gboustead | May 28, 2010
Today, when I was trolling through a stack of dutifully hand-recorded interview notes and research articles with punny names such as, "Reaping the benefits," I came across a fact I had long forgotten about, from the International Food Policy Research Institute: For every dollar of additional income created in the agriculture sector, the economy as a whole will grow by about 2.5 dollars.
This bite of information stuck out at me today, at a time when I'm grappling with how to make a conversation about agriculture, the focus of "Food 2.0: Feeding a Hungry World," eye-catching to audience…
gboustead | May 24, 2010
Maybe you think you already know enough about music. After all, we've been experiencing and describing it for ages. Beethoven called music the "mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life." Others know it as the "universal language" or the "voice of angels." T.S. Eliot said "you are the music while the music lasts."
But many of these sentiments only heighten the musical mysteries legendary "wired" composer Tod Machover has spent his career trying to answer--Questions like: How can music help order emerge from the mind's chaos or conjure thoughts, emotions and memories? Can we learn…
gboustead | May 24, 2010We're delighted to have Carl Zimmer guest blog for us. Carl writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution.
What is it that makes us humans unique? Is it our capacity to learn language? To cooperate on a vast scale and build civilizations? To make fun of celebrities? To answer all those questions (except maybe the last one), scientists don't limit their research to our own species. We may be special…
gboustead | May 22, 2010
If you’re like me, you probably pay much more attention to what you see around you than to what you hear. Maybe you even “tune out” much of the time. But actually sound is just as important as sight to our existence – maybe even more so. We hear before we see in the womb. The vibrations of sound penetrate our bodies in a way that images never do. So this fascinating program is not about dry, technical information. It’s all about waking you up to the sound world around you and to the amazing way our bodies and brains are built to perceive and process sound. You may well have no idea what…
gboustead | May 20, 2010 Chuck Close, Self-Portrait. Photograph: Ellen Page Wilson/Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York
Imagine a chair. It has physical attributes: four legs, a seat, some sort of a back. Now imagine a human face. It also has physical attributes: eyes, a nose, a mouth. But, remarkably, the ways we process these features in our brains—and more crucially how we remember them—are significantly different, relying on wholly distinct neural pathways. Social memory it turns out is a completely different cognitive task than, say, remembering everyday inanimate objects, numbers and dates, or events. Nowhere is…
gboustead | May 17, 2010
You may have noticed things look a little different around here.
We’ve gussied up for the 2010 iteration of our flagship festival, which officially went on sale last week. There are still a few bugs we’re ironing out on the site (please bear with us!) and a couple of exciting programs yet to be announced, but the important thing is that tickets are now on sale. And if previous years are any indication (2008 and 2009), you may want to hurry to reserve your seats. Tickets tend to sell out very quickly.
There’s a LOT to be excited about this year. Let's see, where to begin...
Legendary…