1–20 of 22
The problem with social media isn't that we aren't sure how much privacy we want to have or how long the things we say should stick around. The problem is that social media is a gamification of social interaction, and it causes us to behave in ways that we normally wouldn't. In normal life, people don't take turns…
All day the memory of this interview haunted him. He felt that he had come very badly out of it. She had showed herself to be his superior on his own pet subject. She had been courteous while he had been rude, self-possessed when he had been angry. And then, above all, there was her presence, her monstrous intrusion…
Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No, because it is not relevant: we, too, are machines, just machines of a different type. Commander Riker has also reminded us that Lieutenant Commander Data was created by a man; do we deny that?…
What I really, truly miss is the physical trail that typing usually gives you. Typing on an actual typewriter on paper is only a softer version of chiseling words into stone.
Imagine the history of the galaxy with respect to extraterrestrial intelligence. Very early there were only first generation stars, no heavy metals and therefore no possibility of life, much less intelligence. That's Stage One. In Stage Two planets with heavy metals form from the starstuff processed in the previous…
Causality itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause—of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an…
Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into opposition. For example, the habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social insects. But still, a…
The name "ideonexus" is not an English word, but it is a combination of two words: "ideo" and "nexus." The "ideo" is a version of the word "idea" (想法) that we use in compound words, like "ideology." The word "nexus" means "intersection" (路口), "relationship" (关系), or "connection" (连接). So the name "ideonexus" is…
Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity. Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted, and…
So if you want to find a name in a phone book of a million names you can actually find any name by doing this at most 20 times. In comparing search algorithms we decide that this comparison is our 'n'. For a phone book of 3 names it takes 2 comparisons (at most). For 7 it takes at most 3. For 15 it takes 4. ... For…
It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, 'rest'. We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial 'door-nail', say, is actually forever in…
BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on…
It is possible to speculate on the very distant future of advanced civilizations. We can imagine such societies in excellent harmony with their environments, their biology, and the vagaries of their politics, so that they enjoy extraordinarily long lifetimes. Communications would long have been established with many…
[Learning is] the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there's a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it's time to die, and that will come to all of us, there'll be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life…
In front of your children, verbally speculate about other people’s perspectives in everyday situations. You can wonder why the person behind you in line at a grocery is so impatient or what the joke is when a stranger talking on a cell phone laughs. It’s a natural way to practice seeing other people’s points of…
Memory is not a single entity but a patchwork of several different forms of information storage that emerge progressively with the maturation of different brain circuits. Babies begin life with a primitive yet very useful set of memory skills; lower parts of the brain can store information, but it is at an automatic…
As the pop pundits keep reminding us, we are becoming a global culture. We share the same TV shows and movies, drink the same Coca-Cola, and shoot the same Kodak film. But this "global culture" is highly superficial—^it is only the gloss of popular culture, apparent only in what people over the world would like to…
Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat…
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have…
While about two-thirds of Latino (65%) and black (66%) adults went online in 2010, more than three-fourths (77%) of white adults did so. In terms of broadband use at home, there is a large gap between Latinos (45%) and whites (65%), and the rate among blacks (52%) is somewhat higher than that of Latinos. Fully 85% of…