aamukherjee:

expose-the-light:

Ingredients of life

Illustrations of Chemical compounds by Rex

An ultra-cool set of posters! Dopamine is the one I am most familiar with and it’s a very interesting chemical not only because it causes our emotional responses, but because it controls the ‘reward system’ of our brain which in turn motivates us to repeat actions that we enjoy (even if they are not good for our overall health, as is the case with chemical addiction).

But rather than dwelling too much on the more serious effects of these chemical responses, focus more on the greatness of the posters!

Reading is a bootcamp for developing and exercising critical thinking. Without that — intellectual apocalypse! And critical thinking is about developing a point of view, and all writing is — or, should be — about arguing a point of view, implicitly or explicitly. When you bring the crowd into the equation, this concept completely disappears — because a crowd cannot have a point of view, at least not one that is simultaneously focused and authentic to each individual in the crowd.

I don’t need a focus group of strangers to tell me what I should be reading or, more dangerously, how to read what I’m reading. Decision by committee doesn’t work in creative labor, and it certainly doesn’t work in intellectual labor.

— I shared some thoughts on the future of reading, and why “social reading” isn’t necessarily a great idea, over at Findings. (via explore-blog)

There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

— 

- Susan Cain

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html

Jeffrey Kluger: The sibling bond

Were you the favorite child, the wild child or the middle child? At TEDxAsheville, Jeffrey Kluger explores the profound life-long bond between brothers and sisters, and the influence of birth order, favoritism and sibling rivalry.

Is Serendipity Lost?

It means more than a happy coincidence. And it’s under threat from the internet. Ian Leslie explains …

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2012

One day in 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates microwaves, to boost the sensitivity of radar, when he felt a strange sensation. Checking his pocket, he found his candy bar had melted. Surprised and intrigued, he sent for a bag of popcorn, and held it up to the magnetron. The popcorn popped. Within a year, Raytheon made a patent application for a microwave oven.

The word that best describes this subtle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity”. It was coined by Horace Walpole, man of letters and aristocratic dilettante. Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…now do you understand Serendipity?” These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more conducive to accidental discovery than others.

The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about by accident. The most momentous was Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, prompted when he noticed how a mould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria. Spencer and Fleming didn’t just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into innovation; only an expert on bacteria would have been ready to see the significance of Fleming’s stray spore. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.”

Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

READ MORE

Neurons v Free Will

The notion of free will is under attack again, this time from the advance of neuroscience. Anthony Gottlieb explains...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, March/April 2012

Every age finds a fresh reason to doubt the reality of human freedom. The ancient Greeks worried about Ananke, the primeval force of necessity or compulsion, and her children, the Fates, who steered human lives. Some scientifically minded Greeks, such as Leucippus in the fifth century BC, regarded the motion of atoms as controlled by Ananke, so that “everything happens…by necessity.” Medieval theologians developed a different worry: they struggled to reconcile human freedom with God’s presumed foreknowledge of all actions. And in the wake of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, philosophers grappled with the notion of a universe that was subject to invariable laws of nature. This spectre of “determinism” was a reprise of the old Greek worry about necessity, only this time with experimental and mathematical evidence to back it up.

Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?

No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. That’s why Los Altos is betting the future on an online math program from Khan Academy, and why scores of other schools and districts are clamoring to include Khan Academy in their math curriculum.

Get More Out of Google

The Connection of the Details Is What Creates Both Beauty and Madness.

sarahjuddwelch:

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.

The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

- Charles Eames

courtenaybird:

BBC News - App helps blind to send text messages

“[There is] a growing anxiety shared among the blind community that the widespread adoption of touchscreens for many machines and devices is making them ‘truly blind’… from copying machines to machines at the gym - is all coming with touch screens.”

“Blind people say I ‘see’ things with my fingers, but on touchscreens they are truly blind.”