Posts filed under “Big Ideas”
Where Do Ideas Come From?
I had a professor in college who, on the first day of class, told us to write step-by-step instructions detailing the process of thinking. I sat there for 15 minutes but couldn’t get past what I wrote as step one: Clear your mind. But I knew that even step one was incorrect; I don’t need [...]
New Study on Tylenol and Its Effect on Moral Judgement
James Hamblin, for The Atlantic: Among people who took the placebo pill, those who wrote about existential anxiety set much higher bail ($450) [for prostitution] than those who wrote about the dentist ($300). But if they took Tylenol and wrote existentially, that sense of moral judgement seemed to be blunted. There was a tiny sample [...]
Magnet Implants Can Actually be Pretty Annoying
I recently got a comment on my post Body Hacking: My Magnet Implant that I wanted to share. It comes from a reader who is also named Dan: I know a lot of people really like these things and that’s cool but I thought it would be informative to have a dissenting view (as far [...]
Lose Lose
The Economist: Then they offered [Aaron Swartz] a deal familiar to criminal defendants everywhere: plead guilty, and get off relatively easily—in his case, six months in a “low security setting”—or take your chances at trial, and face a harsher sentence if you lose. For Mr Swartz, that could have meant a sentence of decades in [...]
Building Humans in the Cloud
Via the Huffington Post: If we understand the brain well enough, [Ray Kurzweil] says, we would be better equipped to fix its problems, like mental and neurological illnesses. He imagines a search engine capable of accessing a database of your thoughts, stored in the Cloud. It would anticipate what people are seeking before they even know. [...]
My Best of 2012
Here are the best things I’ve discovered, learned, read, wrote, made, and accomplished in 2012. There’s no particular order and not everything on the list was conceived this year, even if they were a part of my life this year. Inspired by Fogus. My favorite blog posts Learnable Programming by Bret Victor – A fantastic look at [...]