From Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: In a series of papers studying the history of American innovation, Packalen and Bhattacharya indexed every one-word, two-word, and three-word phrase that appeared in more than 4 million patent texts in the last 175 years. To focus their search on truly new concepts, they recorded the year those phrases first appeared in a […]
Continue reading →Over at NPR, Barbara King has a post about the mostly amusing deceptions that chimpanzee mothers sometimes engage in. It’s a nice post that includes an amusing video, which I’ve pasted below; note the look on the face of the mom when she cashes in on the deception, which is centered around an exchange of favors, and take […]
Continue reading →Humans are hard-wired not to be hard-wired. That phrase, drawn from Ken Weiss, is perhaps the simplest of the many ways that Patrick Clarkin tries to convey, in his wonderful post “Developmental Plasticity and the ‘Hard-Wired’ Problem,” how thoroughly entwined are genetics and experience in shaping and constantly reshaping any organism. It’s silly, in a way, to […]
Continue reading →In the fall of 1932, the same year she fell apart in March and fainted in August, Virginia Woolf went on a happy compositional tear in October and November, writing 60,000 words in about 60 days. “All flowing into the stream of its own accord,” as she put it elsewhere. Amid this she recorded this […]
Continue reading →One of the underrated pleasures of the internet is all the old stuff we can now read — goodies that 20 years ago you could read only by going to a major library and hunting. A few weeks back, someone or something pointed me to a sort of English major’s dream hiding within The New York Times of […]
Continue reading →Last year I talked to a primatologist in his mid-80s, still sharp, still in his office most days, a pleasant spot in California, surrounded by his books and by younger colleagues who adored him. He wore khakis and a red plaid shirt and desert boots — I didn’t know you could even find desert boots […]
Continue reading →In 1864, in a radically risky move crucial to winning the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman led his army of some 80,000 men to Atlanta, burned it to the ground, and then marched to the coast of South Carolina, destroying almost all in his path. It was a wild, improbable gambit: He meant to and did […]
Continue reading →