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Amira's favorite quotes

"Everything you can imagine is real."— Pablo Picasso

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Jan
22nd
Sun
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“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”
Václav Havel, Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. Former President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, (1936-2011), Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (English translation by Paul Wilson), 1990, Ch. 1 : Growing Up “Outside”, p. 11.
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“The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”
Lewis Thomas, physician, poet, etymologist, essayist (1913-1993) cited in Forbes, Feb 1, 1998.
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“What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true.

Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.”
Tim Maudlin, (B.A. Yale, Physics and Philosophy; Ph.D. Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science), ☞ What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology, The Atlantic, Jan 2012.
Jan
19th
Thu
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“Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.”

Groucho Marx, American comedian and film star famed as a master of wit (1890-1977)
Jan
15th
Sun
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“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.”
Chuck Palahniuk, American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist, Survivor, W. W. Norton, 1999. (Illustration: Termes Thoughts) See also: ☞ ‘To understand is to perceive patterns’
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Memories are not static entities; over time they shift and migrate between different territories of the brain. (…)

Where memories might be stored. (…) The answer lies in the multitude of tiny modifiable connections between neuronal cells, the information-processing units of the brain. These cells, with their wispy tree-like protrusions, hang like stars in miniature galaxies and pulse with electrical charge.

Thus, your memories are patterns inscribed in the connections between the millions of neurons in your brain. Each memory has its unique pattern of activity, logged in the vast cellular network every time a memory is formed. It is thought that during recall of past events the original activity pattern in the hippocampus is re-established via a process that is known as “pattern completion”. (…) The physical structure of your brain is malleable.”
Hugo Spiers is a neuroscientist and lecturer at the institute of behavioural neuroscience at University College London, What are memories made of?, The Guardian, Jan 14, 2012.
Jan
14th
Sat
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The Future Belongs to the Curious


“We’re all born with it. Albert Einstein dubbed it “holy,” Alistair Cooke called it “free-wheeling intelligence.” It’s that piquing force that nudges us to try it again, explore it some more, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out. From the moment we open our eyes, it fuels our existence. With each new answer we find, our world expands and our passions grow. We can’t wait to share what we’ve learned and teach others how to do it themselves. (…) The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.”
Manifesto, Skillshare, Jan 10, 2012
Jan
13th
Fri
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“Chance favors the connected mind.”
Steven Johnson, American popular science author, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Riverhead Hardcover, 2010.
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Why would someone learn 20 or 50 languages?

“Hyperpolyglot, Alexander Arguelles (…) wants to explore his consciousness, to encounter a language as a living entity, and to collect the esoteric knowledge of these encounters. “Most of the languages I’ve studied I’ve never spoken, and I probably never will,” he told me. “And that’s okay with me. That’s nice if you can do that, but it’s rare that you have an interesting conversation in English. Why do I think it would be any better in another language?”
Jan
12th
Thu
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“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist (1844-1900), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, cited in Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, Routledge, 2002, p. 155.
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“Much education today consists of a high degree of specialization, which tends to give a person tunnel vision and a narrow perspective about the actual interrelationships of all physical phenomena. Students of the future would be encouraged to view the world in a more holistic manner; accordingly, they would be able to converse intelligently across various disciplines.”
Jacque Fresco, self-educated structural designer, philosopher of science, concept artist, educator, and futurist, The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Poverty, Politics, & War, Global Cyber Visions, 2002 (tnx mymindtank)
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“Now, why should the universe be constructed in such a way that atoms acquire the ability to be curious about themselves?”
Marcus Chown, award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine, The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms, Oxford University Press, 2001
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Our Selves, Other Cells. Baby’s cells can live a lifetime in mother’s heart and mind

“Is it any solace to sentimental mothers that their babies will always be part of them?

I’m not talking about emotional bonds, which we can only hope will endure. I mean that for any woman that has ever been pregnant, some of her baby’s cells may circulate in her bloodstream for as long as she lives. Those cells often take residence in her lungs, spinal cord, skin, thyroid gland, liver, intestine, cervix, gallbladder, spleen, lymph nodes, and blood vessels. And, yes, the baby’s cells can also live a lifetime in her heart and mind. (…)

How many people have left their DNA in us? Any baby we’ve ever conceived, even ones we’ve miscarried unknowingly. Sons leave their Y chromosome genes in their mothers. The fetal cells from each pregnancy, flowing in a mother’s bloodstream, can be passed on to her successive kids. If we have an older sibling, that older sibling’s cells may be in us. The baby in a large family may harbor the genes of many brothers and sisters. My mother’s cells are in my body, and so are my daughter’s cells, and half my daughter’s DNA comes from her dad. Some of those cells may be in my brain. This is squirm-worthy.

But there’s something beautiful about this too. Long post postpartum, we mothers continue to carry our children, at least in a sense. Our babies become part of us, just as we are a part of them. The barriers have broken down; the lines are no longer fixed. Moms must be many in one.”
Jan
11th
Wed
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“Language plays a tremendous role in human affairs. It serves as a means of cooperation and as a weapon of conflict. With it, men can solve problems, erect the towering structures of science and poetry – and talk themselves into insanity and social confusion.”
— Irving J. Lee, lecturer, teacher, former professor at Northwestern University (1909-1955), cited in Martin H. Levinson; ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 55, 1998, Opium: A History, Questia Online Library
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Nicholas Carr on Books That Are Never Done Being Written

“Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse. (…) What the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg ’s invention.

Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. (…) Movable text makes a lousy preservative. (…)

What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.

Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.”
Nicholas Carr, American writer, Books That Are Never Done Being Written , WSJ.com, Dec 31, 2011.