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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 12cec23 | Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. | Steven Johnson | ||
| bfb42da | But despite the Secret Service-like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there's nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. "Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems," Gordon explains, "the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambe.. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 3c8269f | Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol. | Steven Johnson | ||
| ae8ee50 | Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way. | Steven Johnson | ||
| a2d5854 | All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution's knack for recycling its toxic waste. | Steven Johnson | ||
| ae396a9 | Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 55a8c8f | The timing of Thomas Lewis' illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood's small intestines had run through the cesspool at 40 Broad. When baby Lewis died, the connection had died with it. But when her husband fell ill, Sarah Lewis began emptying the buckets of soiled water in the cesspool all over again. If Snow had not .. | Steven Johnson | ||
| b4ab2e8 | The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 97b9d88 | If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages. Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today's illuminated wonderland. That something was the elec.. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 9e1f7ca | DR. JOHN SNOW--This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreciated by the profession. | Steven Johnson | ||
| b8a4c7e | It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo. | Steven Levitsky | ||
| 0d26ef7 | Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a .. | Steven Johnson | ||
| c59dcd6 | As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years." | Steven Johnson | ||
| 6c361c2 | If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. | Steven Johnson | ||
| ea9fe84 | Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers." | Steven Johnson | ||
| 0879819 | We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 0168a23 | This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 12e7f1d | A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons--thousands of them--fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. | Steven Johnson | ||
| b12d2b5 | In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience. | Steven Johnson | ||
| d9fe55c | for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 3528d73 | Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 3c47f16 | She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 7b66f56 | Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else... There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. | growth resignation | Edith Wharton | |
| 8cabd67 | she likes being good, and I like being happy. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 868859d | he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 63d06fc | Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages.. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 66f9486 | Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he .. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 89a49b4 | As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change. | Edith Wharton | ||
| d8d5989 | Nima tuk nikoi ne zhelae da znae istinata, mist'r Arch'r? Da zhiveesh sred tezi dobri khora, koito iskat ot teb edinstveno da se prestruvash -- tova e istinskata samota! | Edith Wharton | ||
| f49df7e | High Pasture Come up--come up: in the dim vale below The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow, Night is not, autumn is not--but the flow Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas, Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries In waxing tides of unimagined glow. And to that height illumined of the mind he calls us still by the familiar way, Le.. | inspiration | Edith Wharton | |
| 4cb3872 | The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement--he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 18b31ed | His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. ("The Triumph Of The Night")" | embarrassment resignation | Edith Wharton | |
| f4ff10a | Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue--and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be! | Edith Wharton | ||
| 5518565 | He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 24faa05 | He remembered once hearing his grandmother... say plaintively: "Why daughter, I presume I can go without -- BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE." | Edith Wharton | ||
| 02723a6 | Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to any.. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 947189b | Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements | Edith Wharton | ||
| 1abc37f | In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their .. | edith-wharton friends the-house-of-mirth | Edith Wharton | |
| ea1f6e4 | What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words." | Edith Wharton | ||
| 07c021a | refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing | superficiality | Edith Wharton | |
| a20c905 | Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 2dc3998 | life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know. | empathy marion-mainwaring the-buccaneers | Edith Wharton | |
| bc5f564 | Norton was supremely gifted as an awakener, and no thoughtful mind can recall without a thrill the notes of the first voice which has called it out of its morning dream. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 4caaa30 | Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad | Edith Wharton |