Whoever responded to mmarlett and complained he contributed nothing is dead wrong. I have no idea what CA's are. This is the first article in like 2 years of reading slashdot that I've been stumped on acronyms or initialisms. Bad summary for a major website -- end of line.

Cold didn't have to *lead* to anything. Using the word "Led" in the title is misleading because it suggests a causal link. For all we know, having bigger brains made people leave hotter areas because they felt uncomfortable (I know I feel REALLY bad when it's hot, and I have a HUGE brain) or were more adventurous and sought to live in new areas.

If someone had a faster plane, trust me the airport delays would be figured out. Just like with US customs, you'd have prescreening and background checks and all sorts of fun things to speed things up.

Money is just an agreement about value of goods. So saying the common theme is money is saying nothing useful. What money buys is resources and goods, and if the cost of travel were less because fuel and parts (and so oil in general) were more plentiful, then we'd be doing more air travel than conferencing than today.

If resources were less limited, we'd still be increasing speed as well as other features. Such backwardization of technology is predicted by peak oil. Oil is the basis for most of our capabilities, including generating fuel and parts for space shuttles, etc. Only with a breakthrough, like fusion, will we avoid the inevitable loss of forwardization that oil has provided. Most other energy technologies, even solar, would require too much oil to create in order to satisfy our needs.

Agreed. The "motion detector" in our visual cortex must be swamped by the "true" motion (true defined by movie creator's intentions). I can too point my eyes directly at the center point but still see that the side colors are changing. So it's not that the colors stop changing, it's that the "effective motion" of the colors changing was swamped by the "true motion". Most psychology papers seem naive like this in that they think they tested one thing, while they actually tested something different. Why can't they have the intuition that random slashdot people have?

Who put Hawking in charge of the obvious?

I think the guy's conclusion is biased and uninsightful. Clearly this is a go-get-it type of research, not testing hypothesis but performing experiments and then digging or picking favorite conclusions. More likely is the background noise allows the brain to believe there is more essence to the song than there really is. It's similar with some video games and vision -- the latest graphics can actually appear worse because our internal impression was filling in the essence within the low resolution frames. Clearly there is an element of getting used to things and it would be hard to go to a low res game or recording that you weren't at all used to. But moving forward into perfect clarity always leaves the human less impressed because it dissolves the human input to the stimulus.