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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e9c068a | Adams chuckled. "The evenings are always nice. The Weather boys don't let it rain until later on, when everyone's asleep." -- | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 54c56f8 | A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river - but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself - a thing that went on caring. | inspirational | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 021348a | Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best." | coffee-quotes | Clifford D. Simak | |
| 826f985 | one can sometimes see, and feel, the meaning, the depth, even the love, in a quiet face, in silent, bright eyes ... | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 0321abb | They told me they were headed for a planet the name of which I had not heard before, and they talked among themselves, gaily and happily, but in such a way that I did not seem to be left out. From their talk I gained the fact that some form of art was being presented at the festival on this planet. The art form was not alone of music or painting, but was composed of sound and color and emotion and form and other qualities for which there se.. | Clifford D. Simak | ||
| 3a41748 | At one point, Einstein had commented: 'It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe. | John Gribbin | ||
| c8a6398 | According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, when an electron is ejected from an electron 'gun' on one side of the experiment it leaves as a particle, and can be detected as a particle. But it immediately dissolves into a probability wave, which travels through both of the holes and interferes with itself to make a pattern of probability on the other side of the holes. At the detector screen, the electron can appear as a particle at any poin.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 428afeb | Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to dete.. | physics quantum-mechanics quantum-physics quantum-theory | John Gribbin | |
| b674383 | Earth as our home in space, a single blue-white oasis of life surrounded by a black desert. | John Gribbin | ||
| c284b8c | Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It's hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It's as if we were allowed t.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 3a650ed | in 1906, ill and depressed, unhappy about the continuing opposition of many leading scientists to this kinetic theory of gases, he killed himself, | John Gribbin | ||
| 0287b9a | Europe was, in Joel Mokyr's words, 'the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies'. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 967b6b7 | Every class is unfit to govern.' The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The | Matt Ridley | ||
| 27b862b | For most of history, the state has been an 'ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights', | Matt Ridley | ||
| 27ddd4c | And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1fa555a | the Pentagon actually donates military equipment to the police, including tanks. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a89d382 | The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coincidence; something made things go bump in the night. Superstition | Matt Ridley | ||
| 98e5c8e | I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8197add | So who does run a company these days? Not the shareholders or the board. They largely find out after the fact that things have gone well or badly. Nor are firms cooperatives. Anybody who has tried to run a company by consensus will tell you how disastrously bad an idea that is. Interminable meetings follow hard upon each other's heels as everybody tries to get everybody else to see his or her point of view. Nothing gets done, and tempers fr.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 058f4c6 | There's one thing this Matt Ridley bloke hasn't factored in," I said. Will looked up from his computer screen. "Oh yes?" "What if the genetically superior male is actually a bit of a dickhead?" | Jojo Moyes | ||
| 07ef8c0 | Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And, once again, notice that the true metric of prosperity is time. If Cornelius Vanderbilt or Henry Ford not only moves you faster to where you want to go, but requires you to work fewer hours to earn the ticket price, then he has enriched you by g.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| b77a75e | A series of papers by the Princeton economist Dani Rodrik and his colleagues tried to shed light on the impact of policy decisions on economic growth, but found that 'most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations', and 'most growth accelerations are not preceded or accompanied by major changes in economic policies, institutional arrangements, political circumstances, or external conditions'. The economist William Eas.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 402a3b0 | Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich | Matt Ridley | ||
| b85e831 | the economist John Bell Condliffe, saw what was happening, and warned presciently in 1938: 'We face a new and more formidable superstition than the world has ever known: the myth of the nation-state, whose priests are as intolerant as those of the Inquisition.' Condliffe saw autocratic power as the cause of, not the solution to, poverty. Much | Matt Ridley | ||
| 195800b | Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 237e6f4 | I forecast that the twenty-first century will show a continuing expansion of catallaxy - Hayek's word for spontaneous order created by exchange and specialisation. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 88749e7 | The environment that a child experiences is as much a consequence of the child's genes as it is of external factors: the child seeks out and creates his or her own environment. If she is of a mechanical bent, she practises mechanical skills; if a bookworm, she seeks out books. The genes may create an appetite, not an aptitude. After all, the high heritability of short-sightedness is accounted for not just by the heritability of eye shape, b.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| da960bd | Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 92b09af | Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9a39c5b | The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a4218cc | Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does | Matt Ridley | ||
| 30e10c2 | a person who is free to make a $20,000 purchase of a car as a customer, might not be free to buy an office chair for $500 as an employee. Little wonder that big companies grow more slowly than small ones (firms whose chief executives attend the annual World Economic Forum schmooze-fest in Davos tend to underperform the stock market), and big public bodies have worse reputations than small ones. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 71889ca | what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you're good at, I'll do what I'm good at, and we'll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d74d441 | He asked the question: 'What kind of company do we want this to be?', and the answer built upon three principles: that people are happiest when they have personal control over their life; that people are 'thinking, energetic, creative and caring'; and that the best human organisations are ones like voluntary bodies that are not managed by others, but in which participants coordinate among themselves. Defying | Matt Ridley | ||
| 133be69 | Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel, the people of the Arabian Peninsula found themselves well placed to profit from trade between East and West. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 251ee72 | Most aid is delivered by governments to governments. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ee50267 | In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7ba4d8e | Blockchains for all What are these enthusiasts on about? The 'blockchain' technology behind bitcoin could prove to be an ingredient of an entire new world of technology, as big as the internet itself, a wave of innovation that drives the middleman out of much commerce and leaves us much more free to exchange goods and services with people all over the world without going through corporate intermediaries. It could radically decentralise soci.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 009cbd2 | When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing. | Matt Ridley | ||
| cd6589d | Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 956e539 | The internet, in other words, may be the best forum for crime, but it is also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 780a1a5 | the Australian economist Peter Saunders argues, 'Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 723caaf | To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many streams flowed, a work of art that emerged from centuries of monotheistic fusions and debates, before taking its final form in the hands of a prophet in an expanding empire of newly unified Arabs pushing aside the ancient powers of Rome and Sassan.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 00bce1f | By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone. | Matt Ridley |