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904d5e0
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Pauli turned to the audience and argued, "Yes, my theory is crazy enough!" Then Bohr insisted, "No, your theory is not crazy enough!"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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bdf6764
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Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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13a7d00
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It is always heartening when a fundamentalist of any religion professes a belief in evolution,
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f771971
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I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e6dd3c7
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It all began when the Beagle's previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn't kill him, died of gangrene.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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c70ab16
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Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or "Wise, Wise Man."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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41ba987
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Your own species ends up with a name like that when you get to choose it
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0059e7d
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true randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn't random. And so the company made the feature "less random to make it feel more random," said Apple founder Steve Jobs.12 One"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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9fd95c3
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It is dangerous to judge ability by short-term results.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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ca9ef91
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Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b88ccdf
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you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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5f9f2b8
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That's why doctors instinctively "package" themselves in nice shirts and ties and it's not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts. In"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f72937f
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if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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223e450
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Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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7d7ba7c
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Twenty-four centuries ago, a Greek man stood at the sea's edge watching ships disappear in the distance. Aristotle must have passed much time there, quietly observing many vessels, for eventually he was struck by a peculiar thought. All ships seemed to vanish hull first, then masts and sails. He wondered, how could that be? On a flat earth, ships should dwindle evenly until they disappear as a tiny featureless dot. That the masts and sails ..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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35b0986
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The participants gave higher ratings to the studies that confirmed their initial point of view even when the studies on both sides had supposedly been carried out by the same method. And in the end, though everyone had read all the same studies, both those who initially supported the death penalty and those who initially opposed it reported that reading the studies had strengthened their beliefs. Rather than convincing anyone, the data pola..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b51c837
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What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e275412
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Tatal meu mi-a povestit odata de un tovaras de detentie emaciat, din lagarul de concentrare de la Buchenwald, care era de formatie matematician. Poti spune unele lucruri despre oameni dupa ceea ce le vine in minte cand aud cuvantul "pi". Pentru un "matematician", "pi" reprezinta raportul dintre circumferinta si diametrul unui cerc. Daca l-as fi intrebat pe tatal meu, care avea doar sapte clase, ar fi spus ca "pi" este o placinta rotunda, cu..
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science
human-evolution
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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55288e0
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We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom. We
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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574c290
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Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. A
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e071b06
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The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most su..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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0870157
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IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I"
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b7046cf
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appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not--or have not yet--befallen us.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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2ac3143
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In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be available to posterity. To that the presiding judge famously replied, "The republic has no need of scientists."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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8389b14
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The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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27e5576
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Modeling himself after Newton, Quetelet desired to create a new "social physics" describing the laws of human behavior. In Quetelet's analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state of motion, so the mass behavior of people, if social conditions remain unchanged, remains constant."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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28766fd
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medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs--a culture that is inimical
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e5d1543
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CARL JUNG BELIEVED that to learn about the human experience, it was important to study dreams and mythology. History is the story of events that played out in civilization, but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart. The themes and archetypes of our dreams and myths, Jung pointed out, transcend time and culture. They arise from unconscious instincts that governed our behavior long before civilization papered over and obscured t..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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f287343
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medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs--a culture that is inimical to science as we know it today.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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8020cc1
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To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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046ab50
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Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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9fb1746
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first no one knew exactly how to interpret,
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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a65bd73
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The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the "new unconscious," to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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a2c1919
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we are highly invested in feeling different from one another--and superior--no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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44890ea
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it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person's matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 ..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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6d3c068
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Em vez de convencer as pessoas, os dados apenas polarizaram o grupo. Assim, ate mesmo padroes aleatorios podem ser interpretados como evidencias convincentes quando se relacionam a nocoes preconcebidas.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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98bda1f
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HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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20c6f5c
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Little is known about Boyle's mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by then must have come as a relief.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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131ba1e
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The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we've achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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ce3e75e
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Today we know that gas as carbon dioxide. Priestley had inadvertently invented a way to create carbonated beverages, but alas, since he was a man of modest means, he didn't commercialize his invention. That was done a few years later by one Johann Jacob Schweppe, whose soda company is still in business today.
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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b8e03dd
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Albert Einstein wrote, "One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.... Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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e00de18
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A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before--hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.24 But
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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245e4cf
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The study showed that a combination of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin is no more effective in relieving arthritis pain than a placebo. Still, one eminent doctor had a hard time letting go of his feeling that the supplements were effective and ended his analysis of the study on a national radio program by reaffirming the possible benefit of the treatment, remarking that, "One of my wife's doctors has a cat and she sa..
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Leonard Mlodinow |
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273ba2d
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George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11
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Leonard Mlodinow |