December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Edward Glaeser: ‘Cities Are Making Us More Human’ Illustration: “The elevated sidewalk: How it will solve city transportation problems”, Scientific American, vol. 109 (July-Dec 1913)
“As opposed to the conventional wisdom, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser believes urbanization to be a solution to many unanswered problems, such as pollution, depression and a ...
8 tags
‘To understand is to perceive patterns’
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Pantheon, 2011
“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they...
6 tags
Do thoughts have a language of their own? The language of thought hypothesis The language of thought drawing by Robert Horvitz
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare the observer in the face; on the...
11 tags
Infinite Stupidity. Social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers
A review of some big events
“Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what’s fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of...