To historians looking back a hundred years from now, there will be two eras of science: pre-network science, and networked science.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
(ISBN-13: 978-1937785338, ISBN-10: 1937785335)
Mark Chu-Carroll explores the things you've forgotten and some you never knew as he touches on topics ranging from natural numbers and the Golden Ratio to Group Theory and Calculus.
(ISBN-13: 978-0465046744, ISBN-10: 0465046746)
A book written by Seymour Papert which outlines his thoughts and experiences of using the LOGO programming language to facilitate children leveraging computers to learn in ways not possible prior to their existence.
To historians looking back a hundred years from now, there will be two eras of science: pre-network science, and networked science.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
But new technologies seldom have just a single impact, and there's no contradiction in believing that online tools can both enhance and reduce intelligence. You can use a hammer to build a house; you can also use it to break your thumb. Complex technologies, especially, often require considerable skill to use well. Automobiles are amazing tools, but we all know how learner drivers can terrorize the road. Looking at the internet and concluding that the main impact is to make us stupid is like looking at the automobile and concluding that it's a tool for learner drivers to wipe out terrified pedestrians.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
some of the best ideas for improving the way scientists work involve a break away from the scientific paper as the ultimate goal of scientific research.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
The result is that while many scientists agree in principle that they'd love to share their data in advance of publication, they worry that doing so will give their competitors an unfair advantage. Those competitors could exploit that knowledge to rush their results into print first, or, worse, even steal the data outright and present the results as their own. It's only practical to share data if everyone is protected by a collective agreement such as the Bermuda agreement.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
Although many attendees weren't willing to unilaterally make the first move to share all their genetic data in advance of publication, everyone could see that science as a whole would benefit enormously if open sharing of data became common practice. So they sat and talked the issue over for days, eventually coming to a joint agreement—now known as the Bermuda Agreement—that all human genetic data should be immediately shared online. The agreement wasn't just empty rhetoric. The biologists in the room had enough clout that they convinced several major scientific grant agencies to make immediate data sharing a mandatory requirement of working on the human genome. Scientists who refused to share data would get no grant money to do research.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
If the Polymath Project illustrates a shift in how scientists collaborate to create knowledge, and GenBank and the genetic studies illustrate a shift in how scientists find meaning in knowledge, a third big shift is a change in the relationship between science and society. An example of this shift is the website Galaxy Zoo, which has recruited more than 200,000 online volunteers to help astronomers classify galaxy images.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
Citizen science is part of a larger shift in the relationship between science and society. Galaxy Zoo and similar projects are examples of institutions that are bridging the scientific community and the rest of society in new ways.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
The greatest legacy of Galileo, Newton, and their contemporaries wasn't those one-off breakthroughs. It was the method of scientific discovery itself, a way of understanding how nature works. At the beginning of the seventeenth century extraordinary genius was required to make even the tiniest of scientific advances. By developing the method of scientific discovery, early scientists ensured that by the end of the seventeenth century such scientific advances were run-of-the-mill, the likely outcome of any competent scientific investigation. What previously required genius became routine, and science exploded.
—Michael Nielsen, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
"Every human endeavour that requires more than one person's effort has to devote a certain amount of resources to the problem of coordination: The Internet has greatly simplified this problem
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Every human endeavour that requires more than one person's effort has to devote a certain amount of resources to the problem of coordination: The Internet has greatly simplified this problem
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
"No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence," is the prime rule suggested by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Indeed, literacy scholar Steve Graham recently crunched dozens of reading studies and found that "writing about a text proved to be better than just reading it, reading and rereading it, reading and studying it, reading and discussing it, and receiving reading instruction."
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
"My mind rebels at stagnation," he tells Watson in The Sign of the Four. "Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
After Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! were humiliated in Congress for their cooperation with the Chinese government, they joined the Global Network Initiative, adopting voluntary rules to address the human rights implications of their work.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
This is what's known as the Cute Cat Theory of online services, as formulated by Ethan Zuckerman, the head of the MIT Center for Civic Media. Shut down a small Web site where only activists blog, and the mass public will neither notice nor care. Shut down YouTube for political reasons? Then you take away people's cat videos—which enrages and radicalizes the masses. And autocrats can't risk that.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
And the spy agencies can even demand the corporation never disclose to its users that spies are rummaging through one's communications, leaving it difficult for us to know what's going on.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Even Apple, the darling of the tech world, has censored material for the Chinese government: "On Apple's special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer," MacKinnon writes.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
What's more, corporations obey the laws of the states in which they work. This has produced some egregious examples of digital-age firms bending to the whims of despots. In 2004, Yahoo! handed over to the Communist Party the identity of Shi Tao, a journalist who'd used Yahoo! e-mail to send a write-up of party directives to a U.S.-based democracy site. Shi Tao was jailed for a decade and subjected to brutal factory labor.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
This is precisely what is so alarming about the dragnet-style surveillance of the U.S. spy agencies, particularly the NSA. By casting such a wide net—and gathering up so many everyday utterances—they garner tidbits of everyday speech that, though innocuous when spoken, can be made to look incriminating by agents desperate to make a case. The whole point behind indiscriminate collection of data about citizens is to scare them into self-censoring. As Julia Angwin notes in Dragnet Nation, midcentury Germans who'd been visited by the Stasi became so terrified they either became "model citizens" or withdrew from public life.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
She found that the online discussion actually repressed people's political urges. The more wired her respondents were, the less they believed political change would take place.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
There's also a power shift here in the nature of this citizen information gathering. Traditionally, the state kept tabs on its citizens. But this rarely worked in reverse. Journalists provided a watchdog role, but individual citizens had few ways to participate. As everyday citizens become equipped with documentary tools, this is changing.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Collaborative mapping is, in the world of civics, a new literacy.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that online interactions are going to magically reduce the partisanship of modern politics. It's amazingly hard to change someone's mind on a big, important issue. But this evidence contradicts the notion that online communications are singularly responsible for the increased toxicity we often perceive in today's politics.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
To understand how technology affects social change, you have to look at how it affects the way we think, learn, and cooperate with others, and how local cultures come into play. All the enhancements of our cognition—bigger memory, public thinking, new literacies, and ambient awareness—play critical roles in how political change unfolds and how it's thwarted.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
As Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the printing press allowed economies of scale that spread liberating ideas far more broadly than was before possible.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
To put it another way, reaping the cognitive benefits of the Internet often requires social work. This distresses anyone for whom social work is a chore or seems beneath them.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Personally, I suspect a bigger danger of modern ambient contact is that it reinforces the recency effect—making us feel that information arriving right now is more important than events that happened yesterday, last month, or last century. We've long struggled, as a culture, to pay attention to the past. It's probably harder now than ever.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
As Tom Standage notes, we saw this during the rise of coffee shop culture in the seventeenth century. Today, intellectuals often wax nostalgic about early European coffee shops, where students and writers and businessmen would gather to read newspapers and debate weighty issues. But at the time, authorities hated them. They worried that café going would destroy young students' habits of concentration; the café gossip was seducing them away from their studies.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
But I suspect that what's really going on is not terribly causal. I doubt the ambient broadcasting universe is making people more trivial. What it's doing is revealing how trivial we've been all along, because it's making conversation suddenly visible.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
But ambient awareness is all about slowly amassing an enormous, detailed context. Follow someone's ambient signals for a day and it seems like trivia. In a week it seems like a short story. In six months, a novel.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
If you want to see the future of collective thinking, don't watch what Fortune 500 firms are doing. Watch what fan fiction writers are doing or what activists are doing. Or even watch how smart individuals do it—the ones who cultivate broad, diverse networks of friends or followers online.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
You might expect the people working face-to-face to be more productive, but that wasn't the case. The team with independently working members produced almost twice as many ideas. Other studies confirmed these results. Traditional brainstorming simply doesn't work as well as thinking alone, then pooling results.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The problem with the wikitorial was that the goal had no obvious end point. A large group can argue about a set of facts and come to a reasonable consensus; Wikipedia does this every day. But a strongly worded opinion—the core of an op-ed—is not subject to consensus. This is why collective thinking online also tends to fail when it attempts an aesthetic creation.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Which is the point: Art is usually the product of a single independent vision. As most corporations discover to their dismay, groups can suck creativity out of projects because they tamp down the most original, idiosyncratic parts of each individual's vision.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The problem with the wikitorial was that the goal had no obvious end point. A large group can argue about a set of facts and come to a reasonable consensus; Wikipedia does this every day. But a strongly worded opinion-the core of an op-ed-is not subject to consensus. This is why collective thinking online also tends to fail when it attempts an aesthetic creation.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Because the multitasking employees were more plugged in to their peers, able to vacuum up information and make decisions more quickly. It made them more efficient. The problem is that efficiency isn't always the goal with cognition. If you want to deeply absorb knowledge, you often want to work inefficiently-lingering and puzzling and letting ideas sink in. We need to do both, but our current digital environment is mostly designed to favor multitasking.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Other research has confirmed that rapid task switching makes it harder to manage our attention and to retain what we read. In one experiment, students who watched lectures while sending text messages did roughly 19 percent worse on a test than nontexting students.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
These eureka moments are familiar to all of us; they're why we take a shower or go for a walk when we're stuck on a problem. But this technique works only if we've actually got a lot of knowledge about the problem stored in our brains through long study and focus. As Poincare's experience illustrates, you can't come to a moment of creative insight if you haven't got any mental fuel. You can't be googling the info; it's got to be inside you.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Thamus also observed, astutely, that one ought not to trust an inventor's hype. "O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
In 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge helped settle an issue over which horse racing aficionados had long bickered: When a horse is galloping, is there a moment when all four hooves are simultaneously off the ground
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. "If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Part of what makes Starner's wearable so useful is that it's so fast to consult.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The real challenge of using machines for transactive memory lies in the inscrutability of their mechanics. Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work-where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Bush suspected the comparative difficulties of using libraries is what had prevented them from being of widespread use to the public. "Even the modern great library," he wrote, "is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few." To truly harness our external knowledge, we needed to bring it closer to our minds.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Socrates warned Phaedrus of the dangers of this arriviste technology. He told the story of how the Egyptian god Theuth invented writing and presented it as a gift to Thamus, the king of Egypt. "This," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit." Thamus disagreed. Knowledge stored was not really knowledge at all. People who became reliant on writing would lose the art of remembering anything: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Thamus also observed, astutely, that one ought not to trust an inventor's hype. "O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
In fact, many artists of the 1930s predicted that photography would become a commonplace tool for thought. As László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus designer, wrote: "The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of pen and camera alike.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
In 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge helped settle an issue over which horse racing aficionados had long bickered: When a horse is galloping, is there a moment when all four hooves are simultaneously off the ground?
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
the suggestion of Theresa Nielsen Hayden, a longtime host of online communities, they settled on a clever term: "tummeling," derived from the Yiddish tummler, the person at a party responsible for keeping the crowd engaged and getting them dancing at a wedding. Tummlers are the social adepts of online conversation.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet," as Laurie Penny, a British political writer, puts it.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The truth is that old and new modes of thinking aren't mutually exclusive. Knowing when to shift between public and private thinking-when to blast an idea online, when to let it slow bake-is a crucial new skill: cognitive diversity.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
We so value conversation and giving credit that we hack it into any system that comes along.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The tricky part of public thinking is that it works best in situations where people aren't worried about "owning" ideas.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
It would take another thirty-two years for Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. Untold millions of people died in those three decades of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
As an example, there's the tragic story of Ernest Duchesne, the original discoverer of penicillin.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Sir Francis Bacon figured this out four centuries ago, quipping that "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said something like, "Ninety percent of everything is crap," a formulation that geeks now refer to as Sturgeon's Law.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Technically, the condition of being unable to forget is called hyperthymesia,
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Chess players today, Kasparov has written, "are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
We're becoming more conversational thinkers-a shift that has been rocky, not least because everyday public thought uncorks the incivility and prejudices that are commonly repressed in face-to-face life. But at its best (which, I'd argue, is surprisingly often), it's a thrilling development, reigniting ancient traditions of dialogue and debate. At the same time, there's been an explosion of new forms of expression that were previously too expensive for everyday thought-like video, mapping, or data crunching. Our social awareness is shifting, too, as we develop ESP-like "ambient awareness," a persistent sense of what others are doing and thinking. On a social level, this expands our ability to understand the people we care about. On a civic level, it helps dispel traditional political problems like "pluralistic ignorance," catalyzing political action, as in the Arab Spring.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them. We're shifting from a stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to doing it habitually. Second, today's tools make it easier for us to find connections-between ideas, pictures, people, bits of news-that were previously invisible. Third, they encourage a superfluity of communication and publishing.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about. The printed word helped make our cognition linear and abstract, along with vastly enlarging our stores of knowledge. Newspapers shrank the world; then the telegraph shrank it even more dramatically. With every innovation, cultural prophets bickered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse or a utopia.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
In essence, a new form of chess intelligence was emerging. You could rank the teams like this: (1) a chess grand master was good; (2) a chess grand master playing with a laptop was better. But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance. "Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer," Kasparov concluded, "was overwhelming.
—Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.
—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time." To which adds Guth: "Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.
—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few square feet of grass behind it. A few square feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be all right. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency-or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Another one is cleaning up tools that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
To run a cycle with parts in it you've made yourself gives you a special feeling you can't possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You're at a disadvantage the first time around and it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it will almost undoubtedly take a lot more time, but the next time around you're way ahead of the specialist.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Throughout the process of fixing the machine things always come up, low-quality things, from a dusted knuckle to an accidentally ruined "irreplaceable" assembly. These drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things "gumption traps."
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The solutions all are simple-after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration's programs, "We'll just try them...and if they don't work...why then we'll just try something else." That may not be an exact quote, but it's close.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Which facts are likely to reappear? The simple facts. How to recognize them? Choose those that seem simple. Either this simplicity is real or the complex elements are indistinguishable.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The more general a fact, the more precious it is. Those which serve many times are better than those which have little chance of coming up again.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Poincare proceeded to examine these critically. Which facts are you going to observe? he asked. There is an infinity of them. There is no more chance that an unselective observation of facts will produce science than there is that a monkey at a typewriter will produce the Lord's Prayer.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Poincare then went on to demonstrate the conventional nature of other concepts of science, such as space and time, showing that there isn't one way of measuring these entities that is more true than another; that which is generally adopted is only more convenient.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words....
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
He had to answer the question, If you can't define it, what makes you think it exists? His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism. "A thing exists," he said, "if a world without it can't function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Cromwell's statement, "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going"
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn't follow that it arises out of experience.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
In Part One of formal scientific method, which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When I think of formal scientific method an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut, a huge bulldozer-slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible. It takes twice as long, five times as long, maybe a dozen times as long as informal mechanic's techniques, but you know in the end you're going to get it.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Deductive inferences do the reverse. They start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I'm working on parts. I'm working on concepts.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What makes it hard to see is that where once it was used to get away from it all, the escape has been so successful that now it is the "it all" that the romantics are trying to escape. What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
More money that way-if you don't stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Socrates' lengthy answer may be summed up without much loss as follows: no bad images of "what the gods and heroes are like" (377e); only stories that will make the guardians "least likely to fear death" (386a); no "terrible and frightening names for the underworld" (387b–c); no "lamentations of famous men" who have suffered defeat and died (387e); no representation of "worthwhile people as overcome by laughter" (388e–389a); no representation of gods or heroes as failing "to rule over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food for themselves" (389d–e); none of the "headstrong things that private individuals say to their rulers in works of prose or poetry" (390a); no imitators except "the pure imitator of the good person" (397d); no musical harmonies except the Dorian and Phrygian (399a); no music played on flutes, triangular lutes, harps, or no "multi-stringed or polyharmonic instruments" (399c); no rhythms except those appropriate to "a life that is ordered and courageous" (399d).
—Plato, Republic (Hackett Classics)
more than 100,000 Americans die every year from correctly taking their properly prescribed medication.33 This is one of the leading causes of death in America!
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
The role of science in a society is to observe, to ask questions, to form and test hypotheses and to interpret the findings without bias-not to kowtow to people's perceived desires.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Very few, if any, illegal acts need to occur. It doesn't involve large payoffs being delivered to secret bank accounts or to private investigators in smoky hotel lobbies. It's not a Hollywood story; it's just day-to-day government, science and industry in the United States.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
In other words, nutrition primarily determines whether the disease will ever do its damage.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
When all was said and done, this study found that macular degeneration risk could be reduced by as much as 88%, simply by eating the right foods.41
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
This is probably one of the worst pains humans experience. Those who have had it will never forget it....The severe pain of renal colic needs to be controlled by potent pain killers. Don't expect an aspirin to do the trick. Get yourself to a doctor or an emergency room.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
…hip fractures are more frequent in populations where dairy products are commonly consumed and calcium intakes are relatively high.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Genes do not act in isolation; they need a trigger for their effects to be produced.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Of the 142 diabetic children measured, every single one had antibody levels higher than 3.55. Of the seventy-nine normal children measured, every single one had antibody levels less than 3.55.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
There is enough evidence now that the U.S. government should be discussing the idea that the toxicity of our diet is the single biggest cause of cancer.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
In these studies, men with the highest dairy intakes had approximately double the risk of total prostate cancer, and up to a fourfold increase in risk of metastatic or fatal prostate cancer relative to low consumers.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
First, the proportion of colon cancer cases attributed to known inherited genes is only about 1-3%.89 Another 10-30%89 tend to occur in some families more than others (called familial clustering), an effect possibly reflective of a significant genetic contribution. These numbers, however, exaggerate the number of cancers that are solely "due to genes.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
These rapid changes in cancer rates within one population cannot possibly be explained by changes in inherited genes.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
For example, the Czech Republic has a death rate of 34.19 per 100,000 males, while Bangladesh has a death rate of 0.63 per 100,000 males!6263
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Women who consume a diet rich in animal-based foods, with a reduced amount of whole, plant-based foods, reach puberty earlier and menopause later, thus extending their reproductive lives.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
One man had a twenty-one-year history of diabetes and was taking thirty-five units of insulin a day. After three weeks of intensive dietary treatment, his insulin dosage dropped to eight units a day. After eight weeks at home, his need for insulin shots vanished.
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Of the twenty-five Type 2 patients, twenty-four were able to discontinue their insulin medication!
—Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study
Throughout this book we focus on customer value because it is the starting point.
—Curtis R. Carlson, William W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
If a CEO talks exclusively about increasing shareholder value, he or she provides little or no guidance to employees about how to do their jobs better. All employees, especially the CEO, should spend the bulk of their time talking about their customers and how to address their needs.
—Curtis R. Carlson, William W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
WORK ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT, NOT JUST WHAT'S INTERESTING-THERE'S AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF BOTH." Frank Guarnieri
—Curtis R. Carlson, William W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
As Darwin pointed out, "It is not the strongest of a species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it is the one most adaptable to change."
—Curtis R. Carlson, William W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want
their Favorite Application is a code editor, but it's not their secret weapon . . . that's version control.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
She's starved. She's starved for information, and in the absence of information, people will create their own.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
Maybe they're not tyrants. Maybe they're surrounded by poor communicators. Or maybe they are tyrants. I can't tell from where I'm sitting.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
The product manager is attempting to fake out the engineers in the room by saying, "Hey, this is a tough problem that they have put us in. What are we going to do?" Brilliant bait-and-switch, no? Don't sweat it. They make less than you.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
They're the whack jobs who always ask the same (or random) questions during an all-hands with the hope that simply by asking, they're going to change something.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
The organization's view of your manager is their view of you. I'm glad you're a C++ rock star, but the problem is, your manager is a passive non-communicator who doesn't take the time to grok the political intrigue that is created by any large group of people. I see him as a non-factor and you're living in the shadow of a non-factor. Sorry.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
Real work is visible action managers take to support their particular vision for their organization.
—Michael Lopp, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
—Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
He had formulated the proper nature of the scientific enterprise, by aligning inductive reasoning with mathematics and rigorous experiment. He had revolutionised the study of optics, and established the principles of celestial mechanics. With his discovery of the universal laws of gravity, he had rendered the invisible visible. He explained for the first time the nature of tides. He discovered the infinitesimal calculus. He invented a new system of chronology that, according to Gibbon, "would alone be sufficient to assure him immortality.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
At the close of his life he relayed a judgement of his own career. "I don't know what I may seem to the world," he said, "but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Those words have been endlessly quoted, in large part because they seem to represent the limits of human wisdom and human enterprise.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
A young mathematician, Roger Cotes, was chosen to supervise the new edition; he had the courage, or temerity, to point out many mistakes in Newton's calculations. Newton grudgingly assented to the alterations, and in fact entered a correspondence with Cotes that was one of the most fruitful of his life. Yet in the next edition Newton chose not to acknowledge Cotes's contribution. It is another example of his endless demand for power and control.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Colours were not secondary aspects or properties of light; they were an integral part of divine creation and were light. He listed the seven colours of the spectrum-red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet-on the analogy with the seven notes of the musical scale. There were originally thought to have been only three colours of the spectrum, but Newton insisted that there must be seven in accordance with Pythagorean principles of harmony. This may be considered a mathematical, or a mystical, vision of the universe.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Newton had also arrived with a "scheme" in which he outlined the nature and purpose of the society's deliberations. He declared that natural philosophy "consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws-establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thus deducing the causes and effects of things." This became the working definition of the scientific method.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
He was not averse, however, to fudging or doctoring figures so that he might pretend to a higher degree of accuracy than he had actually accomplished. In certain questions of gravity and velocity, he fixed his calculations in order to claim an exactitude of one part in three thousand. No one of course was in a position to check his figures properly, and so he got away with it. It suggests that Newton's vanity and desire to impress were still part of his bearing in the world.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
He had written the book in Latin so that it could be studied by the European community of natural philosophers. He admitted that he also rendered the subject more complex, and mathematically more advanced, in order to ward off the prying eyes of the vulgar. There is an element of alchemical secrecy and mystery about such a procedure, but he also wanted to deter critics.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
In the popular mind it is sometimes believed that somehow he was the first to discover or "invent" gravity. But that is not the case. Copernicus and Kepler had already speculated about gravitational attraction. The force of Newton's originality lay in the fact that he demonstrated it mathematically, and proved that it was a universal force. No one before had proven beyond doubt, for example, that the tides were affected by the sun and the moon.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
In the course of this letter Newton made his famous remark that "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." It may be unfair to note here that Hooke was of small and somewhat crooked stature.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
But in the course of his intense study of the biblical texts Newton concluded that Athanasius had perpetrated a fraud. He had interpolated key words into the sacred Scriptures to support his argument that Christ was God. In that endeavour he had been supported by the Church of Rome, and from that corruption of the texts had sprung the general corruption of the Christian Church itself. The purity and faith of the early Church had been destroyed by superstitious zealots who were intent upon bowing down before the illusion of the Trinity or Three In One. His mathematical, as well as his spiritual, creed directly opposed their position.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
In particular he became intent upon the prophecies of Daniel and the Book of Revelation written by John the Divine. He was in search of eternal truth. There was for him no necessary disjunction between science and theology. They were part of the same pursuit. Theology and science were, equally, avenues to God. They were the keys to true knowledge of the universe. He was a philosopher in the ancient sense, a seeker after wisdom.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
When Collins wrote to him from London, requesting that some of his mathematical calculations be published, he agreed to the proposal "soe it bee without my name to it. For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I cheifly study to decline." Here is the clear evidence of a man who wrapped himself in isolation and who savoured his singularity; his solitude was his carapace in which he could hide himself. His refusal to collaborate, and his difficulty in communicating his most profound ideas, are part of his essential character.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
It seems that he had one acquaintance, a chemist named Vigani, but he dropped him after Vigani had "told a loose story about a Nun." So the young professor was deeply religious as well as isolated. It is not perhaps a very attractive picture but it is the appropriate setting for one whose work was popularly regarded as being somehow "superhuman" in its achievement.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
In this long period of his professorship he also acquired a reputation for eccentricity and absent-mindedness. When he attended Hall in college he was often so preoccupied with his calculations that he forgot to partake of anything, and the cloth was removed before he had eaten. He would make his way to the wrong church for divine service, or would wear his surplice at dinner.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Newton was by temperament isolated and secretive, unwilling to share his knowledge, ever vulnerable and suspicious, hiding his work with anagrams and conundrums. One of his contemporaries at Cambridge described him as "of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
From his experiments in optics he knew that a reflecting telescope would be more effective than the conventional refracting telescope, since the parabolic mirror would obviate the distortions of light resulting from the use of lenses, and in fact his six-inch device had a power equivalent to a six-foot refractor. If he had only ever achieved this one feat alone, he would be worthy of the highest praise.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
It is also likely that he visited instrument-makers and glass-grinders, since on his return to Cambridge he began to construct a telescope. When at a later date John Conduitt asked him where he had had it made, he replied that he had made it himself. Then his relative asked him where he had obtained his tools for this difficult enterprise, and Newton replied that "he made them himself & laughing added if I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me, I had never made anything of it." Here is an experimenter who proceeded on the basis of complete self-reliance.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Altogether, over two years, he spent the large sum of twenty pounds on his clothing. He was, in other words, careful of his appearance. This appears to be at odds with the image of the absent-minded genius, or indeed of the cloistered hermit. But the fact that he allowed himself to be painted on many occasions, in subsequent years, suggests that he was proud of his image as a scholar and as a gentleman.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
This much can be said of his enforced withdrawal from Cambridge. Between 1665 and 1666 this young man revolutionised the world of natural philosophy. He gave the first proper treatment of the calculus; he split white light into its constituent colours; he began his exploration of universal gravity. And he was only twenty-four years of age.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
It has the merit of being the first written work on the calculus, but it is one that Newton kept to himself. After completing the tract he effectively left mathematics alone for the next two years. The fact that he was now the leading mathematician in England, and perhaps in Europe, was known only to himself. There may have been another sentiment at work in his most complex nature. To know something that no one else in the world knew or understood-that was a most exhilarating experience of power. Perhaps he wished to prolong it for as long as possible.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
There also seems to have been a pattern of progress in his studies. He devoted all of his attention to a problem until he had satisfactorily resolved it; then he would abandon his work for a while. After a few months he would return to it, and make another leap forward. He learned how to "husband" his mind, as it were, to allow it to lie fallow before it became fruitful once more.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
The explanation is not hard to find. Newton hardly bothered with the ordinary curriculum, and at the last minute "crammed" the orthodox textbooks so that he could at least pass each test in turn. His mind, and imagination, were elsewhere.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
But the spectacle of this young man, surveying and mastering all at once the realms of mathematics, optics and cosmology, is little short of astonishing.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
At a later date he wished to test Descartes's theory that light was a "pressure" pulsating through the ether. He inserted a bodkin or large needle within his eye "betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could." He did this in order to alter the curve of his retina and observe the results. His passion for experiment was such that he risked blinding himself in order to pursue his researches. He was single-minded to the point of obsession.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
The description is a fair indication of his temperament. He progressed methodically, moving from the less to the more difficult, but he was also capable of those sudden moments of insight or comprehension that rendered Euclid "easy" to him at first acquaintance. One disciple wrote at a later date that Newton "could sometimes see almost by Intuition, even without Demonstration.
—Peter Ackroyd, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Lies are simpler, and most of the time they make better sense.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
But I think she must not, for she caught me with an easy smile, then stole away without a word. Like dew in dawn's pale light.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Caution is always wisdom's tool.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Clothes do not make the man, but you need the proper costume if you want to play the part.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Fault isn't the issue. A tree doesn't make a thunderstorm, but any fool knows where lightning's going to strike.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Book 2)
Definition 8. We will say that two graphs are equal if they have equal vertex sets and equal edge sets. And we will say that two graph diagrams are equal if they represent equal vertex sets and equal edge sets.
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
Definition 7. If {X, Y} is an edge of a graph, we say that {X, Y} joins or connects the vertices X and Y, and that X and Y are adjacent to one another. The edge {X, Y} is incident to each of X and Y, and each of X and Y is incident to {X, Y}. Two edges incident to the same vertex are called adjacent edges. A vertex incident to no edges at all is isolated.
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
Definition 6. The elements of the vertex set of a graph are called vertices (singular: vertex) and the elements of the edge set are called edges. We shall denote the number of vertices by "v" and the number of edges by "e".
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
Definition 5. A graph is an object consisting of two sets called its vertex set and its edge set. The vertex set is a finite nonempty set. The edge set may be empty, but otherwise its elements are two-element subsets of the vertex set.
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
Notation. The empty set (we had to say "an empty set" before, but now we can say "the empty set") shall be denoted by "ø" or "{ }".
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
Convention. We agree to consider an empty set to be a subset of every set.
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
to a mathematician an "object" is anything conceivable, including numbers, unicorns, and Peter Pan.
—Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory (Dover Books on Mathematics)
You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared. You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
But there's a better way. You show her she is beautiful. You make mirrors of your eyes, prayers of your hands against her body. It is hard, very hard, but when she truly believes you..." Bast gestured excitedly. "Suddenly the story she tells herself in her own head changes. She transforms. She isn't seen as beautiful. She is beautiful, seen.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Every Fae child knows this, but you mortals never seem to see. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience,
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Lovely as the moon: not flawless, perhaps, but perfect.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
There is a sort of camaraderie that rarely exists except between men who have fought the same enemies and known the same women.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Excellence is excellence's only companion.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
That's why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
I had been feeling rather out of my element until Ambrose let me know, in his own special way, that there wasn't much difference between the University and the streets of Tarbean. No matter where you are, people are basically the same. Besides, anger can keep you warm at night, and wounded pride can spur a man to wondrous things.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Why? Because pride is a strange thing, and because generosity deserves generosity in return. But mostly because it felt like the right thing to do, and that is reason enough.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
A poet is a musician who can't sing. Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.
—Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One
However, Tesla was not especially interested in the nitty-gritty work of converting his inventions into profitable products. Moreover, he was often frustrated that ordinary people did not grasp the ideals underlying his inventions, and so he resorted to illusions to convince them of the value of his creations. Tesla came to believe that along with identifying the ideal for an invention, he also had to create the right illusion-about the exciting and revolutionary changes that his invention would bring about for society.
—W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
For Schumpeter, engineers and managers come up with incremental innovations by going out and assessing existing needs whereas entrepreneurs and inventors introduce radical and disruptive innovations by responding to ideas that come from within.20 With objective rationality, the individual shapes ideas in response to the outside world (the market) whereas with subjective rationality, the individual reshapes the outside world to conform to his or her internal ideas.
—W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
As Tesla told one biographer, he was inspired by a saying from Sir Isaac Newton: "I simply hold the thought steadily in my mind's eye until a clear light dawns upon me.
—W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
To succeed, inventors must be creative on both sides-in how they negotiate with both nature and society.
—W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
Power tastes best when sweetened by courtesy.
—George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5)