March 2011
59 posts
3 tags
“ “The integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit...”
– Samuel Beckett, Irish avant-garde writer, dramatist and poet (1906-1989) in a letter to McGreevy of October 18, 1932 cited in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume One: 1929–1940
3 tags
“David Edwards: The core of creativity is the fused process of...”
– David Edwards (Ph.D. in chemical engineering and a faculty position in Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), ‘The Lab’, Inside Higher Ed, March 28, 2011.
3 tags
“ “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas....”
– John Cage, American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist (1912-1992), cited in Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, Routledge, 2003.
3 tags
“The Story of a Clever Young Man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic...”
– the story told by J. M. Keynes (John Quentin) to Ludwig Wittgenstein in his death bed in a Derek Jarman’s movie Wittgenstein, cited in Deniz Cem Önduygu, The Story of a Clever Young Man, Phylomeny
4 tags
“ “The laws of physics are the compression of reality which, when run on a...”
– Vlatko Vedral (Serbian born Physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies), Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information, Oxford University Press, USA 2010 (tnx johnsparker)
2 tags
“ “Poetry is an anthropological thing, like counting. We’re...”
– Hans Magnus Enzensberger, German author, poet, translator, and editor cited in Writers’ Festival: German poet morally centered, The Prague Post, June 16, 2010.
2 tags
“ “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to...”
– William Arthur Ward, writer (1921–1994)
10 tags
“Sam Keen on renewing our sense of wonder - “Human beings are what I think of as...”
– Sam Keen (American author, professor and philosopher) interviewed by Scott London, Renewing Our Sense of Wonder: An Interview with Sam Keen. Originally adapted from the public radio series “Insight & Outlook.” It was published in the October 1999 issue of The Sun magazine. It also appears in the...
2 tags
“ “Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If...”
– Alan Bennett, English playwright, screenwriter and author
8 tags
“Mark Changizi: The path to enhancing our brains is not to change or add to it,...”
– Mark Changizi (evolutionary neurobiologist, cognitive scientist, aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do), Harnessing Humans, Forbes, March 25, 2011. See also: Mark Changizi on Humans, Version 3.0.
7 tags
“ “We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns...”
– Nicole Krauss, American author best known for her novels The History of Love
4 tags
“Pascal Bruckner on the western cult of happiness
“Happiness was never “a...”
– Pascal Bruckner, French writer and philosopher, Condemned to Joy. The Western cult of happiness is a mirthless enterprise, City Journal, Winter 2011, vol.21, no.1. (Published in March 2011).
5 tags
“ “One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future, but in...”
– Lewis Namier, English historian (1888-1960), cited in David Pearce’s Technological Singularities, Intelligence Explosions & The Future of Biological Sentience, (tnx wildcat2030)
4 tags
“ “Everything was unknown and unnamed. No language, no self-awareness. Even...”
– Dennis Lehane, American author, quoted by James Gleick
4 tags
“James Gleick on information: The basis of the universe isn’t matter or energy —...”
– James Gleick, author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology, in Kevin Kelly’s interview Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data, Wired Magazine, February 28, 2011.
4 tags
“Q: “If the ultimate fate of our universe is so bleak, what then is its...”
– Sten Odenwald, astronomer, researcher studying the cosmic infrared background and space weather, Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University, “Ask the Astronomer”
4 tags
“ “The best way to predict the future is to design it.” ”
– Buckminster Fuller, American engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist (1895-1983)
5 tags
“William James on establishing habits
“A third maxim may be added to the...”
– William James (American psychologist and philosopher, 1842-1910), Habit, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890, p. 60. cited in Entersection
7 tags
“ “We have greatly overestimated value of access to info and greatly...”
– Clay Shirky, American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, at SXSW 2011 cited in Kristina Loring’s The Long Game of Social Change, Design mind, Intrapreneur, March 12, 2011
5 tags
“ “The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by...”
– John Schaar, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society (1970)
4 tags
“Malcolm Gladwell on success
“The lesson here is very simple. But it is...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker, Outliers, Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
3 tags
“ “The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what...”
– Charles Du Bos, French critic (1882-1939) (tnx myserendipities)
7 tags
“Jeffrey Dill on education of global citizens in 21st century
“To be...”
– Jeffrey Dill, Teaching the virtues of a global citizen, (pdf) CULTURE, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Fall 2009, p. 3-4.
2 tags
“ Freeman Dyson: “Science is the sum total of a great multitude of...”
– Freeman Dyson, British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering, How We Know (tnx chrbutler)
4 tags
“ “Whatever we know without inference is mental.” ”
– Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon and Schuster (1948), p. 224.
7 tags
“ “If you build a machine that makes connections between everything,...”
– George Dyson, scientific historian cited in Kevin Kelly, Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, The Technium, October 24, 2008.
4 tags
“Iain McGilchrist on consciousness
“Is consciousness a product of the...”
– Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and writer, The Master and his Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009. (tnx jamreilly) See also: Interview with Iain McGilchrist, Frontier Psychiatrist
2 tags
“Vlatko Vedral on free will
“Free will lies somewhere between randomness...”
– Vlatko Vedral, Serbian born Physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information, Oxford University Press, 2010. (tnx johnsparker)
1 tag
“Albert Einstein on free will
“If the moon, in the act of completing its...”
– Albert Einstein cited in John Horgan, New Year’s Resolution: I will believe in free will, Scientific American, Dec 27, 2010 (tnx johnsparker)
3 tags
“ “Science is our century’s art.” ”
– Horace Freeland Judson, historian of molecular biology, The Search for Solutions, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York, 1980, p.10.
3 tags
2 tags
“ “If any of them can explain it,” said Alice, “I’ll give him six-pence. I don’t...”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter XII cited in J. Allen Paulos, I Think, Therefore I Laugh. The Flip Side of Philosophy, Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 114.
5 tags
“ “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” ”
– Paul Klee, Swiss-born painter and graphic artist (1879-1940) (tnx yama-bato)
3 tags
“ “We suggest that conventional mental images are structured by...”
– George Lakoff, Metaphors we live by, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993
8 tags
“Lawrence Krauss on probability and the Universe
“Richard Feynman used to...”
– Lawrence Krauss, American Theoretical Physicist who is Professor of Physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University, Closing words for “A Universe From Nothing” (01:03:20 - 01:04:30), AAI 2009.
2 tags
“ “The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not...”
– W.H. Auden (1907-1973), ‘The Poet and the City’ (1962), in the collection The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays, Random House, 1965, p. 81.
3 tags
“ “Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we...”
– W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “The Virgin & The Dynamo”, in the collection The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays, Random House, 1965, p. 62.
5 tags
“ “Feedback is a method of controlling a system by re-inserting into it the...”
– Norbert Wiener, mathematician, Cybernetics in History. In The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954, p. 84.
4 tags
“ “As words are not the objects they represent, structure – and structure alone –...”
– Alfred Korzybski, Science & Sanity, Int’l Non-A Pub. Co. (1933)
5 tags
“ “And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in...”
– Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Language, Mind and Reality”, ETC: A Review of General Semantics , Vol 9 No. 3 (Spring 1952).
11 tags
“ “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world...”
– Edward Sapir, German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics (1884-1939), The Status Of Linguistics As A Science (1929), p. 69.
5 tags
“ “A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly...”
– Daedalus (Winter 1965). Scientific Concepts and Cultural Change, Science and Culture, ed. Gerald Holton, Beacon (1967).
6 tags
“C. I. Lewis on abstraction and common understanding
“But the...”
– C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, Dover (1956), p. 54-55, 80.
4 tags
“ “Mathematics is perfect. But it is not complete. To see some truths you must...”
– Kurt Gödel in Janna Levin’s novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Anchor, 2009
4 tags
“Marcelo Gleiser on the beginning of universe
“There were no witnesses to...”
– Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe, Free Press, 2010 (tnx johnsparker)
10 tags
“Lee Smolin on Thinking In Time Versus Thinking Outside Of Time
“One...”
– Lee Smolin, physicist, Perimeter Institute, answering the question What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?, Edge: The World Question Center 2011. (Illustration source)
4 tags
“ “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, writer
3 tags
“Nicholas A. Christakis on Holism “The whole is different from the sum of...”
– Nicholas A. Christakis, Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University, answering the question What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?, Edge: The World Question Center 2011
3 tags
“ “See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you...”
– Douglas Adams
3 tags
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“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly...”
– Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish physician and writer (1859-1930), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, (1892) (Illustration). “Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” — paraphrased in the Sherlock... 