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| During courtship, males evince complex stereotyped behaviors… no, we’re not talking about anyone you know, but about male fruit flies, in whose brains courtship activates a couple of dozen neurons. > |
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| It’s not much to look at. It has the dimensions, color and surface of a rather small cauliflower. It’s taken a lot of time to figure out how it works. And within the next ten years or so, we’ll have an exhaustive model of it... > |
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| In 1984, Richard Wurman, graphic designer with a passion for making information comprehensible, sensed that technology, design and entertainment were converging. > |
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| Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe an expression of a desire. Or perhaps it’s connected somehow to the elections. Whatever the reason, for the past few days, I seem to keep stumbling across videos about evolution... > |
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| Excuse me for writing such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one. The obligatory citation for talking about concise writing is often attributed to Mark Twain... > |
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| I stands for Artificial Intelligence, or the ability of computers to develop ‘mental’ processes similar to those of human beings. A machine is considered ‘intelligent’ if it can pass the Turing test... > |
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| Sometimes someone – perhaps a student or a journalist – will ask me for a definition of the term ‘creativity’. When I respond that it is merely (merely!) finding new and useful connections, they are disappointed. > |
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| Above is an image launched into space in 1972 aboard the Pioneer 10. A message in a bottle for extraterrestrials, and an example of infographics: the art of overcoming linguistic barriers... > |
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| Kentaro Nagai moved the continents to form the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. Worldmapper morphed them to represent the proportions of specific phenomena (education, child labor, pollution, export…) in different countries. > |
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| Some writers (Feldman, for example) claim that creativity is a continuum that starts from everyday creativity (something we all experience, using language or learning a new skill) and arrives at universal creativity... > |
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| This week’s theme is metaphor. You may think metaphor is just moldy old stuff (this in itself is a metaphor), useful only to poets, but you’d be wrong. Eidetic thought – that is, thinking in terms of images – is a powerful creative tool. > |
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| The characters of Heroes, a popular American television series, all have superpowers which come in handy for saving the world: one can fly, another can travel in time, and so on. > |
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| The main character in English novelist Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity has the habit of making Top Five (or Ten, or Three...) lists of just about anything, from albums to books to potential girlfriends. > |
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