Posts filed under “Big Ideas”
Marco Arment Discussing The “Fertile Ground” of iOS 7
Marco Arment (formerly of Tumblr, Instapaper, and The Magazine) discussing iOS 7: iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient. If there’s […]
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. […]