Brainiac

Interstate highways as wildlife habitat

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:11:18 GMT

Interstate highways are where nature goes to die. This is true literally, in the case of roadkill, and it's true spiritually, too: Is there a less serene place in the world than the concrete desolation of I-95? Yet an article...

The Week in Ideas 6/17

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:04:20 GMT

Western Sahara: Why Africas last colony cant break free: Jenn Abelson on Western Saharas quest for independence from Morocco. Western Sahara was a Spanish colony (known as Spanish Sahara) until 1975 and when Spain left, Morocco and Mauritania moved...

Global warming refuges in the 50 states

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:36:56 GMT

Forget literacy rates and per capita income. In this age of rising sea levels, elevation is what's really going to distinguish states in the union. Michael Scott Cuthbert of MIT and designer Nate Barksdale have created and shared on Facebook...

"Errors in human thought...are not like errors in science."

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:31:04 GMT

After posting about John Gray's new book "The Silence of Animals" I found this talk that he gave at the Royal Society of Arts in April. There Gray concisely expressed the argument in his book. He explained that he doesn't...

The progress delusion

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:16:17 GMT

Is human history a story of progress? Its a complicated question and how you decide it probably goes a long way towards determining your basic orientation on social and political life. In that view, a new book from British political...

Unconscious passwords

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:55:47 GMT

Passwords are a pain, vulnerable both to being forgotten and to being extracted by "rubber hose cryptography" or, more colloquially, torture. An article last week in the MIT Technology Review detailed an innovative new fix for the problem being developed...

Does PRISM really work?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:36:24 GMT

Revelations last week that the National Security Agency has been conducting a top-secret digital surveillance program called PRISM spawned widespread outrage. They also prompted a secondary set of questions: Is blindly collecting gargantuan amounts of Internet data even an effective...

Color by transportation era

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:21:11 GMT

In metropolitan areas, new development has almost always followed innovations in transportation. In Boston, like other longstanding American cities, the original village center expanded as advances in technologyrailroads, streetcars, automobiles, interstate highwaysmade it easier for people to travel faster over...

Dialect maps of the United States

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:52:24 GMT

We know that dialects vary across the United States but unless you're paying close attention it's hard to remember who says exactly what, where. Take the sweet sauce known as "caramel," for instance. You've probably heard it pronounced with three...

Fundraising for gun violence research

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:22:04 GMT

Crowfunding sites like Kickstarter are best known for promoting quirky new consumer products and your best friend's latest film venture, but here's an entirely different kind of cause you can support: gun control research. Nature recently reported that economist Bisakha...

The Week in Ideas 6/10

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:09:32 GMT

How Boston changes in the summerby the numbers: Leon Neyfakh on how Boston changes when the citys 152,000 students leave school for the summer. Brookline Booksmith sells more copies of Infinite Jest (to ambitious summer readers), T ridership plummets,...

Furniture, hollowed by fire

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Think of a building scorched by fire. Its burnt hull is uniquely evocative, speaking at once to the life and destruction that preceded it. Furniture artist Tuomas Markunpoika picks up on this emotion in his series Engineering Temporality. Markunpoika takes...

Kissin' cousins the whole world over

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:00:00 GMT

It's one of those fun, intuitive things to wonder: If you go back far enough in time, don't we all turn out to be related? Recently on NationalGeorgraphic.com, science writer Carl Zimmer wrote about a new study out of the...

Middle-class parents in the Boston Public Schools

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:00:00 GMT

If youre a middle-class parent in Boston, the question inevitably occurs: Should I raise my family in the city or abscond to the suburbs, where the public schools are a more certain bet? Anecdotally, it seems that increasingly parents are...

Page-a-day tea

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:00:00 GMT

The tea world is rife with accoutrements but maybe none are cooler than this: a page-a-day calendar where each page is made from pressed tea leaves that dissolve in hot water. The Tea Calendar, as it's called, was created by...

Prestigious journals, low statistical standards

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:30:00 GMT

Top academic journals have significant influence in American life. They can make a professors career with a single article, and the results they publish carry real authority: If it was published in Nature, we think, it must be true. But...

The Week in Ideas 6/3

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:00:00 GMT

How Boston powered the gay rights movement: Leon Neyfakh on the crucial but overlooked role that Boston played in the 1970s, at the beginning of the gay rights movement. New York and San Francisco are generally thought of as...

Old faces of Havana

Fri, 31 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Old age tends to take people out of public view, but street artist JR tries to bring them back. JR, a Frenchman whose real name is unknown, has become an international art celebrity thanks to his series "The Wrinkles of...

If Roe were overturned, how would abortion rates change?

Thu, 30 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT

On May 14, Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison for killing babies outside the womb following failed late-term abortions. The horrific details from the trial intensified the countrys already supercharged abortion debateand one of the...

The lost art of sign painting

Wed, 29 May 2013 18:31:54 GMT

Following my previous post on film footage of 1926 London, here's another jolt of nostalgia: Filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon have a new documentary about the lost art of sign painting. Watching the trailer (below), it's striking how closely...

Old color: footage from London, 1926

Wed, 29 May 2013 15:30:23 GMT

At the John Adams house in Quincy, tour guides pause to let visitors to listen to the ticking of an English Grandfather clock- after noting that the ticking sound you hear today is the exact same sound John Adams heard...

Birds in Boston

Tue, 28 May 2013 18:28:10 GMT

Wild animals in cities are a strange thing. Its not unusual, for example, to see squirrels scamper or birds alight on isolated trees in the cityscape, which makes you wonder: How did they get there, and where do they...

A cannonade of wax

Tue, 28 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

A cannon shooting 24-pound balls of wax at a wall? That seems worth a second look, and art fans can get one at a recently opened Anish Kapoor retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin. Kapoor, who's British, helped to...

The Week in Ideas 5/27

Mon, 27 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Bostons Marathon Memorial: How much should we save? Ruth Graham on what to do with the thousands of objectsribbons, sneakers, bouquets, paintings, poemsthat have been left at the spontaneous public memorial in Copley Square. For now, the city of...

Wooden but not stiff: records made from maple trees

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:10:00 GMT

In early January I blogged about how the Swedish indie band Shout Out Louds was making records out of ice to promote its new single, "Blue Ice." Those records were cool but they melted, which puts them at a disadvantage...