1, water=H2O, and Barack Obama=US president, so, too, do religiously educated people know that religion=morality. As simple and pleasing as this relationship may seem, it has at least three possible interpretations.
November 2009
1 post
How your brain sees virtual you | New Scientist →
As players who stay up all night fighting imaginary warriors demonstrate, slipping into the skin of an avatar, and inhabiting a virtual world can be riveting stuff. But to what extent does your brain regard your virtual self as you? Brain scans of avid players of the hugely popular online fantasy world World of Warcraft reveal that areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgement seem...
October 2009
3 posts
On Language - Explaining the Origins of Ms. |... →
In the Nov. 10, 1901, edition of The Sunday Republican of Springfield, Mass., tucked away in an item at the bottom of Page 4, an unnamed writer put forth a modest proposal. “There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill,” the writer began. “Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs....
Old Dictionaries | NYTimes.com →
In the opening paragraphs of Rex Stout’s novel “Gambit,” published in 1962, we are introduced to his detective hero, Nero Wolfe, as he sits in front of a fireplace, methodically ripping pages from Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, and feeding them into the fire.
September 2009
4 posts
Framingham Heart Study & Is Happiness Catching? |... →
In the reunion photos, there is only one person who visibly degrades in health as the years pass: a boyish-faced man sporting mutton-chop sideburns. When he was younger, he looked as healthy as the rest of the crowd. But each time he showed up for the reunion, he had grown steadily heavier, until the 2003 photograph, when he looked straightforwardly obese, the only one of his size in the entire...
The age of enhancement | Prospect Magazine →
A cornucopia of drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything from our memories to our trust in others.
August 2009
5 posts
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple... →
… It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing...
The Wagnerian Method | SEEDMAGAZINE.COM →
When physicist John Smith spent the night in his garden with the score to Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Richard Wagner’s four-part, 15-hour epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, he wasn’t interested in its account of the apocalyptic struggle of Norse gods for control of the world. Smith was concerned with a struggle of a different sort—one between the opera’s words and music that might elucidate...
Steve Jobs: The man who polished Apple | Times... →
Chief executive of Apple Inc and owner of Jackling House changed the world and cheated death. So why the paranoia?
How Different Groups Spend Their Day - Interactive... →
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
Work Hours Per Week Around the World |... →
Traditional working hours vary greatly around the globe, based on both economic and cultural differences. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development just released their study on average annual hours worked per worker in 2008, showing us which countries have their nose to the grindstone and which ones are more often found smelling the roses.
July 2009
5 posts
Love in 2D | NYTimes.com →
Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends.
Starting to get crowded in 100-year-olds' club |... →
It’s starting to get crowded in the 100-year-olds’ club. Once virtually nonexistent, the world’s population of centenarians is projected to reach nearly 6 million by midcentury. That’s pushing the median age toward 50 in many developed nations and challenging views of what it means to be old and middle-age.
Video: The Evolution of God | Bloggingheads.tv →
A video discussion of a variety of subjects, including polytheism, duotheism and monotheism, with Robert Wright and Mark Kleiman.
The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain? | Wired.com →
Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain. In the past year, researchers have developed technology that makes it possible to use thoughts to operate a computer, maneuver a wheelchair or even use Twitter — all without lifting a finger. But as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists...
Who Can Possibly Govern California? - NYTimes.com →
Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has an emergency button under his desk that was installed 30 years ago after former City Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a window and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
May 2009
7 posts
The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation -... →
Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.
Brain Gain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker →
Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted.
And He Shall Be Judged: Donald Rumsfeld: GQ... →
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty.
What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You?... →
Rudy Santana’s day began recently, as almost all his working days begin, with a name on a screen. The name that April morning belonged to a Massachusetts man in his mid-30s. He owed money on a credit card and a second mortgage, the screen told Santana, and was separated from his wife. He was behind in paying back $28,900.97 in debt. Which was why he was on Santana’s screen.
April 2009
13 posts
The Geography of Jobs - TIP Strategies →
This animated map provides a striking visual of employment trends over the last business cycle using net change in jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on a rolling 12-month basis. We used this approach to provide the smoothest possible visual depiction of ongoing employment dynamics at the MSA level. By animating the data, the map highlights a number of concurrent trends leading up to...
Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen... →
A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did. What sets Rosling apart isn’t...
Nixon's Undelivered Moon Disaster Speech [1969] →
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The following speech, revealed in 1999, was prepared by Nixon’s then speechwriter, William Safire, to be used in the event of a disaster that would maroon the astronauts on the moon…
What Makes Us Human?: Scientific American →
Chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans and share nearly 99 percent of our DNA. Efforts to identify those regions of the human genome that have changed the most since chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor have helped pinpoint the DNA sequences that make us human.
The Green Issue - Why Isn’t the Brain Green? -... →
The field’s origins grew mostly out of the work, beginning in the 1970s, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psychologists whose experiments have demonstrated that people can behave unexpectedly when confronted with simple choices. We have many automatic biases — we’re more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our...
NOVA | Extreme Ice | PBS →
Around the world, glaciers and ice sheets have begun breaking apart and accelerating toward the oceans faster than ever imagined possible. With his Extreme Ice Survey, photographer James Balog is trying to alert the world to this unsettling fact.
The Running Man, Revisited § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM →
… a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors.
Keeping Up With Being Kept - Making it Easy for... →
AT FIRST GLANCE, the Web site SeekingArrangement.com seems like any other dating site. Most of the men are looking for fit, sexy women, and most of the women want nice guys who can make them smile and laugh. But if eHarmony or Match.com is a chatty social mixer, Seeking Arrangement is a down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions.
PW Singer on military robots and the future of war... →
P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction — that now may not be so fictitious.
Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes... →
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
March 2009
11 posts
Kevin Brockmeier's The Year of Silence - PRI →
The boy left a note in his teacher’s tray explaining himself. He had dreamed that the dinosaur was still roaring, the note said, but so weakly that the sound could only be heard from directly inside its head. He wanted to find out if it was true.
Movie Trailers - Where the Wild Things Are →
Maurice Sendak’s classic book Where the Wild Things Are comes to the big screen in an adventure tale for every generation.
