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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7145655 | Historians, whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| e1066f3 | After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling.... But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."6" | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0ef1e42 | moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song. Again, it's the butterfly effect. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| ad68461 | there remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 8570f45 | claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God's whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year--almost fifty years after Galileo's condemnation--the professor of mathematics at the University of Basel, Peter Megerlin, had been roundly attacked by theologians for accepting the Copernican system and had been banned from teaching it at the university. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| f245800 | As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn't. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 2f2d985 | Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn't seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 50b2b1d | when chance is involved, people's thought processes are often seriously flawed. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 73ae717 | American people whether they agree that plants create the oxygen in the air, light travels faster than sound, or you cannot make radioactive milk safe by boiling it, you will get double-digit disagreement in each case (13 percent, 24 percent, and 35 percent, respectively | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| cb23f75 | Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child's third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| a0ea135 | regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| c1c6698 | Do we, like the flight instructors, believe that harsh criticism improves our children's behavior or our employees' performance? | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 751d945 | Cardano worked at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| f92c550 | One trader even believed that relieving himself in the "wrong" toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| d8664d0 | That brings us back to the default mode. "When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth," Andreasen says. "Your association cortices are always running in the background, but when you are not focused on some task--for example, when you are doing something mindless, like driving--that's when your mind is most free to roam. That's why that is when you most actively create new ideas." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| bff98f4 | Let all the disciples of Aristotle...," he would write, "recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics."6" | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 1c29369 | Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the much larger Roman army, slaughtering more than 60,000 of its 80,000 soldiers. "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope?" Cicero asked. "Yet all had one and the same end." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 5c4b2b0 | A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his "accomplishment," he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. "I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights," he said, "and 7 times 7 is 48." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0c1c17f | The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel "burnt out." That's good to know when scheduling your tasks--you could be better at generating imaginative ideas if you do that kind of thinking after working on a chore that involves a period of tedious, focused effort that strains your powers of concentration." | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 56c11fe | Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different. --JAMES BORG | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 336111b | the elasticity of our thinking allows us to move beyond the existing world of our senses and invent new concepts. | Leonard Mlodinow | ||
| 0ffaa4a | All around the circle, feeding on the green, green grass were fat and happy horses... | Black Elk | ||
| d30a9ba | LAUNCELOT An they have conspired together, I will not say you | Black Monday | ||
| ea22d0a | Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up. | Black people | ||
| 0549947 | N]ature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men. | Black people | ||
| 3250d40 | Be confident in your blackness! | Black people | ||
| ac579c3 | Homesickness springs from the isolation of the soul from its surroundings. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 96b7061 | There is in, us a lack of the synthetic faculty which distinguishes things that are important from those that are not. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 56cd3f8 | It seems incredible that a man possessing so many conditions of happiness should be not only so little happy, but clearly does not see the reason why he should exist at all. It | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| dacfc3e | Truly times must be out of joint, when only asses have any power of action left, and those who have a little more intelligence use it to doubt everything, and to persuade themselves that it is not worth while to attempt anything. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 68fe251 | There speaks again the sceptic; but I shall never be so intoxicated as to lose my capacity of observation. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 35ab503 | Dla Boga, panie Wolodyjowski! Larum graja! wojna! nieprzyjaciel w granicach! a ty sie nie zrywasz? szabli nie chwytasz? na kon nie siadasz? Co sie stalo z toba, zolnierzu? Zalis swej dawnej przepomnial cnoty, ze nas samych w zalu jeno i trwodze zostawiasz? | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| f429f70 | Our souls are full of Gothic arches, pinnacles, twisted traceries we cannot shake off, and of which Greek minds knew nothing. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| f042b98 | I have noticed that the stoutest pessimists, when fate or men try to take something out of their lives, fight tooth and nail, and cry out as loud as the greatest optimists. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 8da4e7b | She prefers simply a life in the shape of an Apollo to that of humpbacked Pulcinello; that is her philosophy. She | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 953f75e | Ah me! what torture to have to deal with virtue, cold and merciless as the letter of the law! | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 51b19ac | He who is a sceptic in regard to faith, in regard to science, conservatism, progress, and so on, has indeed difficulty in finding anything to do. In | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 822d78e | Hamlet is the human soul as it was, as it is, and as it will be. In conceiving this drama, Shakspeare overstepped the limit fixed even for genius. I can understand Homer and Dante, studied by the light of their epoch. I can comprehend that they could do what they did; but how an Englishman of the seventeenth century could foreknow psychosis, a science of recent growth, will be to me, in spite of my study of Hamlet, an everlasting mystery. H.. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| d278b6f | the ears of the prince. His guardianship over | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| a6dcb46 | Besides, my old opinions--at least, the greater part of them--are now in tatters, like a worn-out garment. But | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 283b03b | own single law; Hei! be amazed, grow not enraged! thou in thy | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| 6fb1302 | Walking along the avenues, we had one of the so-called intellectual conversations, which consist a great deal in quoting names of books and authors. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| bb77f23 | ground the coursing of flocks run wild. | Henryk Sienkiewicz | ||
| d512874 | Aspasia and Xantippe in one. I | Henryk Sienkiewicz |