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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e071b06 | 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 It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking.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.. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0870157 | IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate." I" | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| b7046cf | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 2ac3143 | 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." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 8389b14 | The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome; | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 27e5576 | 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." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 28766fd | 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 | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| e5d1543 | 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.. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| f287343 | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 8020cc1 | To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 046ab50 | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 9fb1746 | first no one knew exactly how to interpret, | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 3f09861 | If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem. | Bjarne Stroustrup | ||
| a65bd73 | 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." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| a2c1919 | 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 | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 44890ea | 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 .. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 6d3c068 | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 98bda1f | HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 20c6f5c | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 131ba1e | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| ce3e75e | 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. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| b8e03dd | 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." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| e00de18 | 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 | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 245e4cf | 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.. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 273ba2d | 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 | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 7bc8b7f | On June 18, 1964, about 11:30 a.m. Mrs. Juanita Brooks, who had been shopping, was walking home along an alley in the San Pedro area of the city of Los Angeles. She was pulling behind her a wicker basket carryall containing groceries and had her purse on top of the packages. She was using a cane. As she stooped down to pick up an empty carton, she was suddenly pushed to the ground by a person whom she neither saw nor heard approach. She was.. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 74ca553 | Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein plagiarized relativity from his mailman, don't tell him, 'You life is a cruel joke' and walk away. Have tea with him. It can broaden your style of thinking, and it's cheaper than seeing a therapist. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| fdf17ad | People expect good luck to follow bad luck, or they worry that bad will follow good. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 144772d | true randomness sometimes produces repetition, | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 84e97e7 | Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, "To have a great idea, have a lot of them." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 03e93da | recent years psychologists have found that the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is at least as important a factor in success as talent. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| faa7240 | Thus even random patterns can be interpreted as compelling evidence if they relate to our preconceived notions. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0c46c83 | On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 7f022fa | Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling. | Bjarne Stroustrup | ||
| a7be1c0 | The smith and his penny both are black. | Black | ||
| fdd0f81 | In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn't invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an "hour" might be more than twice as long in June as in December (in London, for example, it varied from 38 to 82 of today's minutes)." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0c4cc92 | We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| ac6c5a1 | The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| f8449c0 | Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that your boss will respond to your e-mails more slowly than before. But your boss might be slower in responding because she is unusually busy or her mother is ill. And so the chances that your star is falling if she is taking longer to respond are .. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 2a57ed8 | At the University of Bologna, there was another bizarre twist on what is the norm today: students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 5523506 | a bishop should not be condemned except with seventy-two witnesses... a cardinal priest should not be condemned except with forty-four witnesses, a cardinal deacon of the city of Rome without thirty-six witnesses, a subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector, or doorkeeper except with seven witnesses. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| b442a25 | Fewer than eight hundred Americans earn a Ph.D. in physics each year. Worldwide, the number is probably in the thousands. And yet from this small pool comes the discovery and innovation that shapes the way we live and think. From X-rays, lasers, radio waves, transistors, atomic energy--and atomic weapons--to our view of space and time, and the nature of the universe, all this has arisen from this dedicated pool of individuals. To be a physi.. | influence physics science | Leonard Mlodinow | |
| 1238ea5 | The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people often hesitate or sugarcoat their true opinion. Suppose I ask my students, "Did you like my discussion of the stochastic nature of the" | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 5eedcdf | It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. --Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993 | Leonard Mlodinow |