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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7b6be6b | When I was a teenager I had posters of all of my favorite musicians up on my bedroom walls--David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Edgar Winter's They Only Come Out at Night, and the first KISS album. My dad didn't really know what to make of it. One time he came into my room while I was listening to music and looked at all the posters and said, "You're a fag, aren't you?" This was an actual one-sided conversation we had." | Keith Morris | ||
| b9318db | England had been conquered by the Vikings, and its ancient royal family were in exile - in Normandy. | Marc Morris | ||
| 8b9a971 | In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men's minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations. | Marc Morris | ||
| 4dfcbac | Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king's general direction. | Marc Morris | ||
| ec189f7 | In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country's Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it .. | Marc Morris | ||
| 84e6386 | According to Harris, Dawkins and other prominent neoatheists (Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett round out the self-styled "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"), science education is a natural antidote to sacred terror. But independent studies by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, and journalist and political scientist Peter Bergen indicate that a majority of al-Qaeda members and associates went to coll.. | Benny Morris | ||
| 1cc5e2c | whole universe can be thought of as a delayed-choice experiment in which the existence of observers who notice what is going on is what imparts tangible reality to the origin of everything. Following | John Gribbin | ||
| 150e7c4 | The image that emerges from quantum physics is similar in some ways to the way that the illusion that air, or water is a continuous fluid emerges. Myriad tiny particles separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth fluid. Myriad quantum states separated by tiny gaps feels to you like a smooth flow of time. Zeno was right. The arrow of time points, but it does not move. THE | John Gribbin | ||
| b973be9 | The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics -an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws. | John Gribbin | ||
| 9e83dbd | The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside | John Gribbin | ||
| 2145a0e | Curiously, though, we only have to look at one of the two slits for the outcome of the whole experiment to be affected, as if the electrons passing through the other slit also knew what we were doing. This is an example of quantum "non-locality," which means that what happens in one location seems to affect events in another location instantly. Non-locality is a key feature of the central mystery of quantum mechanics, and a vital ingredient.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 8597103 | As I understood it, what really mattered was simply that some systems ('system' is just a jargon word for anything, like a swinging pendulum, or the Solar System, or water dripping from a tap) are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial 'push' you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its own behaviour. | John Gribbin | ||
| 0a933f4 | It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. | John Gribbin | ||
| 0fb9673 | A black hole with the mass of the Sun would take 1066 years for this to occur, even if it never swallowed any outside matter along the way. A black hole with the mass of a galaxy will evaporate in 1099 years, and even a hole containing the mass of a supercluster of galaxies - the biggest ever likely to form - will be gone in 10117 years. That | John Gribbin | ||
| 6f95881 | Reality' is the idea that there is a real world that exists whether or not anyone is looking at it, or measuring it. | John Gribbin | ||
| a069ab6 | People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein | John Gribbin | ||
| 71772f1 | it is not the way of science to sit idly back and hope that someone will come up with a "better" answer to our problems. In the absence of a better answer, we have to face up to the implications of the best answer we've got." | John Gribbin | ||
| 82ff9a6 | The existence of life must be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be taken as a starting point in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an irrational element from the point of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the existence of elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics. The asserted impossibility of a physical or chemical explanation of .. | John Gribbin | ||
| ae101ec | These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton's laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second law of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future. | John Gribbin | ||
| afe29ae | The Big Bang was not the beginning of the Universe. | John Gribbin | ||
| ab1b1a8 | action, and there are also structures so distinct from the rest of the cell 'jelly', like cells within cells, that the best explanation of their presence is that that is indeed what they are. These semi-autonomous 'cells within the cell' are called organelles. As we saw in Chapter Four, Lynn Margulis has explained how the ancestors of the organelles used to be separate, bacteria | John Gribbin | ||
| 4ab246d | El destino al que esta abocado cualquier especialista de cualquier area de la ciencia es cenirse cada vez mas estrechamente al tema de su especialidad, aprendiendo cada vez mas sobre cada vez menos materia, hasta acabar finalmente sabiendolo todo sobre nada. | John Gribbin | ||
| dd9ee65 | spacetime is flat, that about 5 per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the form of baryons (including bright stars and gas and dust), some 27 per cent is in the form of cold dark matter, and 68 per cent is in the form of the lambda field, also known as dark energy. | John Gribbin | ||
| 70fa010 | Every problem in quantum physics had to be first "solved" using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning." | John Gribbin | ||
| 8c958c7 | Poincare took Laplace's argument to its logical conclusion. He proved, using the full rigour of mathematics, that if you have a box of gas containing a definite number of particles (as many as you like, as long as it is not actually infinite) and the particles strictly obey Newton's laws of motion, then after a sufficiently long interval of time the distribution of the particles in the box must return to its original state, with each partic.. | John Gribbin | ||
| 6807ba0 | If what you learn about quantum physics here excites you as much as it does me, you should explore quantum physics in greater depth by reading some of the authors I follow with devotion. For starters, I highly recommend: Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, New York: Vintage, 2011), Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design, New York: Bantam, 2012), Amit Goswami (The Self Aware Universe, New York: Ta.. | Greg Kuhn | ||
| 56ba0b4 | Absolute, true, and mathematical time, for itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure for duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year. | John Gribbin | ||
| d36b001 | the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8ff09c7 | The cultural progress of the Species encountered impediments along the way. Overpopulation was a constant problem: as soon as the capacity of the local environment to support the population began to suffer, so individuals began to retreat from specialisation and exchange into defensive self-sufficiency, broadening their production and narrowing their consumption. This reduced the collective intelligence they could draw upon, which reduced t.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4c453ea | A propria palavra "seducao" implica mentira e manipulacao." | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1c2c41f | Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raca humana e nao haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparencia, cada ser humano e unico. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7bdb6ca | The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c056701 | Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"20" | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7943212 | Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty." Matt Ridley TW: @" | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 5fa8712 | La extraordinaria difusion del psicoanalisis entre 1920 y 1970 se debe mas al marketing que a los exitos terapeuticos. Al hablar con los enfermos sobre sus infancia, los analistas ofrecian una humanidad y simpatia hasta entonces inexistentes. Esto les hizo populares cuando las alternativas eran un sueno profundo a base de barbituricos, el coma insulinico, la lobotomia y las convulsiones provocadas por el choque electrico: todas ellas desagr.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3578922 | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley elaborates: "'If I sew you a hide tunic today, you can sew me one tomorrow' brings limited rewards and diminishing returns. '[But] ... I make the clothes, you catch the food' brings increasing returns. Indeed, it has the beautiful property that it does not even need to be fair. For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal but.. | Peter H. Diamandis | ||
| abcb74a | Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind. But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind--principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners--are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left A.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9731004 | If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word--for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| cf2b6c5 | The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is "designed" quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, orig.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4ce41fd | Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 9637fc5 | This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4505306 | Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 77a266e | It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world back into pre-industrial poverty some time during the coming century. There is even a new reason for such pessimism: the integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, wh.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f90b57e | Snazi-li se muz ziskat zenu, neposle ji svuj vypis z uctu, ale daruje ji perlovy nahrdelnik. Nechlubi se svou lekarskou kartou, ale mezi reci prohodi, ze kazdy tyden ubehne patnact kilometru a nikdy nebyva nachlazeny. Nechlubi se pred ni akademickymi tituly, ale snazi se ji okouzlit svym vtipem. Nezaprisaha se pred ni svou pozornosti, ale k narozeninam ji posle kytici rudych ruzi. Temito gesty ji oznamuje: jsem bohaty, jsem zdravy, jsem chy.. | Matt Ridley |