It takes children longer to understand and use zero than other numbers, and it takes adults longer to read it than other small numbers. That’s because to understand zero, our mind must create something out of nothing. It must recognize absence as a mathematical object. - Quanta
Our findings revealed that, when people make judgments about wisdom, they are essentially linking wisdom to two key dimensions that we call reflective orientation and socio-emotional awareness. - Psyche
AI-created artworks are disrupting the accepted norms of the art world. As philosopher Alice Helliwell from Northeastern University London argues, if we can consider radical and divergent pieces like Duchamp's urinal and Tracey Emin's bed as art proper, how can something created by a generative algorithm be dismissed? - BBC
Whether AI can achieve true imagination is an open question, but for now, what separates humans from machines is not the ability to invent out of whole cloth—it’s the skill required to create something new out of something old. - The Atlantic
What an expert says: "In times of disagreement and dissent, nostalgia peaks. COVID was an example of what stimulates nostalgia. … Vintage TV wants to slow you down.” - HuffPost
“The third-generation perspective on the Holocaust is carefully hedged, defiantly distanced, explicitly filtered, supremely self-aware. These stories fundamentally do not belong to the writers or artists.” - The New York Times
Anne Appelbaum, who has written many a book on autocratic dictators, says there’s a real case for optimism, or at least against pessimism. “It is easier just to accept the idea of decline. But let’s remember what’s at stake.” - The Atlantic
“Dilemmas on how to depict a woman so that she is taken seriously and how to navigate the archival violence previously done against her, is something biographers of women must think about.” - LitHub
In Wisconsin, “'The Hay Rake Ballet' in an alfalfa field — set to opera music in front of a rapt crowd who oohed and aahed at every lift of the rakes used to move hay into rows — was a hit of the Farm/Art D'Tour.” - The New York Times
"For every university student raising cash by sharing nudes, there’s a wholesome housewife uploading DIY tips or an up-and-coming musician posting his latest tracks.” Is OnlyFans the next TikTok? - Wired
But the U.S. comprehensively remade horror - particularly historical horror, starting, but far from ending, with the Salem witch trials: “The bad conscience of the colonizers that comes back to haunt their descendants is racialized.” - Slate
A big idea known as predictive processing says that your experience of the world is a simulated model constructed by your brain... In our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. - Vox
They’ve discovered that the brain uses contextual clues to decipher meaning, implying that understanding words and sentences is a dynamic, interpretive process. - Harvard Magazine
He explains that patent offices, when assessing an invention's patentability, have been inadvertently examining the cognitive abilities of the inventor rather than the invention itself. He suggests this introduces dangerous subjectivity into the process, in terms of varying indirect interpretations of an inventor's intellectual capacity, rather than on the technical merits of the invention. - Phys
