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Just finished Freakonomics. I really enjoyed it, really gets you to look at certain things in a different light.
NT Book Club Vol. WDYRTD
- Thread in 'General' Thread starter Started by iwhipmyheadovv,
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Freakonomics 
I recommend their podcasts which are pretty interesting
Finished up What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
I think this book will be well worth your time
Also, this book was almost as interesting as my current favorite book -- Ready Player One
I recommend their podcasts which are pretty interestingFinished up What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
I think this book will be well worth your timeAlso, this book was almost as interesting as my current favorite book -- Ready Player One
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Freakonomics was a great read. Are you guys talking about the OG version? I think there's a second one?FreakonomicsI recommend their podcasts which are pretty interesting
Finished up What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical QuestionsI think this book will be well worth your time
Also, this book was almost as interesting as my current favorite book -- Ready Player One
I havent read the second one, but I was absolutely fascinated with the story of the Superman radio program essentially being the undoing to the KKK in its heydey.
I'm in the 'What if?' myself, along with like 4 other books.
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Strong post to avy ratio
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I have yet to read Superfreakonomics, but I know Think Like A Freak basically summarizes the two.
During my recent trip to NY, I knocked out the following:
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
During my recent trip to NY, I knocked out the following:
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
“One small step for the mind …” Exciting read. Interesting Facts. Artificial Intelligence. The future of the human mind.
"In the coming decades, however, the power of neuroscience may become explosive. Current research is on the threshold of new scientific discoveries that will likely leave us breathless. One day, we might routinely control objects around us with the power of the mind, download memories, cure mental illness, enhance our intelligence, understand the brain neuron by neuron, create backup copies of the brain, and communicate with one another telepathically. The world of the future will be the world of the mind."
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” We are on a long journey to complete his wishes.
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
"The mind is no farther than our next thought, yet we are often clueless when asked to articulate and explain it."
"To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics."
Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind, writes, “Emotions are not feelings at all but a set of body-rooted survival mechanisms that have evolved to turn us away from danger and propel us forward to things that may be of benefit.”
Dr. Sperry, after detailed studies of split-brain patients, finally concluded that there could be two distinct minds operating in a single brain. He wrote that each hemisphere is “indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”
The mind of man is capable of anything … because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
—JOSEPH CONRAD
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
"All drugs basically work the same way: by crippling the VTA–nucleus accumbens circuit, which controls the flow of dopamine and other neurotransmitters to the pleasure center."
"In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy."
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
"And as a scientist, I’m not supposed to talk about my feelings.… I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair."
"Finally, there is one impact of reverse engineering the brain that is rarely discussed but is on many people’s minds: immortality. If consciousness can be transferred into a computer, does that mean we don’t have to die?"
Speculation is never a waste of time. It clears away the deadwood in the thickets of deduction.
—ELIZABETH PETERS
We are a scientific civilization.… That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge.… Knowledge is our destiny.
—JACOB BRONOWSKI
"Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation."
“Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves?”
"Meanwhile, if we need to be connected to a supercomputer to upload information, we won’t want to be tied to a cable jacked into our spinal cord, as in The Matrix. The connection will have to be wireless so we can access vast amounts of computer power simply by mentally locating the nearest server."
Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
—BILL WATTERSON
Either intelligent life exists in outer space or it doesn’t. Either thought is frightening.
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
"Success means depriving the enemy of a victory."
(Since curiosity was an essential feature in our becoming intelligent, it is likely that any alien species will be curious, and hence want to analyze us, but not necessarily to make contact.)
The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
"In the coming decades, however, the power of neuroscience may become explosive. Current research is on the threshold of new scientific discoveries that will likely leave us breathless. One day, we might routinely control objects around us with the power of the mind, download memories, cure mental illness, enhance our intelligence, understand the brain neuron by neuron, create backup copies of the brain, and communicate with one another telepathically. The world of the future will be the world of the mind."
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” We are on a long journey to complete his wishes.
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
"The mind is no farther than our next thought, yet we are often clueless when asked to articulate and explain it."
"To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics."
Rita Carter, author of Mapping the Mind, writes, “Emotions are not feelings at all but a set of body-rooted survival mechanisms that have evolved to turn us away from danger and propel us forward to things that may be of benefit.”
Dr. Sperry, after detailed studies of split-brain patients, finally concluded that there could be two distinct minds operating in a single brain. He wrote that each hemisphere is “indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and … both the left and right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”
The mind of man is capable of anything … because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.
—JOSEPH CONRAD
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
—ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
I have no special talents.… I am only passionately curious.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
"All drugs basically work the same way: by crippling the VTA–nucleus accumbens circuit, which controls the flow of dopamine and other neurotransmitters to the pleasure center."
"In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy."
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
"And as a scientist, I’m not supposed to talk about my feelings.… I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair."
"Finally, there is one impact of reverse engineering the brain that is rarely discussed but is on many people’s minds: immortality. If consciousness can be transferred into a computer, does that mean we don’t have to die?"
Speculation is never a waste of time. It clears away the deadwood in the thickets of deduction.
—ELIZABETH PETERS
We are a scientific civilization.… That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge.… Knowledge is our destiny.
—JACOB BRONOWSKI
"Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation."
“Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves?”
"Meanwhile, if we need to be connected to a supercomputer to upload information, we won’t want to be tied to a cable jacked into our spinal cord, as in The Matrix. The connection will have to be wireless so we can access vast amounts of computer power simply by mentally locating the nearest server."
Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
—BILL WATTERSON
Either intelligent life exists in outer space or it doesn’t. Either thought is frightening.
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
"Success means depriving the enemy of a victory."
(Since curiosity was an essential feature in our becoming intelligent, it is likely that any alien species will be curious, and hence want to analyze us, but not necessarily to make contact.)
The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
"While much of America’s infrastructure decays, Musk is building a futuristic end-to-end transportation system that would allow the United States to leapfrog the rest of the world. Musk’s vision, and, of late, execution seem to combine the best of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller."
"Musk, though, approaches everything from a Platonic perspective. As he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible. To the extent that rival automakers haven’t, that’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure. This position can look unreasonable or foolish to outsiders, but the philosophy works for Musk and constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits."
"If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules."
“Elon’s mind was always way beyond the present moment,” he said. “You could see that he was a step or three ahead of everyone else and one hundred percent committed to what we were doing.”
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
“Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated.” The integration mentioned by Jung—the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower—appears to be Musk’s gift. Squint ever so slightly, and it looks like Musk could be using his skills to pave the way toward an age of astonishing machines and science fiction dreams made manifest.
As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”
“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.
"My grandfather had this desire for adventure, exploration doing crazy things."
"He listed The Lord of the Rings, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as some of his favorites, alongside The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “
"The man does not take no for an answer. You can’t blow him off. I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over.”
Musk’s insistence on explaining the early origins of his passion for electric cars, solar energy, and rockets can come off as insecure. It feels as if Musk is trying to shape his life story in a forced way. But for Musk, the distinction between stumbling into something and having intent is important. Musk has long wanted the world to know that he’s different from the run-of-the-mill entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich. He’s been in pursuit of a master plan all along. “I really was thinking about this stuff in college,” he said. “It is not some invented story after the fact. I don’t want to seem like a Johnny-come-lately or that I’m chasing a fad or just being opportunistic. I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”
“Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”
“Raising fifty million dollars is a matter of making a series of phone calls, and the money is there”
It wasn’t just Los Angeles’s glitz and grandeur that attracted Musk. It was also the call of space. After being pushed out of PayPal, Musk had started to revisit his childhood fantasies around rocket ships and space travel and to think that he might have a greater calling than creating Internet services. The changes in his attitude and thinking soon became obvious to his friends, including a group of PayPal executives who had gathered in Las Vegas one weekend to celebrate the company’s success. “We’re all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on eBay,” said Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor. “He was studying it and talking openly about space travel and changing the world.”
Musk did not mind becoming the butt of cheese jokes. The more he thought about space, the more important its exploration seemed to him. He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. The average person might see space exploration as a waste of time and effort and rib him for talking about the subject, but Musk thought about interplanetary travel in a very earnest way. He wanted to inspire the masses and reinvigorate their passion for science, conquest, and the promise of technology.
"When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords."
The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal. “Even if you’re someone who writes code for your job, you need to understand how mechanical things work,” said Dolly Singh, who spent five years as the head of talent acquisition at SpaceX. “We were looking for people that had been building things since they were little.”
"Musk, though, approaches everything from a Platonic perspective. As he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible. To the extent that rival automakers haven’t, that’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure. This position can look unreasonable or foolish to outsiders, but the philosophy works for Musk and constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits."
"If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules."
“Elon’s mind was always way beyond the present moment,” he said. “You could see that he was a step or three ahead of everyone else and one hundred percent committed to what we were doing.”
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
“Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated.” The integration mentioned by Jung—the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower—appears to be Musk’s gift. Squint ever so slightly, and it looks like Musk could be using his skills to pave the way toward an age of astonishing machines and science fiction dreams made manifest.
As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”
“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.
"My grandfather had this desire for adventure, exploration doing crazy things."
"He listed The Lord of the Rings, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as some of his favorites, alongside The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “
"The man does not take no for an answer. You can’t blow him off. I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over.”
Musk’s insistence on explaining the early origins of his passion for electric cars, solar energy, and rockets can come off as insecure. It feels as if Musk is trying to shape his life story in a forced way. But for Musk, the distinction between stumbling into something and having intent is important. Musk has long wanted the world to know that he’s different from the run-of-the-mill entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich. He’s been in pursuit of a master plan all along. “I really was thinking about this stuff in college,” he said. “It is not some invented story after the fact. I don’t want to seem like a Johnny-come-lately or that I’m chasing a fad or just being opportunistic. I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”
“Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”
“Raising fifty million dollars is a matter of making a series of phone calls, and the money is there”
It wasn’t just Los Angeles’s glitz and grandeur that attracted Musk. It was also the call of space. After being pushed out of PayPal, Musk had started to revisit his childhood fantasies around rocket ships and space travel and to think that he might have a greater calling than creating Internet services. The changes in his attitude and thinking soon became obvious to his friends, including a group of PayPal executives who had gathered in Las Vegas one weekend to celebrate the company’s success. “We’re all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on eBay,” said Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor. “He was studying it and talking openly about space travel and changing the world.”
Musk did not mind becoming the butt of cheese jokes. The more he thought about space, the more important its exploration seemed to him. He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. The average person might see space exploration as a waste of time and effort and rib him for talking about the subject, but Musk thought about interplanetary travel in a very earnest way. He wanted to inspire the masses and reinvigorate their passion for science, conquest, and the promise of technology.
"When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords."
The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal. “Even if you’re someone who writes code for your job, you need to understand how mechanical things work,” said Dolly Singh, who spent five years as the head of talent acquisition at SpaceX. “We were looking for people that had been building things since they were little.”
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
"The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision."
"This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both."
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
“There is no such thing as an unsolvable problem.”
“It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device,”
“With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance,” he once said. “It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
“I grew up in small town America, so we had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke you fix it yourself.”
"By avoiding a chain of command, both at Fairchild Semiconductor and then at Intel, Noyce empowered employees and forced them to be entrepreneurial."
Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product. Nolan Bushnell scored a trifecta when he was twenty-nine, which is why he, rather than Bill Pitts, Hugh Tuck, Bill Nutting, or Ralph Baer, goes down in history as the innovator who launched the video game industry. “I am proud of the way we were able to engineer Pong, but I’m even more proud of the way I figured out and financially engineered the business,” he said. “Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money was hard.”
It was a key step toward a direct human-computer partnership or symbiosis. “The invention of interactive computing through time-sharing was even more important than the invention of computing itself,” according to Bob Taylor. “Batch processing was like exchanging letters with someone, while interactive computing was like talking to them.
"Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them."
“We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”
"Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious."
“Computers did more than politics did to change society.”
“We were looking for nonviolent weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow."
“He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, and he would answer anything and make diagrams for it,” Wozniak said. “He taught me how to make an and gate and an or gate out of parts he got—parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other. To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.”
"As the Internet goes through different cycles—it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging, and social networking—there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or startups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation. Sometimes innovation involves recovering what has been lost."
THE WEB -- Such a system, he felt, would connect people from afar so that they could complete each other’s sentences and add useful ingredients to each other’s half-formed notions. “I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together,” he said. “The really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.”17 The goal was to facilitate team creativity—the brainstorming that occurs when people sit around fleshing out each other’s ideas—when the players are not in the same place.
“Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”
His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. “You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”
"This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both."
Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quotes:
“There is no such thing as an unsolvable problem.”
“It takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device,”
“With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance,” he once said. “It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
“I grew up in small town America, so we had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke you fix it yourself.”
"By avoiding a chain of command, both at Fairchild Semiconductor and then at Intel, Noyce empowered employees and forced them to be entrepreneurial."
Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product. Nolan Bushnell scored a trifecta when he was twenty-nine, which is why he, rather than Bill Pitts, Hugh Tuck, Bill Nutting, or Ralph Baer, goes down in history as the innovator who launched the video game industry. “I am proud of the way we were able to engineer Pong, but I’m even more proud of the way I figured out and financially engineered the business,” he said. “Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money was hard.”
It was a key step toward a direct human-computer partnership or symbiosis. “The invention of interactive computing through time-sharing was even more important than the invention of computing itself,” according to Bob Taylor. “Batch processing was like exchanging letters with someone, while interactive computing was like talking to them.
"Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them."
“We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”
"Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious."
“Computers did more than politics did to change society.”
“We were looking for nonviolent weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow."
“He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, and he would answer anything and make diagrams for it,” Wozniak said. “He taught me how to make an and gate and an or gate out of parts he got—parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other. To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.”
"As the Internet goes through different cycles—it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging, and social networking—there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or startups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation. Sometimes innovation involves recovering what has been lost."
THE WEB -- Such a system, he felt, would connect people from afar so that they could complete each other’s sentences and add useful ingredients to each other’s half-formed notions. “I wanted it to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together,” he said. “The really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an understanding of cancer.”17 The goal was to facilitate team creativity—the brainstorming that occurs when people sit around fleshing out each other’s ideas—when the players are not in the same place.
“Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”
His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. “You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”
Last edited:
- 3,777
- 2,039
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2006
Knocked out 4 more gems
Pedro
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation
Pedro
"...after all my tears, all my fears, all my fights, all my money, all my honors and awards, I was used to leaving bewilderment, confusion, and anger in my wake, as well as some wonder and awe. That had been the story of my life. And that story began, just as it will end, here at la finca."
"I had the essentials, beginning with the heart of a lion. Behind every pitch lay the determination and will to win: to kill rather than be killed."
"Hard work and good chemistry, yes, there was plenty of that, especially in an age when hitters had gained an edge over pitchers. But when theory, knowledge, and talent result in execution at a dominant level, there’s some mystery and grandeur in play as well. Sometimes the magic of baseball steals the day."
"Behind every big-league pitcher stands the real person, each with his own story to tell of resilience and an offering of hope. Mine is the story of a young boy and then a man who overcame his demons, fought his battles, overcame the doubters, and ignored the taunts and jeers of the fans who acted as if they knew the man in front of them, the man who lived, loved, cried, and laughed his way from the humblest beginning to this blessed present. From the mango tree to the top of the world. A ball in my hand, flowers at my feet."
Rating: 4/5
Quotes:
“Flowers teach you something,” she said. “They teach you about how to be, how to live inside. The heart of someone is like a flower—a beautiful thing in a person and is an attraction for someone.
He stressed to me that if I ever wanted a shot at becoming a baseball player, I had to do everything like he did.
Train, run, and throw, then train, run, and throw some more.
“There are no shortcuts,” he told me. “I got you into the academy, but I can’t get you out of here.
“That part’s up to you.”
Eleodoro had spoken with me before and after the tryout. He knew what I was about. He had locked eyes with me, and I never blinked back at his intense, dark eyes. He did not see an ounce of fear. He sensed that I would show everyone that what they saw on the outside bore no resemblance to what was on the inside. Look inside my heart, I was saying. There you’ll find the answer you’re looking for.
"The fact that he had to compete with so much talent that was at Campo Las Palmas forced him to develop his ability to concentrate, his intelligence, and above all, the ability to throw all of his pitches with excellent control."
“Never quit pitching inside.”
"After all the adversity I overcame, from cultural shock, jealous teammates, distru****l coaches, and ultimately disbelief that my head and body would hold up as a big-league starter, the Dodgers prized an outsider more highly than one of their own. The Dodgers gave up on me. They turned their back on me, which is why, to this day, my back is turned on them."
"Imagine if Rivera had never blazed his Hall of Fame path in the Bronx and I had spent my peak years there instead. It’s a fun scenario to toss around, and there were others too."
Torre’s opinion was, “‘Look for a pitch and try to stay with it.’ That’s why guys took a lot out of Pedro because Pedro, to me, he was always trying to throw pitches that looked like strikes. They weren’t, because he had the ability to do that, which is very rare. I think basically we were trying to stay in the middle of the field with him. We weren’t trying to pull him, we were just trying to stay on the ball. He could embarrass you, but so be it—you can’t play this game afraid of being embarrassed.”
As usual, Joe acted surprised that I was not there.
“You’re not going to go to the meeting?”
“No. I’ve faced these guys before. What is there that I haven’t seen?”
“Well, you better find your way to get Jeter out.”
“Why don’t you and Jeter together go **** yourself, Joe.”
He had to laugh at that one, but that made me even more snippy.
"Sometimes you really find out about a person when things aren’t going so good"
Great Story:
I continued to circle the baseball field.
The cafeteria at Dodgertown had big windows that overlooked the fields, so I wasn’t surprised to hear later that Leo Posada, one of the minor league instructors, asked Chico as they sat down to eat, “Hey, who’s that guy running out there? He’s been running for more than an hour.”
Chico said, “Who?” before looking out the window. Next thing I know, Chico sprinted toward me from the cafeteria.
“Why are you running?” Chico asked.
I had been running for almost two hours in my cleats, with no water.
“Because you told me to run until you remember to stop me—did you finally remember?” I asked.
Now, I could tell, Chico felt awful.
He said, “I’m sorry, Pedro, I didn’t mean it.”
Very calmly, I said, “That’s okay. Next time, just tell me to get my tennis shoes and I’ll run forever.”
I sat down on the grass and gingerly untied my cleats, pulled them off, and saw that blood had seeped through my socks. My toes and the back of my heel were peeling, the skin was all gone, and I had sets of blisters exactly where each cleat had been pounding into the bottom of my feet.
I remember Guy and the other coaches got very upset over what had happened, especially with the intrasquad game coming up.
I told them, “No, it doesn’t matter.”
Guy said, “Tomorrow you won’t run.”
“I will run. But I just need my tennis shoes.”
2 Hilarious Parts:
"When I came back, I didn’t always have perfect attendance, mainly because there were some baseball games I wanted to play in that conflicted with my class time. One teacher decided to nip my hooky habit in the bud. I had a really short haircut then, almost completely shaved off, except for a little tuft in the front of my head. My teacher grabbed that tuft one day and shook my head back and forth."
I never heard what 40-10’s real name was, but I knew the origin of his nickname. He was a young baseball player taking an English class, and it came time for him to practice his counting. So he started to count out loud: “ . . . forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, forty-ten—”
Baseball players can’t let a beautiful moment like that just slide on by.
"I had the essentials, beginning with the heart of a lion. Behind every pitch lay the determination and will to win: to kill rather than be killed."
"Hard work and good chemistry, yes, there was plenty of that, especially in an age when hitters had gained an edge over pitchers. But when theory, knowledge, and talent result in execution at a dominant level, there’s some mystery and grandeur in play as well. Sometimes the magic of baseball steals the day."
"Behind every big-league pitcher stands the real person, each with his own story to tell of resilience and an offering of hope. Mine is the story of a young boy and then a man who overcame his demons, fought his battles, overcame the doubters, and ignored the taunts and jeers of the fans who acted as if they knew the man in front of them, the man who lived, loved, cried, and laughed his way from the humblest beginning to this blessed present. From the mango tree to the top of the world. A ball in my hand, flowers at my feet."
Rating: 4/5
Quotes:
“Flowers teach you something,” she said. “They teach you about how to be, how to live inside. The heart of someone is like a flower—a beautiful thing in a person and is an attraction for someone.
He stressed to me that if I ever wanted a shot at becoming a baseball player, I had to do everything like he did.
Train, run, and throw, then train, run, and throw some more.
“There are no shortcuts,” he told me. “I got you into the academy, but I can’t get you out of here.
“That part’s up to you.”
Eleodoro had spoken with me before and after the tryout. He knew what I was about. He had locked eyes with me, and I never blinked back at his intense, dark eyes. He did not see an ounce of fear. He sensed that I would show everyone that what they saw on the outside bore no resemblance to what was on the inside. Look inside my heart, I was saying. There you’ll find the answer you’re looking for.
"The fact that he had to compete with so much talent that was at Campo Las Palmas forced him to develop his ability to concentrate, his intelligence, and above all, the ability to throw all of his pitches with excellent control."
“Never quit pitching inside.”
"After all the adversity I overcame, from cultural shock, jealous teammates, distru****l coaches, and ultimately disbelief that my head and body would hold up as a big-league starter, the Dodgers prized an outsider more highly than one of their own. The Dodgers gave up on me. They turned their back on me, which is why, to this day, my back is turned on them."
"Imagine if Rivera had never blazed his Hall of Fame path in the Bronx and I had spent my peak years there instead. It’s a fun scenario to toss around, and there were others too."
Torre’s opinion was, “‘Look for a pitch and try to stay with it.’ That’s why guys took a lot out of Pedro because Pedro, to me, he was always trying to throw pitches that looked like strikes. They weren’t, because he had the ability to do that, which is very rare. I think basically we were trying to stay in the middle of the field with him. We weren’t trying to pull him, we were just trying to stay on the ball. He could embarrass you, but so be it—you can’t play this game afraid of being embarrassed.”
As usual, Joe acted surprised that I was not there.
“You’re not going to go to the meeting?”
“No. I’ve faced these guys before. What is there that I haven’t seen?”
“Well, you better find your way to get Jeter out.”
“Why don’t you and Jeter together go **** yourself, Joe.”
He had to laugh at that one, but that made me even more snippy.
"Sometimes you really find out about a person when things aren’t going so good"
Great Story:
I continued to circle the baseball field.
The cafeteria at Dodgertown had big windows that overlooked the fields, so I wasn’t surprised to hear later that Leo Posada, one of the minor league instructors, asked Chico as they sat down to eat, “Hey, who’s that guy running out there? He’s been running for more than an hour.”
Chico said, “Who?” before looking out the window. Next thing I know, Chico sprinted toward me from the cafeteria.
“Why are you running?” Chico asked.
I had been running for almost two hours in my cleats, with no water.
“Because you told me to run until you remember to stop me—did you finally remember?” I asked.
Now, I could tell, Chico felt awful.
He said, “I’m sorry, Pedro, I didn’t mean it.”
Very calmly, I said, “That’s okay. Next time, just tell me to get my tennis shoes and I’ll run forever.”
I sat down on the grass and gingerly untied my cleats, pulled them off, and saw that blood had seeped through my socks. My toes and the back of my heel were peeling, the skin was all gone, and I had sets of blisters exactly where each cleat had been pounding into the bottom of my feet.
I remember Guy and the other coaches got very upset over what had happened, especially with the intrasquad game coming up.
I told them, “No, it doesn’t matter.”
Guy said, “Tomorrow you won’t run.”
“I will run. But I just need my tennis shoes.”
2 Hilarious Parts:
"When I came back, I didn’t always have perfect attendance, mainly because there were some baseball games I wanted to play in that conflicted with my class time. One teacher decided to nip my hooky habit in the bud. I had a really short haircut then, almost completely shaved off, except for a little tuft in the front of my head. My teacher grabbed that tuft one day and shook my head back and forth."
I never heard what 40-10’s real name was, but I knew the origin of his nickname. He was a young baseball player taking an English class, and it came time for him to practice his counting. So he started to count out loud: “ . . . forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, forty-ten—”
Baseball players can’t let a beautiful moment like that just slide on by.
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
‘Why do you think it is necessary to collect information on the majority of the public in order to protect us from the minority of potential evil-doers?’
It had started as a gamble. But now the material was becoming a scoop to end all scoops. What Snowden revealed was looking more and more like a curtain dramatically pulled away to reveal the true nature of things. As the plane came in to land, the crowded lights of Hong Kong twinkling below, there was for the first time a sense of certainty. Greenwald had no more doubts. Snowden was real. His information was real. Everything was real.
‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’ -- GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
The zombies were the public, unaware that the iPhone offered the spy agency new snooping capabilities beyond the imagination of the original Big Brother. The ‘paying customers’ had become Orwell’s mindless drones.
‘This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.’
‘The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon … In the end [it] is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.’
It had started as a gamble. But now the material was becoming a scoop to end all scoops. What Snowden revealed was looking more and more like a curtain dramatically pulled away to reveal the true nature of things. As the plane came in to land, the crowded lights of Hong Kong twinkling below, there was for the first time a sense of certainty. Greenwald had no more doubts. Snowden was real. His information was real. Everything was real.
‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’ -- GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
The zombies were the public, unaware that the iPhone offered the spy agency new snooping capabilities beyond the imagination of the original Big Brother. The ‘paying customers’ had become Orwell’s mindless drones.
‘This kind of deception from a world leader is not justice, and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile. These are the old, bad tools of political aggression. Their purpose is to frighten, not me, but those who would come after me.’
‘The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon … In the end [it] is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.’
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
"The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering."
"The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering."
"Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time. Unless we repeat things over and over, they tend to slip from our grasp. Everyone knows our working memory stinks. Miller’s paper explained that it stinks within very specific parameters. Some people can hold as few as five things in their head at any given time, a few people can hold as many as nine, but the “magical number seven” seems to be the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory. To make matters worse, those seven things only stick around for a few seconds, and often not at all if we’re distracted. This fundamental limitation, which we all share, is what makes us find the feats of memory gurus so amazing."
"Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories."
"Ed sent me a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.” I copied that thought onto a Post-it note and stuck it on my wall. Then I tore it down and memorized it."
“The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate,” he told them, while I sat in the back of his classroom. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”
They did away with rote memorization and replaced it with a new kind of “experiential learning.” Students would study biology not by memorizing plant anatomy from a textbook but by planting seeds and tending gardens. They’d learn arithmetic not through times tables but through baking recipes. Dewey declared, “I would have a child say not, ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced.’ ”
“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
"The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering."
"Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time. Unless we repeat things over and over, they tend to slip from our grasp. Everyone knows our working memory stinks. Miller’s paper explained that it stinks within very specific parameters. Some people can hold as few as five things in their head at any given time, a few people can hold as many as nine, but the “magical number seven” seems to be the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory. To make matters worse, those seven things only stick around for a few seconds, and often not at all if we’re distracted. This fundamental limitation, which we all share, is what makes us find the feats of memory gurus so amazing."
"Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories."
"Ed sent me a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.” I copied that thought onto a Post-it note and stuck it on my wall. Then I tore it down and memorized it."
“The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate,” he told them, while I sat in the back of his classroom. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”
They did away with rote memorization and replaced it with a new kind of “experiential learning.” Students would study biology not by memorizing plant anatomy from a textbook but by planting seeds and tending gardens. They’d learn arithmetic not through times tables but through baking recipes. Dewey declared, “I would have a child say not, ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced.’ ”
“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation
"I was getting pulled into something much larger than myself. The yearning to know about nature and where or how we fit in is deep within all of us. As I learned about evolution and descent by natural selection, the answers fell into place."
"I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble."
"The only way to get the answers is to keep looking at living things and learning more about the process by which we all came to be. Evolution happens here no matter how we all got started. But now we can start to ask meaningfully about origins and destinies as well. We will go to thrilling places—unimaginable places—if only we keep our minds open to new ideas, our faculties keen to significant pieces of evidence, our youthful curiosities forever engaged. Where did we come from? Are we alone? Search on!"
Rating: 4/5
Quotes:
"Inherent in this rejection of evolution is the idea that your curiosity about the world is misplaced and your common sense is wrong. This attack on reason is an attack on all of us. Children who accept this ludicrous perspective will find themselves opposed to progress. They will become society’s burdens rather than its producers, a prospect that I find very troubling. Not only that, these kids will never feel the joy of discovery that science brings. They will have to suppress the basic human curiosity that leads to asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries. They will miss out on countless exciting adventures. We’re robbing them of basic knowledge about their world and the joy that comes with it. It breaks my heart."
"By inspiring people to learn the fundamental features of nature described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, creationists can actually inspire a richer appreciation of the mechanism of evolution"
"Evolution snaps into focus when you realize how fantastically old our planet is."
"I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet, and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions—from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life—will be found in not too much more time."
"Seeking to link cause and effect, Lamarck speculated that this supposed ability to change or modify the traits passed on to offspring was the result of a complexifying force. If an animal wanted to eat certain leaves, for example, it might develop the right kind of teeth for it, and then pass that beneficial new trait to its offspring. This came to be called the inheritance of acquired traits. It would be a tendency or agent in nature that helps the successive generations build on beneficial modifications that resulted from a previous generation’s effort."
"Evolution happens as each generation of living things interacts with its environment and reproduces. Lamarck got at least that part of it right. Those natural designs that survive to reproduce pass on their genes. Those that don’t successfully reproduce disappear; their genes disappear as well. It’s survival of the hang-in-there’s, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs."
"What I find so compelling about evolution, convergent evolution especially, is that it is clearly a fundamental law of nature, like the laws of gravitation, electromagnetism, and heat transfer that shape our world. And yet it is much more personal than those other laws, because we are a direct consequence of it. Stranger still, we can understand it: nature comprehending itself from within."
"A future that makes this technology available to all of us would be a bright one indeed. It would be a life-affirming result of our understanding of evolution, and the many historical steps that got us to this point. First scientists including Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist, discovered the microscopic world. Then other scientists discovered that our immune system could be trained or induced to fight specific diseases that it’s exposed to. Then scientists identified specific bacteria and specific viruses. Then scientists discovered chemicals or molecules that disrupt cell walls and membranes of certain bacteria. Then scientists discovered that bacteria fight each other. For example, way down in your intestines, there are generally three different types of Escherichia coli fighting each other with specialized bacteriocins all the time. This is what researchers mean when they talk about “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Science is a beautifully cumulative process."
"Evolutionary theory benefited from medicine, and now medicine benefits from evolutionary theory."
"We might say that we are a lucky bunch to be alive right now. But it wasn’t luck. It was a strategy; it was science. You are here because a large number of people worked together around the world and across the centuries to understand how the natural world really works."
“To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
"The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown."
"We’ve been changing faster than ever over the past ten thousand years, and probably up through the past few hundred years. We like to think we’re immune to evolution, that we’ve moved beyond it, but we’re still in the thick of it. We just can’t quite see the forest for the trees."
"There are places in rural Africa and rural China, where people have never made a phone call of any kind. The singularity won’t affect them for some time, if at all."
"By the way, what is the sexiest thing about a woman? This is not a trick question. It does not require men to cower fearing a politically incorrect secondary remark or facial gesture. In my opinion, the sexiest thing about a woman is her smile. If the woman doesn’t smile, or doesn’t smile well, men will not dig her. They will look for other women, who smile well. What’s involved in smiling? Good teeth, attentiveness, engaging eyes, and the ability to be happy. Each of these is an apparently inheritable trait. Each is not going to be much affected by sleek computers hooked up to a nest of frozen heads.
A smile comes from deep within. If it’s not genuine we can tell, albeit not consciously, and often not right away. "
"Just think what it would mean if one of those distant bodies is spewing some heretofore-unknown type of life into deep space, or if life awaits sheltered under a rock on Mars. What if that life is like us? What if it’s totally different? Whatever the answer, the discovery would change the way we all think about what it means to be a living thing. It will tell us about the different ways in which life can arise and evolve. It would give us, for the first time in history, concrete proof that we are not alone in the universe."
"These ideas would merely be arcane musings were it not for the fascination we all feel about understanding our origin. There is no more dramatic way to test, and extend, the limits of what we have learned about evolution than by searching for evidence that it has occurred on other worlds as well. The answer will drive new technologies. It will inspire future generations of scientists. And it may revolutionize both our practical and our philosophical understandings of what it means to be human."
"We are still sorting out the thick and tangled branches of the Tree of Life; only within the past decade have biologists identified the giant viruses that help build the case that they qualify as a fourth domain of life. The harder we push on the search for the origin of life, the more surprises we find."
"I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble."
"The only way to get the answers is to keep looking at living things and learning more about the process by which we all came to be. Evolution happens here no matter how we all got started. But now we can start to ask meaningfully about origins and destinies as well. We will go to thrilling places—unimaginable places—if only we keep our minds open to new ideas, our faculties keen to significant pieces of evidence, our youthful curiosities forever engaged. Where did we come from? Are we alone? Search on!"
Rating: 4/5
Quotes:
"Inherent in this rejection of evolution is the idea that your curiosity about the world is misplaced and your common sense is wrong. This attack on reason is an attack on all of us. Children who accept this ludicrous perspective will find themselves opposed to progress. They will become society’s burdens rather than its producers, a prospect that I find very troubling. Not only that, these kids will never feel the joy of discovery that science brings. They will have to suppress the basic human curiosity that leads to asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries. They will miss out on countless exciting adventures. We’re robbing them of basic knowledge about their world and the joy that comes with it. It breaks my heart."
"By inspiring people to learn the fundamental features of nature described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, creationists can actually inspire a richer appreciation of the mechanism of evolution"
"Evolution snaps into focus when you realize how fantastically old our planet is."
"I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet, and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions—from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life—will be found in not too much more time."
"Seeking to link cause and effect, Lamarck speculated that this supposed ability to change or modify the traits passed on to offspring was the result of a complexifying force. If an animal wanted to eat certain leaves, for example, it might develop the right kind of teeth for it, and then pass that beneficial new trait to its offspring. This came to be called the inheritance of acquired traits. It would be a tendency or agent in nature that helps the successive generations build on beneficial modifications that resulted from a previous generation’s effort."
"Evolution happens as each generation of living things interacts with its environment and reproduces. Lamarck got at least that part of it right. Those natural designs that survive to reproduce pass on their genes. Those that don’t successfully reproduce disappear; their genes disappear as well. It’s survival of the hang-in-there’s, or the made-the-cuts, or the just good-enoughs."
"What I find so compelling about evolution, convergent evolution especially, is that it is clearly a fundamental law of nature, like the laws of gravitation, electromagnetism, and heat transfer that shape our world. And yet it is much more personal than those other laws, because we are a direct consequence of it. Stranger still, we can understand it: nature comprehending itself from within."
"A future that makes this technology available to all of us would be a bright one indeed. It would be a life-affirming result of our understanding of evolution, and the many historical steps that got us to this point. First scientists including Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the seventeenth-century Dutch microscopist, discovered the microscopic world. Then other scientists discovered that our immune system could be trained or induced to fight specific diseases that it’s exposed to. Then scientists identified specific bacteria and specific viruses. Then scientists discovered chemicals or molecules that disrupt cell walls and membranes of certain bacteria. Then scientists discovered that bacteria fight each other. For example, way down in your intestines, there are generally three different types of Escherichia coli fighting each other with specialized bacteriocins all the time. This is what researchers mean when they talk about “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Science is a beautifully cumulative process."
"Evolutionary theory benefited from medicine, and now medicine benefits from evolutionary theory."
"We might say that we are a lucky bunch to be alive right now. But it wasn’t luck. It was a strategy; it was science. You are here because a large number of people worked together around the world and across the centuries to understand how the natural world really works."
“To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people’s trash.”
"The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown."
"We’ve been changing faster than ever over the past ten thousand years, and probably up through the past few hundred years. We like to think we’re immune to evolution, that we’ve moved beyond it, but we’re still in the thick of it. We just can’t quite see the forest for the trees."
"There are places in rural Africa and rural China, where people have never made a phone call of any kind. The singularity won’t affect them for some time, if at all."
"By the way, what is the sexiest thing about a woman? This is not a trick question. It does not require men to cower fearing a politically incorrect secondary remark or facial gesture. In my opinion, the sexiest thing about a woman is her smile. If the woman doesn’t smile, or doesn’t smile well, men will not dig her. They will look for other women, who smile well. What’s involved in smiling? Good teeth, attentiveness, engaging eyes, and the ability to be happy. Each of these is an apparently inheritable trait. Each is not going to be much affected by sleek computers hooked up to a nest of frozen heads.
A smile comes from deep within. If it’s not genuine we can tell, albeit not consciously, and often not right away. "
"Just think what it would mean if one of those distant bodies is spewing some heretofore-unknown type of life into deep space, or if life awaits sheltered under a rock on Mars. What if that life is like us? What if it’s totally different? Whatever the answer, the discovery would change the way we all think about what it means to be a living thing. It will tell us about the different ways in which life can arise and evolve. It would give us, for the first time in history, concrete proof that we are not alone in the universe."
"These ideas would merely be arcane musings were it not for the fascination we all feel about understanding our origin. There is no more dramatic way to test, and extend, the limits of what we have learned about evolution than by searching for evidence that it has occurred on other worlds as well. The answer will drive new technologies. It will inspire future generations of scientists. And it may revolutionize both our practical and our philosophical understandings of what it means to be human."
"We are still sorting out the thick and tangled branches of the Tree of Life; only within the past decade have biologists identified the giant viruses that help build the case that they qualify as a fourth domain of life. The harder we push on the search for the origin of life, the more surprises we find."
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Moonwalking with Einstein was pretty good.
Just finished the Color of Water by James McBride. thinking about picking up The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty or Coates' book next.
Just finished the Color of Water by James McBride. thinking about picking up The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty or Coates' book next.
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The Governance of China by Xi Jinping
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- Oct 7, 2007
Just finished
Tbh I already had the same mentality as the author currently at age 24. Still a great read nonetheless and a constant reminder to not get complacent
Tbh I already had the same mentality as the author currently at age 24. Still a great read nonetheless and a constant reminder to not get complacent
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- Apr 24, 2006
Keep it up. I'm seeing some solid titles
3 more gems down. When To Rob A Bank is more a collection of articles than an actual book.
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
How Google Works
When to Rob a Bank
3 more gems down. When To Rob A Bank is more a collection of articles than an actual book.
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
How Google Works
When to Rob a Bank
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- Oct 7, 2007
Went through this in one sitting
Just started this:
Just started this:
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- Oct 7, 2007
Sums it up nicely. I really like how raw and direct the book is. Definitely learned a lot reading that book.
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- Oct 7, 2007
Just finished this:
Been going through some troubling times lately and reading is the best therapy
Been going through some troubling times lately and reading is the best therapy
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- Aug 22, 2007
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- Feb 15, 2014
Good post fam...I kinda suffer from anxiety and need some good reading material like this..Does it touch on anxiety?
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- Oct 7, 2007
Yep, it addresses anxiety/stress/fear/worry.
Kind of shows how perspective is so important
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- Nov 16, 2001
Just finished reading this. Always love hearing how he helped make GE the best company in the world at the end of the last century.
Currently reading these two gems.
Currently reading these two gems.
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- Feb 15, 2014
Thanks bro..I'm gonna give it a read...
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Great titles in here
3 more down.
The Wright Brothers
The Wright Brothers was ok, the new American Genius special on them did a good job as well.
Station Eleven
I was expecting more from Station Eleven, but it strays from your typical post-apocalyptic zombie story and focuses on the characters themselves in a realistic post-apocalyptic story in which a massive flu devastates the population.
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
I may have read too many books on Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley that made this seem to be just another to the list. Same story, different voice. Solid read if you have never read anything on Steve Jobs.
3 more down.
The Wright Brothers
The Wright Brothers was ok, the new American Genius special on them did a good job as well.
Station Eleven
I was expecting more from Station Eleven, but it strays from your typical post-apocalyptic zombie story and focuses on the characters themselves in a realistic post-apocalyptic story in which a massive flu devastates the population.
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
I may have read too many books on Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley that made this seem to be just another to the list. Same story, different voice. Solid read if you have never read anything on Steve Jobs.
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Just finished this:
Made notes and keeping them in my wallet.
Starting this:
Made notes and keeping them in my wallet.
Starting this:
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- Aug 23, 2010
equality I really enjoyed the The Way of the Superior Man
My quick summary: Don't make excuses, be spontaneous, be confident, be passionate. Praise your woman or partner. Do it often and everyday.
I just finished this.
I enjoyed how straightforward everything is written. Definitely a good read for those looking to build confidence and finding direction.
Also touched on a lot of points on keeping a successful relationship with the feminine, my new favorite word is "ravished"
