TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
abstract machine ::: 1. (language) A processor design which is not intended to be implemented as hardware, but which is the notional executor of a particular intermediate any physical computer or it may be used to make the language implementation easier to port to other platforms.A virtual machine is an abstract machine for which an interpreter exists.Examples: ABC, Abstract Machine Notation, ALF, CAML, F-code, FP/M, Hermes, LOWL, Christmas, SDL, S-K reduction machine, SECD, Tbl, Tcode, TL0, WAM.2. (theory) A procedure for executing a set of instructions in some formal language, possibly also taking in input data and producing output. Such abstract machines are not intended to be constructed as hardware but are used in thought experiments about computability.Examples: Finite State Machine, Turing Machine. (1995-03-13)
abstract machine 1. "language" A processor design which is not intended to be implemented as {hardware}, but which is the notional executor of a particular {intermediate language} (abstract machine language) used in a {compiler} or {interpreter}. An abstract machine has an {instruction set}, a {register set} and a model of memory. It may provide instructions which are closer to the language being compiled than any physical computer or it may be used to make the language implementation easier to {port} to other {platforms}. A {virtual machine} is an abstract machine for which an {interpreter} exists. Examples: {ABC}, {Abstract Machine Notation}, {ALF}, {CAML}, {F-code}, {FP/M}, {Hermes}, {LOWL}, {Christmas}, {SDL}, {S-K reduction machine}, {SECD}, {Tbl}, {Tcode}, {TL0}, {WAM}. 2. "theory" A procedure for executing a set of instructions in some formal language, possibly also taking in input data and producing output. Such abstract machines are not intended to be constructed as {hardware} but are used in thought experiments about {computability}. Examples: {Finite State Machine}, {Turing Machine}. (1995-03-13)
aeroplane ::: n. --> A flying machine, or a small plane for experiments on flying, which floats in the air only when propelled through it.
Alan Turing "person" Alan M. Turing, 1912-06-22/3? - 1954-06-07. A British mathematician, inventor of the {Turing Machine}. Turing also proposed the {Turing test}. Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science. Turing was a student and fellow of {King's College Cambridge} and was a graduate student at {Princeton University} from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published "On Computable Numbers", a paper in which he conceived an {abstract machine}, now called a {Turing Machine}. Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. He masterminded operations at {Bletchley Park}, UK which were highly successful in cracking the Nazis "Enigma" codes during World War II. Some of his early advances in computer design were inspired by the need to perform many repetitive symbolic manipulations quickly. Before the building of the {Colossus} computer this work was done by a roomful of women. In 1945 he joined the {National Physical Laboratory} in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named {Automatic Computing Engine} (ACE). In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester where the {Manchester Automatic Digital Machine}, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built. He also worked on theories of {artificial intelligence}, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms. Turing was gay, and died rather young under mysterious circumstances. He was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident. There is an excellent biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, subtitled "The Enigma of Intelligence" and a play based on it called "Breaking the Code". There was also a popular summary of his work in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach". {(http://AlanTuring.net/)}. (2001-10-09)
Bacon, Roger: (1214-1294) Franciscan. He recognized the significance of the deductive application of principles and the necessity for experimental verification of the results. He was keenly interested in mathematics. His most famous work was called Opus majus, a veritable encyclopaedia of the sciences of his day. -- L.E.D Baconian Method: The inductive method as advanced by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The purpose of the method was to enable man to attain mastery over nature in order to exploit it for his benefit. The mind should pass from particular facts to a more general knowledge of forms, or generalized physical properties. They are laws according to which phenomena actually proceed. He demanded an exhaustive enumeration of positive instances of occurrences of phenomena, the recording of comparative instances, in which an event manifests itself with greater or lesser intensity, and the additional registration of negative instances. Then experiments should test the observations. See Mill's Methods. -- J.J.R.
CAM-PC ::: (hardware) A cellular automata circuit board which is a hardware implementation from Automatrix of the MIT CAM-6 machine. It comes with dozens of experiments and applications. . (1995-04-21)
CAM-PC "hardware" A {cellular automata} circuit board which is a hardware implementation from {Automatrix} of the {MIT} {CAM-6} machine. It comes with dozens of experiments and applications. {(http://automatrix.com/campc/index.html)}. (1995-04-21)
Clauberg, Dr. Carl ::: SS Physician infamous for his experiments in sterilizing Jewish women at Auschwitz, in Barracks 11.
Compatible Timesharing System "operating system" (CTSS) One of the earliest (1963) experiments in the design of interactive {time-sharing} {operating systems}. CTSS was ancestral to {Multics}, {Unix}, and {ITS}. It was developed at the {MIT} Computation Center by a team led by Fernando J. Corbato. CTSS ran on a modified {IBM 7094} with a second 32K-word bank of memory, using two {2301 drums} for swapping. {Remote access} was provided to up to 30 users via an {IBM 7750} {communications controller} connected to {dial-up} {modems}. The name {ITS} (Incompatible {time-sharing} System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs. (1997-01-29)
Compatible Timesharing System ::: (operating system) (CTSS) One of the earliest (1963) experiments in the design of interactive time-sharing operating systems. CTSS was ancestral to provided to up to 30 users via an IBM 7750 communications controller connected to dial-up modems.The name ITS (Incompatible time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs. (1997-01-29)
connector ::: n. --> One who, or that which, connects
A flexible tube for connecting the ends of glass tubes in pneumatic experiments.
A device for holding two parts of an electrical conductor in contact.
Dachau ::: Erected in 1933, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Used mainly to incarcerate German political prisoners until late 1938, whereupon large numbers of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and other supposed enemies of the state and anti-social elements were sent as well. Nazi doctors and scientists used many prisoners at Dachau as guinea pigs for experiments. During the war, construction began on a gas chamber, but it never became operational. Dachau was liberated by American troops in April 1945.
dhutanga. [alt. dhutanga] (S. dhutaguna/dhuta/dhuta; T. sbyang pa'i yan lag; C. toutuo[xing]; J. zuda[gyo]; K. tut'a[haeng] 頭陀[行]). In Pāli, lit. "limbs of scrupulousness," viz., "austerities," or "ascetic practices." The term is alternately known as simply dhuta/dhuta in both Pāli and Sanskrit; the BUDDHIST HYBRID SANSKRIT term dhutaguna means the "qualities" (GUnA) of the "purified" (dhuta) person, viz., an "ascetic." Dhutanga refers to a specific set of thirteen ascetic practices that the Buddha authorized monks to adopt voluntarily for the purposes of cultivating contentedness with little, detachment, energy, and moderation. These austerities are not enjoined on monks and nuns by the VINAYA, but are rather optional practices that monastics were sanctioned to adopt for limited periods of time in order to foster sensory restraint (INDRIYASAMVARA), an important constituent of morality (sĪLA). Based on the Buddha's own failed experiments with extreme mortification of the flesh (see TAPAS) as a practice conducive to enlightenment while he was a BODHISATTVA, this specific set of practices was considered to provide a middle way (MADHYAMAPRATIPAD) between self-mortification and sensual indulgence. The thirteen authorized practices are (1) wearing patched robes made from discarded cloth rather than from cloth donated by laypeople; (2) wearing only three robes; (3) going for alms; (4) not omitting any house while on the alms round, rather than begging only at those houses known to provide good food; (5) eating only what can be eaten in one sitting; (6) eating only food received in the alms bowl (PĀTRA), rather than more elaborate meals presented to the SAMGHA; (7) refusing more food after indicating one has eaten enough; (8) dwelling in the forest; (9) dwelling at the root of a tree; (10) dwelling in the open air, using only a tent made from one's robes as shelter; (11) dwelling in a charnel ground (sMAsĀNA); (12) satisfaction with whatever dwelling one has; and (13) sleeping in a sitting position without ever lying down (see CHANGJWA PURWA). The comparable Mahāyāna list of twelve dhutagunas is essentially the same, dropping the two practices involving eating (5, 6) and adding an additional rule on wearing only garments made of coarse hemp and wool. The VISUDDHIMAGGA recommends these ascetic practices especially to those of either greedy (RĀGA) or deluded (MOHA) temperaments (CARITA), because greed and delusion both wane through, respectively, the continued practice of asceticism and the clarification of what is important in life; sometimes a person of hateful temperament is also said to benefit, because conflict abates as one becomes content with little. The Buddha offered this authorized list of voluntary practices after explicitly rejecting a more severe set of austerities proposed by his cousin and rival DEVADATTA that would have been mandatory for all members of the saMgha: forest dwelling (see ARANNAVĀSI), subsistence on gathered alms food only, use of rag robes only, dwelling at the foot of a tree, and strict vegetarianism. With the growth of settled monasticism, the practice of the austerities waned, although asceticism continues to be a major prestige factor within the Buddhist lay and monastic communities. In their accounts of India, both FAXIAN and XUANZANG note the presence of followers of Devadatta who adhered to the austere practices he had recommended to the Buddha. The dhutangas should be distinguished from TAPAS, "severe austerities," or DUsKARACARYĀ, "difficult feats" of religious virtuosity, practices that do not necessarily involve the authorized types of ascetic practices. See also THUDONG.
D. Interpretations of Probability. The methods and results of mathematical probability (and of probability in general) are the subject of much controversy as regards their interpretation and value. Among the various theories proposed, we shall consider the following Probability as a measure of belief, probability as the relative frequency of events, probability as the truth-frequency of types of argument, probability as a primitive notion, probability as an operational concept, probability as a limit of frequencies, and probability as a physical magnitude determined by axioms. I. Probability as a Measure of Belief: According to this theory, probability is the measure or relative degree of rational credence to be attached to facts or statements on the strength of valid motives. This type of probability is sometimes difficult to estimate, as it may be qualitative as well as quantitative. When considered in its mathematical aspects, the measure of probable inference depends on the preponderance or failure of operative causes or observed occurrences of the case under investigation. This conception involves axioms leading to the classic rule of Laplace, namely: The measure of probability of any one of mutually exclusive and apriori equiprobable possibilities, is the ratio of the number of favorable possibilities to the total number of possibilities. In probability operations, this rule is taken as the definition of direct probability for those cases where it is applicable. The main objections against this interpretation are: that probability is largely subjective, or at least independent of direct experience; that equiprobability is taken as an apriori notion, although the ways of asserting it are empirical; that the conditions of valid equiprobability are not stated definitely; that equiprobability is difficult to determine actually in all cases; that it is difficult to attach an adequate probability to a complex event from the mere knowledge of the probabilities of its component parts, and that the notion of probability is not general, as it does not cover such cases as the inductive derivation of probabilities from statistical data. II. Probability as a Relative Frequency. This interpretation is based on the nature of events, and not on any subjective considerations. It deals with the rate with which an event will occur in a class of events. Hence, it considers probability as the ratio of frequency of true results to true conditions, and it gives as its measure the relative frequency leading from true conditions to true results. What is meant when a set of calculations predict that an experiment will yield a result A with probability P, is that the relative frequency of A is expected to approximate the number P in a long series of such experiments. This conception seems to be more concerned with empirical probabilities, because the calculations assumed are mostly based on statistical data or material assumptions suggested by past experiments. It is valuable in so far as it satisfies the practical necessity of considering probability aggregates in such problems. The main objections against this interpretation are: that it does not seem capable of expressing satisfactorily what is meant by the probability of an event being true; that its conclusions are more or less probable, owing to the difficulty of defining a proper standard for comparing ratios; that neither its rational nor its statistical evidence is made clear; that the degree of relevance of that evidence is not properly determined, on account of the theoretical indefinite ness of both the true numerical value of the probability and of the evidence assumed, and that it is operational in form only, but not in fact, because it involves the infinite without proper limitations. III. Probability as Truth-Frequency of Types of Arguments: In this interpretation, which is due mainly to Peirce and Venn, probability is shifted from the events to the propositions about them; instead of considering types and classes of events, it considers types and classes of propositions. Probability is thus the ability to give an objective reading to the relative tiuth of propositions dealing with singular events. This ability can be used successfully in interpreting definite and indefinite numerical probabilities, by taking statistical evaluations and making appropriate verbal changes in their formulation. Once assessed, the relative truth of the propositions considered can be communicated to facts expressed by these propositions. But neither the propositions nor the facts as such have a probability in themselves. With these assumptions, a proposition has a degree of probability, only if it is considered as a member of a class of propositions; and that degree is expressed by the proportion of true propositions to the total number of propositions in the class. Hence, probability is the ratio of true propositions to all the propositions of the class examined, if the class is finite, or to all the propositions of the same type in the long run, if the class is infinite. In the first case, fair sampling may cover the restrictions of a finite class; in the second case, the use of infinite series offers a practical limitation for the evidence considered. But in both cases, probability varies with the class or type chosen, and probability-inferences are limited by convention to those cases where numerical values can be assigned to the ratios considered. It will be observed that this interpretation of probability is similar to the relative frequency theory. The difference between these two theories is more formal than material in both cases the probability refers ultimately to kinds of evidence based on objective matter of fact. Hence the Truth-Frequency theory is open to the sime objections as the Relative-Frequency theory, with proper adjustments. An additional difficulty of this theory is that the pragmatic interpretation of truth it involves, has yet to be proved, and the situation is anything but improved by assimilating truth with probability.
docimastic ::: a. --> Proving by experiments or tests.
early inward current ::: The initial electrical current, measured in voltage clamp experiments, that results from the voltage-dependent entry of a cation such as Na+ or Ca2+; produces the rising phase of the action potential.
empirical ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or founded upon, experiment or experience; depending upon the observation of phenomena; versed in experiments.
Depending upon experience or observation alone, without due regard to science and theory; -- said especially of medical practice, remedies, etc.; wanting in science and deep insight; as, empiric skill, remedies.
esp ::: ESP Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is a collective term describing communication or perception by means of other than our five physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, i.e. a sixth sense. Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980), Professor of Psychology at Duke University in the USA, conducted thousands of experiments producing statistical evidence of the existence of a telepathic function in some individuals, and coined the term ESP (also referred to as psi after the 'agent' through which the mind is able to receive the ESP impressions).
eudiometrical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a eudiometer; as, eudiometrical experiments or results.
Euthanasia ::: The original meaning of this term was an easy and painless death for the terminally ill. However, the Nazi euthanasia program took on quite a different meaning: the taking of eugenic measures to improve the quality of the German “race.” This program culminated in enforced “mercy” deaths for the incurably insane, permanently disabled, deformed and “superfluous.” Three major classifications were developed: 1) euthanasia for incurables; 2) direct extermination by “special treatment”; and 3) experiments in mass sterilization.
experimentalism ::: A philosophy that uses data obtained from experiments in order to ascertain the integrity of an idea or proposed concept.
experimentalize ::: v. i. --> To make experiments (upon); to experiment.
Experimental Physics Control Systems "body" (EPCS) A group of the European Physical Society, focussing on all aspects of controls, especially {informatics}, in experimental physics, including accelerators and experiments. (1994-12-12)
Experimental Physics Control Systems ::: (EPCS) A group of the European Physical Society, focussing on all aspects of controls, especially informatics, in experimental physics, including accelerators and experiments. (1994-12-12)
Experimental Psychology: (1) Experimental psychology in the widest sense is the application to psychology of the experimental methods evolved by the natural sciences. In this sense virtually the whole of contemporary psychology is experimental. The experimental method consists essentially in the prearrangement and control of conditions in such a way as to isolate specific variables. In psychology, the complexity of subject matter is such that direct isolation of variables is impossible and various indirect methods are resorted to. Thus an experiment will be repeated on the same subjects with all conditions remaining constant except the one variable whose influence is being tested and which is varied systematically by the experimenter. This procedure yields control data within a single group of subjects. If repetition of the experiment with the same group introduces additional uncontrolled variables, an equated control group is employed. Systematic rotation of variables among several groups of subjects may also be resorted to. In general, however, psychologists have designed their experiments in accordance with what has frequently been called the "principle of the one variable."
experimenter ::: n. --> One who makes experiments; one skilled in experiments.
experiment ::: n. **1. A test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc. v. 2.* To try something new, especially in order to gain experience. experiments. adj.* experimenting.
experimetalist ::: n. --> One who makes experiments; an experimenter.
Fate [from Latin fatum that which is divinely decreed from fari to speak] The regents of the kosmos, acting as karmic agents of past destiny, are said to be the establishers of fate or destiny for the world or universe then beginning its manvantaric evolution. They establish in the noumenal worlds the roots, and in the phenomenal worlds the fruits, of the essential laws of being. Fatalism is the belief that human beings have no free will; however, in actual fact, though perhaps we cannot maintain our own personal will against the laws of the universe except in very moderate degree, yet we have considerable latitude to make experiments and learn from our mistakes. The Latin fatum means the laws of nature or the will of the gods, personified as the Parcae or three Fates, the Greek Moirai. In the best sense therefore it means our lot, appointed by the destiny born of our own past thoughts, feelings, and acts. See also KARMA; MOIRA
field experiments: an experiment in a natural setting, rather than the comparatively artificial setting of the laboratory. Consequently, extraneous variables are difficult to control.
galvanoscopy ::: n. --> The use of galvanism in physiological experiments.
ganzfeldexperiments ::: Ganzfeld Experiments Ganzfeld is a German word meaning 'complete field'. The Ganzfeld experiments were originated by the German psychologist Wolfgang Metzger (1899 - 1979), and are considered to have been the most carefully scrutinised ESP experiments. Alleged psychics had their eyes covered and ears blocked while a 'sender' attempted to transmit messages to them. Later the psychics would compare the messages received with those sent out. There was a great deal of excitement and interest at the time but the research failed to produce any convincing results.
gedanken /g*-dahn'kn/ Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested. "Gedanken" is a German word for "thought". A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term "gedanken experiment" is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealise away some important aspect of the real world in constructing the "apparatus". Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A "gedanken thesis" is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See also {AI-complete}, {DWIM}.
Hypothesis: In general, an assumption, a supposition, a conjecture, a postulate, a condition, an antecedent, a contingency, a possibility, a probability, a principle, a premiss, a ground or foundation, a tentative explanation, a probable cause, a theoretical situation, an academic question, a specific consideration, a conceded statement, a theory or view for debate or action, a likely relation, the conditioning of one thing by another. In logic, the conditional clause or antecedent in a hypothetical proposition. Also a thesis subordinate to a more general one. In methodology, a principle offered as a conditional explanation of a fact or a group of facts; or again, a provisional assumption about the ground of certain phenomena, used as a guiding norm in making observations and experiments until verified or disproved by subsequent evidence. A hypothesis is conditional or provisional, because it is based on probable and insufficient arguments or elements; yet, it is not an arbitrary opinion, but a justifiable assumption with some foundation in fact, this accounts for the expectation of some measure of agreement between the logical conclusion or implications drawn from a hypothesis, and the phenomena which are known or which may be determined by further tests. A scientific hypothesis must be proposed after the observations it must explain (a posteriori), compatible with established theories, reasonable and relevant, fruitful in its applications and controllable, general in terms and more fundamental than the statements it has to explain. A hypothesis is descriptive (forecasting the external circumstances of the event) or explanatory (offering causal accounts of the event). There are two kinds of explanatory hypotheses the hypothesis of law (or genetic hypothesis) which attempts to determine the manner in which the causes or conditions of a phenomenon operate and the hypothesis of cause (or causal hypothesis) which attempt to determine the causes or conditions for the production of the phenomenon. A working hypothesis is a preliminary assumption based on few, uncertain or obscure elements, which is used provisionally as a guiding norm in the investigation of certain phenomena. Often, the difference between a working hypothesis and a scientific hypothesis is one of degree; and in any case, a hypothesis is seldom verified completely with all its detailed implications. The Socratic Method of Hypothesis, as developed by Plato in the Phaedo particularly, consists in positing an assumption without questioning its value, for the purpose of determining and analyzing its consequences only when these are clearly debated and judged, the assumption itself is considered for justification or rejection. Usually, a real condition is taken as a ground for inferences, as the aim of the method is to attain knowledge or to favor action. Plato used more specially the word "hypothesis" for the assumptions of geometry (postulates and nominal definitions) Anstotle extended this use to cover the immediate principles of mathematics. It may be observed that the modern hypothetico-deductive method in logical and mathematical theories, is a development of the Socratic method stripped of its ontological implications and purposes.
independent groups designs: used in experiments when separate groups of individuals participate in the different levels of the independent variable, so that each data set is independent of each other. Also known as a between subjects or unrelated design, as comparisons are made between groups rather than within them.
inductivism ::: The philosophy that holds that scientific research is guided by the various observations and data produced by previous science experiments; In other words, that science progresses in a direction that has prior experimental data. It exists both in a classical naive version, which has been highly influential, and in various more sophisticated versions. The naive version, which trace back to thinkers such as Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī[15] and David Hume, says that general statements (theories) have to be based on empirical observations, which are subsequently generalized into statements that can be regarded as true or probably true.
in vacuo ::: --> In a vacuum; in empty space; as, experiments in vacuo.
isochromatic ::: a. --> Having the same color; connecting parts having the same color, as lines drawn through certain points in experiments on the chromatic effects of polarized light in crystals.
laboratory experiments: conducted in a laboratory or a rigorously controlled environment, whereby the independent variable is manipulated, whilst all other extraneous variables are strictly controlled.
laboratory ::: n. --> The workroom of a chemist; also, a place devoted to experiments in any branch of natural science; as, a chemical, physical, or biological laboratory. Hence, by extension, a place where something is prepared, or some operation is performed; as, the liver is the laboratory of the bile.
LAMINA ::: A concurrent object-oriented language.[Experiments with a Knowledge-based System on a Multiprocessor, Third Intl Conf Supercomputing Proc, 1988].[ELINT in LAMINA, Application of a Concurrent Object language, Delagi et al, KSL-88-3, Knowledge Sys Labs, Stanford U].
LAMINA A {concurrent} {object-oriented} language. ["Experiments with a Knowledge-based System on a Multiprocessor", Third Intl Conf Supercomputing Proc, 1988]. ["ELINT in LAMINA, Application of a Concurrent Object language", Delagi et al, KSL-88-3, Knowledge Sys Labs, Stanford U].
late outward current ::: The delayed electrical current, measured in voltage clamp experiments, that results from the voltage-dependent efflux of a cation such as K+. Produces the repolarizing phase of the action potential.
laws of large numbers: A theorem which states that the long term average of an experiment should be close to the expected value. (The avergae tends to the expected value - the greater the number of experiments, the higher the probability that it stays within a given neighbourhood of the expected value.) The probability of this average straying outside any given neighbourhood around the expected value tends towards zero (statistically) even if it is not impossible (physically).
Madhav: “Alchemy is changing base metal into gold. So heaven experiments in changing this creature called man into a godhead. And this experiment is done on the base of nature, earth.” The Book of the Divine Mother
magicalrecord ::: Magical Record A magical record is a journal or similar source of documentation containing magical events, experiences, ideas, and any other information that the magician may see fit to add. Aleister Crowley wrote, "It is absolutely necessary that all experiments should be recorded in detail during, or immediately after their performance. The more scientific the record is, the better. Yet the emotions should be noted, as being some of the conditions. Let then the record be written with sincerity and care; thus with practice it will be found more and more to approximate to the ideal."
Magma2 "language" A language that allows programmability of the control environment, e.g. {recursion}, {backtracking}, {coroutines}, {nondeterminism}, etc. Magma2 was the successor to {MagmaLISP}. ["Magma2: A Language Oriented Toward Experiments in Control", Franco Turini, ACM TOPLAS 6(4):468-486 (Oct 1984)]. (1995-07-30)
Magma2 ::: (language) A language that allows programmability of the control environment, e.g. recursion, backtracking, coroutines, nondeterminism, etc. Magma2 was the successor to MagmaLISP.[Magma2: A Language Oriented Toward Experiments in Control, Franco Turini, ACM TOPLAS 6(4):468-486 (Oct 1984)]. (1995-07-30)
Matrix ::: [FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call FidoNet.2. Fanciful term for a cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see network, the).3. The totality of present-day computer networks.[Jargon File]
Matrix [FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {network, the}). 3. The totality of present-day computer networks. [{Jargon File}]
Mengele, Josef (1911-1978?) ::: SS physician at Auschwitz, notorious for pseudo-medical experiments, especially on twins and Gypsies. He “selected” new arrivals by simply pointing to the right or the left, thus separating those considered able to work from those who were not. Those too weak or too old to work were sent straight to the gas chambers, after all their possessions, including their clothes, were taken for resale in Germany. After the war, he spent some time in a British internment hospital but disappeared, went underground, escaped to Argentina, and later to Paraguay, where he became a citizen in 1959. He was hunted by Interpol, Israeli agents, and Simon Wiesenthal. In 1986, his body was found in Embu, Brazil.
microarray A technique for performing many DNA experiments in parallel. Nothing to do with computers. (2007-05-14)
Murphy's Law "humour" (Or "Sod's Law") The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for {lusers}. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it "THIS WAY UP"; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under {magic smoke}). Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the US Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later. Within months "Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is sometimes referred to as {Finagle's Law}. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself! [{Jargon File}] (1998-02-14)
Murphy's Law ::: (humour) (Or Sod's Law) The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads: If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under magic smoke).Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the US Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later.Within months Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed Finagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself![Jargon File] (1998-02-14)
nanotechnology ::: /nan'-oh-tek-nol*-jee/ Any fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built by the specification and placement of individual atoms or molecules or where at least one dimension is on a scale of nanometers.The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place in 1990, for example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company.Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by K. Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation, where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth.See also nanobot. .(2003-05-02)
nanotechnology /nan'-oh-tek-no"l*-jee/ Any fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built by the specification and placement of individual atoms or molecules or where at least one dimension is on a scale of {nanometers}. The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments took place in 1990, for example with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company. {Richard P. Feynman's initial public discussion in 1959-12-29 (http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html)} lead to the {Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (http://www.foresight.org/FI/fi_spons.html)}. Erik Drexler coined the term about 30 years later in his book "Engines of Creation", where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth. See also {nanobot}. {(http://lucifer.com/~sean/Nano.html)}. (2008-01-14)
Newton's Method: The method of procedure in natural philosophy as formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, especially in his Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Book III). These rules are as follows: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general induction from phaenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phaenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions. To this passage should be appended another statement from the closing pages of the same work. "I do not make hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." -- A.C.S.
Objective probability - Characteristic obtained as a result of repeated experiments or repeated trials rather than on the basis of subjective estimates. It is useful in estimating dollar value, quantity, or other characteristics of a given universe for purposes of making statistical decisions.
osmium ::: n. --> A rare metallic element of the platinum group, found native as an alloy in platinum ore, and in iridosmine. It is a hard, infusible, bluish or grayish white metal, and the heaviest substance known. Its tetroxide is used in histological experiments to stain tissues. Symbol Os. Atomic weight 191.1. Specific gravity 22.477.
outcome: The result of performing experiments.
Pascal, Blaise: (1623-1662) French philosopher mathematician and scientist. He conducted scientific researches including experiments on atmospheric pressure and invented an ingenious calculating machine. He turned from preoccupation with the scientific to the study of man and his spiritual problems and found faith as a sounder guide than reason. At this stage of his thought, theology becomes central. These thoughts are developed in his Provincial Letters and in his posthumously published masterpieces of style, the Pensees. -- L.E.D.
philosophy ::: A broad field of inquiry concerning knowledge, in which the definition of knowledge itself is one of the subjects investigated. Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, spanning the nature of the Universe and human nature (of the mind and the body) as well as the relationships between these and between people. It explores what and how people come to know, including existence itself, and how that knowledge is reliably and usefully represented and communicated between and among humans, whether in thought, by language, or with mathematics. Philosophy is the predecessor and complement of science. It develops notions about the issues that underlie science and ponders the nature of thought itself. The scientific method, which involves repeated observations of the results of controlled experiments, is an available and highly successful philosophical methodology. Within fields of study that are concerned directly with humans (economics, psychology, sociology, and so forth), in which experimental methodologies are generally not available, sub-disciplines of philosophy have been developed to provide a rational basis for study in the respective fields.
physiological psychology: is a subdivision of biological psychology that studies the neural mechanisms of perception and behavior through direct manipulation of the brains of nonhuman animal subjects in controlled experiments.
pneumatical ::: a. --> Consisting of, or resembling, air; having the properties of an elastic fluid; gaseous; opposed to dense or solid.
Of or pertaining to air, or to elastic fluids or their properties; pertaining to pneumatics; as, pneumatic experiments.
Moved or worked by pressure or flow of air; as, a pneumatic instrument; a pneumatic engine.
Fitted to contain air; Having cavities filled with air; as, pneumatic cells; pneumatic bones.
prism ::: n. --> A solid whose bases or ends are any similar, equal, and parallel plane figures, and whose sides are parallelograms.
A transparent body, with usually three rectangular plane faces or sides, and two equal and parallel triangular ends or bases; -- used in experiments on refraction, dispersion, etc.
A form the planes of which are parallel to the vertical axis. See Form, n., 13.
robot ::: 1. (robotics) A mechanical device for performing a task which might otherwise be done by a human, e.g. spraying paint on cars.See also cybernetics.2. (chat) An IRC or MUD user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which tries to 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive Turing test experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation.3. (World-Wide Web) spider.[Jargon File] (1996-03-23)
robot 1. "robotics" A mechanical device for performing a task which might otherwise be done by a human, e.g. spraying paint on cars. See also {cybernetics}. 2. "chat" An {IRC} or {MUD} user who is actually a program. On IRC, typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are {NickServ}, which tries to prevent random users from adopting {nicks} already claimed by others, and MsgServ, which allows one to send {asynchronous} messages to be delivered when the recipient signs on. Also common are "annoybots", such as KissServ, which perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people. Service robots are less common on {MUDs}; but some others, such as the "Julia" robot active in 1990--91, have been remarkably impressive {Turing test} experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of conversation. 3. "web" {spider}. [{Jargon File}] (1996-03-23)
Science ::: A process through which knowledge is acquired. The scientific method conventionally begins with an observation and proceeds to formulate a hypothesis. From there a sound experiment is designed with appropriate variables to study and controls set to try to narrow the focus to the variable of study (i.e. whether the independent variable is causing a change in the dependent variable). If the results of the experiment align with the hypothesis then further experiments are designed and peer-reviewed to ensure validity. If the results do not align then the hypothesis may need to be reworked. This is a simplification of the process but is the primary method of knowledge acquisition in society today. Unfortunately the mental state of the experimenters and the subjects cannot be controlled adequately and there needs to be a rethinking of this method to truly understand and decipher the mystery of consciousness. The process of meditation is used to decipher the factors that give rise to conscious experience.
Skinner Box ::: A cage designed for animals in operant conditioning experiments.
spectrological ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to spectrology; as, spectrological studies or experiments.
SYMBOLANG ::: Lapidus & Goldstein, 1965. Symbol manipulating Fortran subroutine package for IBM 7094, later CDC6600.[Some Experiments in Algebraic Manipulation, CACM 8:501-508 1965]. (1995-03-16)
SYMBOLANG Lapidus & Goldstein, 1965. Symbol manipulating Fortran subroutine package for IBM 7094, later CDC 6600. ["Some Experiments in Algebraic Manipulation", CACM 8:501-508 1965]. (1995-03-16)
tamper ::: n. --> One who tamps; specifically, one who prepares for blasting, by filling the hole in which the charge is placed.
An instrument used in tamping; a tamping iron. ::: v. i. --> To meddle; to be busy; to try little experiments; as, to tamper with a disease.
tentation ::: n. --> Trial; temptation.
A mode of adjusting or operating by repeated trials or experiments.
tetraethylammonium ::: A quaternary ammonium compound that selectively blocks voltage-sensitive K+ channels; eliminates the delayed K+ current measured in voltage clamp experiments.
tetrodotoxin ::: An alkaloid neurotoxin, produced by certain puffer fish, tropical frogs, and salamanders, that selectively blocks voltage-sensitive Na+ channels; eliminates the initial Na+ current measured in voltage clamp experiments.
Thanatology ::: The science of producing death; description given during the Nuremberg trials to the medical experiments performed during the Holocaust.
The astral light is itself divided into subordinate planes; the lower regions teem with gross emanations from the earth, including psychic remnants from deceased beings, which exert a negative influence on the living, especially when intercourse with these remnants is encouraged by moral and physical weakness or by ignorant experiments.
The Greek verb from which psyche is derived also means to chill, make cold; and this has an application to the psyche as the lower part of the human soul and therefore closely connected with the kama-rupa and astral light after death. Hence it is that those who dabble in necromantic experiments, or even in psychic experiences, often refer to a damp, chill, and often clammy sensation in the atmosphere when contact with these kama-rupic entities is made. This should be warning that such contact is not only highly unwholesome, but a danger signal that one is dealing with death and decay.
The historical antecedents of experimental psychology are various. From British empiricism and the psychological philosophy of Locke, Berkeley and Hume came associationism (see Associationism), the psychological implications of which were more fully developed by Herbart and Bain. Associationism provided the conceptual framework and largely colored the procedures of early experimental psychology. Physics and physiology gave impetus to experiments on sensory phenomena while physiology and neurology fostered studies of the nervous system and reflex action. The names of Helmholtz, Johannes Müller, E. H. Weber and Fechner are closely linked with this phase of the development of experimental psychology. The English biologist Galton developed the statistical methods of Quetelet for the analysis of data on human variation and opened the way for the mental testing movement; the Russian physiologist Pavlov, with his researches on "conditioned reflexes," contributed an experimental technique which has proved of paramount importance for the psychologist. Even astronomy made its contribution; variations in reaction time of different observers having long been recognized by astronomers as an important source of error in their observations.
trial: An experiment within a series of experiments.
trier ::: n. --> One who tries; one who makes experiments; one who examines anything by a test or standard.
One who tries judicially.
A person appointed according to law to try challenges of jurors; a trior.
That which tries or approves; a test.
vadding "games" /vad'ing/ (From VAD, a permutation of ADV, i.e. {ADVENT}, used to avoid a particular {admin}'s continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game) A leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the "secret" parts of large buildings - basements, roofs, freight elevators, maintenance crawlways, steam tunnels, and the like. A few go so far as to learn locksmithing in order to synthesise vadding keys. The verb is "to vad" (compare {phreaking}; see also {hack}, sense 9). This term dates from the late 1970s, before which such activity was simply called "hacking"; the older usage is still prevalent at {MIT}. Vadding (pronounced /vay'ding/) was also popular {CMU}, at least as early as 1986. People who did it every night were called the "vaders," possibly after "elevator," which was one of the things they played with, or "invader," or "Darth Vader". This game was usually played along with no-holds-barred hide-and-seek. CMU grad students were the known to pry open the inner doors of elevators between floors to see the graffiti on the inside of the outer doors. The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is "elevator rodeo", also known as "elevator surfing", a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home! See also {hobbit}. [{Jargon File}] (1996-01-07)
vadding ::: (games) /vad'ing/ (From VAD, a permutation of ADV, i.e. ADVENT, used to avoid a particular admin's continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game) A which such activity was simply called hacking; the older usage is still prevalent at MIT.Vadding (pronounced /vay'ding/) was also popular CMU, at least as early as 1986. People who did it every night were called the vaders, possibly after hide-and-seek. CMU grad students were the known to pry open the inner doors of elevators between floors to see the graffiti on the inside of the outer doors.The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is elevator rodeo, also known as elevator surfing, a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home!See also hobbit.[Jargon File] (1996-01-07)
virtual reality (VR) 1. "application" Computer simulations that use 3D graphics and devices such as the {data glove} to allow the user to interact with the simulation. 2. "games" A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and "true confessions" magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as {Usenet}'s {news:alt.callahans} newsgroup or the {MUD} experiments on {Internet} and elsewhere), interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel complete with scenery, "foreground characters" that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common "background characters" manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who "owns" it, otherwise, anything goes. See {bamf}, {cyberspace}. [{Jargon File}] (1995-01-30)
voltaism ::: n. --> That form of electricity which is developed by the chemical action between metals and different liquids; voltaic electricity; also, the science which treats of this form of electricity; -- called also galvanism, from Galvani, on account of his experiments showing the remarkable influence of this agent on animals.
Vortex-Atom Theory The theory devised by Kelvin (1824-1907), more or less copied after misunderstood teachings of the ancients, to represent the atoms of matter as vortices in a homogeneous, incompressible, and perfectly nonviscous fluid. It can be shown, both mathematically and by experiments with smoke rings, that such vortices would have many of the properties attributed to atoms — they are indestructible, when two meet they rebound and vibrate — but the property of mass is not sufficiently explained. A vortical motion in such a fluid should keep on forever, but the hypothesis supplies no explanation of how such a motion could ever have been started. Descartes propounded a vortical theory, relating however to the physical universe of stars and planets; but, in his theory, it was God who set his vortices in motion.
Weber-Fechner Law: Basic law of psychophysics which expresses in quantitative terms the relation between the intensity of a stimulus and the intensity of the resultant sensation. E. H. Weber applying the method of "just noticeable difference" in experiments involving weight discrimination found that the ability to discriminate two stimuli depends not on the absolute difference between the two stimuli but on their relative intensities and suggested the hypothesis that for each sense there is a constant expressing the relative intensities of stimuli producing a just noticeable difference of sensation. Fechner, also employing the method of just perceptible difference, arrived at the formula that the sensation varies with the logarithm of the stimulus: S = C log R where S represents the intensity of the sensation, R that of the stimulus and C a constant which varies for the different senses and from individual to individual and even for the same individual at different times. -- L.W.
We live in a common mental atmosphere, taking in and giving out thoughts and feelings, which must often pass from mind to mind, though we may not be aware of the fact. The undoubted fact of our having separate minds does not mean that these minds are closed systems, and not mutually penetrable. The experiments which are made to prove thought transference defeat their object to a great extent, because the mind of the transmitter is not concentrated on the idea to be transmitted, so much as on the idea that he is trying to transfer it. The most conclusive proofs, and curiously enough the most common, are unpremeditated, and actually are daily occurrences.
Yale Haskell ::: (language) A fully integrated Haskell programming environment. It provides tightly coupled interactive editing, incremental compilation and correspond to Lisp's traditional interpreted and compiled modes. Compiled and interpreted modules may be freely mixed in any combination.Yale Haskell is run using either a command-line interface or as an inferior process running under the Emacs editor. Using the Emacs interface, simple compilation to be running in the background as the editing of a source file continues in Emacs in the foreground.A scratch pad may be automatically created for any module. Such a pad is a logical extension of the module, in which additional function and value definitions may be added, but whose evaluation does not result in recompilation of the module.A tutorial on Haskell is also provided in the Emacs environment. A Macintosh version of Yale Haskell includes its own integrated programming environment, complete with an Emacs-like editor and pull-down menus.Yale Haskell is a complete implementation of the Haskell language, but also contains a number of extensions, including: (1) Instead of stream based I/O, a monadic I/O system is used. Although similar to what will be part of the new Haskell 1.3 report, the I/O system will change yet again when 1.3 becomes official.(2) Haskell programs can call both Lisp and C functions using a flexible foreign function interface.(3) Yale Haskell includes a dynamic typing system. Dynamic typing has been used to implement derived instances in a user extensible manner.(4) A number of small Haskell 1.3 changes have been added, including polymorphic recursion and the use of @ in an expression to denote bottom. Although the 1.3 report is not yet complete, these changes will almost certainly be part of the new report.(5) A complete Haskell level X Window System interface, based on CLX.(6) A number of annotations are available for controlling the optimiser, including those for specifying both function and data constructor strictness standard prelude functions have been specialised for better performance using these annotations.(7) Separate compilation (including mutually recursive modules) is supported using a notion of a UNIT file, which is a kind of localised makefile that tells the compiler about compiler options and logical dependencies amongst program files.(8) Yale Haskell supports both standard and literate Haskell syntax.Performance of Yale Haskell's compiled code has been improved considerably over previous releases. Although still not as good as the Glasgow (GHC) and Chalmers both Yale Haskell and hbc. (Our experiments suggest, however, that Yale Haskell's compiled code is on average about 3 times slower than hbc.)Binaries are provided for Sun/SPARC and Macintosh, but it is possible to build the system on virtually any system that runs one of a number of Common Lisp Harlequin LispWorks. akcl, gcl and CLisp do not have adaquate performance for our compiler. The current version is 2.1. . E-mail: , . (1993-07-14)
Yale Haskell "language" A fully integrated {Haskell} programming environment. It provides tightly coupled interactive editing, {incremental compilation} and dynamic execution of Haskell programs. Two major modes of compilation, correspond to {Lisp}'s traditional "interpreted" and "compiled" modes. Compiled and interpreted modules may be freely mixed in any combination. Yale Haskell is run using either a command-line interface or as an {inferior process} running under the {Emacs} editor. Using the Emacs interface, simple two-keystroke commands evaluate expressions, run dialogues, compile {modules}, turn specific compiler diagnostics on and off and enable and disable various {optimisers}. Commands may be queued up arbitrarily, thus allowing, for example, a compilation to be running in the background as the editing of a source file continues in Emacs in the foreground. A "scratch pad" may be automatically created for any module. Such a pad is a logical extension of the module, in which additional function and value definitions may be added, but whose evaluation does not result in recompilation of the module. A tutorial on Haskell is also provided in the Emacs environment. A {Macintosh} version of Yale Haskell includes its own integrated programming environment, complete with an Emacs-like editor and {pull-down menus}. Yale Haskell is a complete implementation of the Haskell language, but also contains a number of extensions, including: (1) Instead of stream based I/O, a {monadic I/O} system is used. Although similar to what will be part of the new {Haskell 1.3} report, the I/O system will change yet again when 1.3 becomes official. (2) Haskell programs can call both {Lisp} and {C} functions using a flexible foreign function interface. (3) Yale Haskell includes a {dynamic typing} system. Dynamic typing has been used to implement {derived instances} in a user extensible manner. (4) A number of small Haskell 1.3 changes have been added, including {polymorphic recursion} and the use of @_@ in an expression to denote {bottom}. Although the 1.3 report is not yet complete, these changes will almost certainly be part of the new report. (5) A complete Haskell level {X Window System} interface, based on {CLX}. (6) A number of {annotations} are available for controlling the optimiser, including those for specifying both function and data constructor {strict}ness properties, "{inlining}" functions, and specialising {over-loaded} functions. Many standard {prelude} functions have been specialised for better performance using these annotations. (7) {Separate compilation} (including {mutually recursive} {modules}) is supported using a notion of a UNIT file, which is a kind of localised {makefile} that tells the compiler about compiler options and logical dependencies amongst program files. (8) Yale Haskell supports both standard and "{literate}" Haskell syntax. Performance of Yale Haskell's compiled code has been improved considerably over previous releases. Although still not as good as the Glasgow ({GHC}) and Chalmers ({HBC}) compilers, the flexibility afforded by the features described earlier makes Yale Haskell a good choice for large systems development. For some idea of performance, Hartel's latest "Nuc" benchmark runs at about the same speed under both Yale Haskell and hbc. (Our experiments suggest, however, that Yale Haskell's compiled code is on average about 3 times slower than hbc.) Binaries are provided for {Sun}/{SPARC} and {Macintosh}, but it is possible to build the system on virtually any system that runs one of a number of {Common Lisp} implementations: {CMU Common Lisp}, {Lucid Common Lisp}, {Allegro Common Lisp} or {Harlequin LispWorks}. {akcl}, {gcl} and {CLisp} do not have adaquate performance for our compiler. The current version is 2.1. {Yale (ftp://nebula.cs.yale.edu/pub/haskell/yale)}. (128.36.13.1). {UK (ftp://ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/pub/haskell/yale/)}. {Sweden (ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/haskell/yale/)}. E-mail: "haskell-request@cs.yale.edu", "haskell-request@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk". (1993-07-14)
zenercards ::: Zener Cards These consisted of five designs (now generally described as ESP symbols) being a plus sign, a square, a circle, a set of three wavy lines and a five-pointed star. The symbols were printed in black ink, on cards similar in size to, and resembling, playing cards. Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980), Professor of Psychology at Duke University in the USA, used Zener cards (designed in the early 1930s by a colleague, perceptual psychologist Karl Zener) when conducting his experiments.
Zork ::: (games) /zork/ The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see ADVENT. Zork was originally written on MIT-DM during the Infocom. The Fortran source was later rewritten for portability and released to Usenet under the name Dungeon.Both Fortran Dungeon and translated C versions are available from many FTP archives.[Jargon File] (1998-09-21)
Zork "games" /zork/ The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Zork was originally written on {MIT-DM} during the late 1970s, later distributed with {BSD Unix} as a patched, sourceless {RT-11} {Fortran} binary (see {retrocomputing}) and commercialised as "The Zork Trilogy" by {Infocom}. The Fortran source was later rewritten for portability and released to {Usenet} under the name "Dungeon". Both Fortran "Dungeon" and translated {C} versions are available from many {FTP archives}. [{Jargon File}] (1998-09-21)
KEYS (10k)
2 Manly P Hall
1 Tom Butler-Bowdon
1 Stephen Hawking
1 Rosch
1 Robert Anton Wilson
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson
1 ken-wilber
1 Howard Gardner
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Arthur C Clarke
1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
33 Anonymous
14 Mahatma Gandhi
13 Daniel Kahneman
11 Stephen Hawking
11 Ralph Waldo Emerson
11 Eric Ries
11 Carl Sagan
10 Neil deGrasse Tyson
9 Walter Isaacson
8 Thomas A Edison
8 Nikola Tesla
8 Dan Ariely
7 Robert Lanza
7 Peter Singer
7 Isaac Newton
7 Hope Jahren
7 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 Siddhartha Mukherjee
6 Kelley Armstrong
5 Nir Eyal
1:Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
~ Manly P Hall,#KEYS
2:Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#KEYS
3:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #KEYS
4:The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation. ~ ken-wilber, #KEYS
5:In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
6:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. ~ Stephen Hawking, #KEYS
7:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
8:Many experiments have shown that categories appear to be coded in the mind neither by means of lists of each individual member of the category, nor by means of a list of formal criteria necessary and sufficient for category membership, but, rather, in terms of a prototype of a typical category member. The most cognitively economical code for a category is, in fact, a concrete image of an average category member.
~ Rosch, 1977, p. 30,#KEYS
9:The alchemist of today is not hidden in caves and cellars, studying alone, but as he goes on with his work, it is seen that walls are built around him, and while he is in the world, like the master of old, he is not of it. As he goes further in his work, the light of other people's advice and outside help grows weaker and weaker, until finally he stands alone in darkness, and then comes the time that he must use his own lamp, and the various experiments which he has carried on must be his guide. He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ~ Manly P Hall, The Initiates of the Flame, #KEYS
10:And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.
And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,#KEYS
11:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#KEYS
12:For instance, a popular game with California occultists-I do not know its inventor-involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer.
To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game." Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer.
There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning "Do not answer my question." So, the way to use it is to start simply, with "easy" questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher-imprint vulnerability again-but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.)
When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don't want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform.
It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs.
After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them.
This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as "We are all greater artists than we realize" or "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" or "mind and its contents are functionally identical."
This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3.1 am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5.1 like people, and people like me.
Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.
This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer. "Whatever you say it is, it isn't, " Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves. "Neti, neti" (not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is. Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind 1 , and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind2 and the mind which contemplates mind2 contemplating mind 1 as mind3, you are well on your way to meta-programming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:You must make bold experiments in life! ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 2:Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 3:In politics experiments means revolutions. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 4:I love fools' experiments. I am always making them. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 5:We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 6:Experiments are mediators between nature and idea. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 7:Success depends on how many experiments you can fit into 24 hours. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 8:All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 9:Don't believe the results of experiments until they're confirmed by theory. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 10:The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 11:I like to try anything... You have to do the experiments to find out what the formulas are. ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove 12:Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth. ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 13:They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 14:Their experiments caused them to destabilize the structure of the continent and thus Atlantis sank beneath the waves. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 15:Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 16:Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 17:Well, I'm always hoping to hear from interested chemists and protein chemists, because I'd love for these experiments to be done properly. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 18:Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality". ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 19:I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks". ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 20:Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. ~ rupert-sheldrake, @wisdomtrove 21:The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 22:Is it necessary to practice all these asanas, further and further? Is it necessary to develop scientific researches further and further? To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 23:Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical. ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 24:It is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 25:I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable to you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 26:Climbing Mount Everest is more satisfying than standing at the top; flirting and foreplay are more exciting than having an orgasm; and conducting groundbreaking lab experiments is more interesting than receiving praise and prizes. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 27:I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 28:I do not think that you can try and systematize education for the whole world. I would try experiments in small communities and in schools to see how they work out, instead of taking the children of an entire nation and trying to bring them up on the same system. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 29:A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 30:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. ~ stephen-hawking, @wisdomtrove 31:Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path... But each of us - experiments of the depths - strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 32:He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 33:If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 34:Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 35:The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 36:Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little course, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 37:The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 38:It is true that the more we see some connection in what happens to us, the more we are confirmed in the opinion we have about the reality of our appearances; and it is also true that the more we examine our appearances closely, the more we find them well-sequenced, as microscopes and other aids in making experiments have shown us. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 39:In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running around inside wheels and conduction frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 40:It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes. ~ george-carlin, @wisdomtrove 41:A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work." ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 42:Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 43:After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 44:Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 45:In the spiritual life it is not necessary to have a complete map of the path in order to begin traveling. On the contrary, having such complete knowledge may actually hinder rather than help the onward march. The deeper secrets of spiritual life are unraveled to those who take risks and who make bold experiments with it. They are not meant for the idler who seeks guarantees at every step. Those who speculate from the shore about the ocean shall know only its surface, but those who would know the depths of the ocean must be willing to plunge into it. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 46:Instead of studying old traditions, emphasis is now placed on new observations and experiments. When present observation collides with past tradition, we give precedence to the observation. Of course, physicists analysing the spectra of distant galaxies, archaeologists analysing the finds from a Bronze Age city, and political scientists studying the emergence of capitalism do not disregard tradition. They start by studying what the wise people of the past have said and written. But from their first year in college, aspiring physicists, archaeologists and political scientists are taught that it is their mission to go beyond what Einstein, Heinrich Schliemann and Max Weber ever knew. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:large-scale breeding experiments. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
2:You must make bold experiments in life! ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
3:I consider all my films experiments. ~ Michael Haneke, #NFDB
4:Instincts are experiments. Data is proof. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
5:Unperformed experiments have no results. ~ Asher Peres, #NFDB
6:All the months are crude experiments, ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
7:Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
8:Instincts are experiments. Data is proof. ~ Alistair Croll, #NFDB
9:Children were experiments, and his had failed. ~ Maile Meloy, #NFDB
10:In politics experiments means revolutions. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
11:Life is but an endless series of experiments. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
12:Without proper experiments I conclude nothing. ~ Johannes Kepler, #NFDB
13:Progress through cautious, well founded experiments. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
14:I love fools' experiments. I am always making them. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
15:I give them experiments and they respond with speeches. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
16:When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
17:Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
18:Inside a big experiment, there are little experiments, ~ Vijay Govindarajan, #NFDB
19:Life is an experiment. The more experiments the better ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
20:Writing it is itself one of the experiments with truth. One ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
21:Experiments are mediators between nature and idea. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
22:The scientific truth is forged in the fire of experiments, ~ Zygmunt Miloszewski, #NFDB
23:Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
24:Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses ~ Steve Blank, #NFDB
25:One experiments and has to choose always the best results. ~ Karlheinz Stockhausen, #NFDB
26:Have lots of experiments, but make sure they're strategically focused. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
27:It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
28:Success depends on how many experiments you can fit into 24 hours ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
29:Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress. ~ Thor Heyerdahl, #NFDB
30:We've made science experiments of ourselves and our children. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
31:You have not succeeded in your experiments, that is all there is to it. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
32:Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy? ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
33:Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
34:All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
35:Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
36:Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
37:Quit pretending you know things you don’t and start running experiments. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
38:Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?” Ye ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
39:But experiments went for nothing,-dualism had sworn to uphold its position. ~ Auguste Laurent, #NFDB
40:Don't believe the results of experiments until they're confirmed by theory. ~ Arthur Eddington, #NFDB
41:Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.
~ Manly P Hall,#NFDB
42:Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
43:Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
44:We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
45:Preston Nichols and Peter Moon’s 1992 book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time ~ David Wilcock, #NFDB
46:Allowing us to do many causal experiments is the fourth power of Big Data. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz, #NFDB
47:To engage in experiments on heat was always one of my most agreeable employments. ~ Benjamin Thompson, #NFDB
48:I want medical experiments on animals stopped. They don't do anything, and they don't work. ~ Sam Simon, #NFDB
49:Life is one of those experiments meant to be conducted in a stimulating, messy environment. ~ Sara Zarr, #NFDB
50:If I had been a member of the academic establishment, I could have done other experiments. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
51:More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we're not smart enough. ~ Scott Aaronson, #NFDB
52:Spaceflight isn't just about doing experiments, it's about an extension of human culture. ~ Chris Hadfield, #NFDB
53:I like to try anything... You have to do the experiments to find out what the formulas are. ~ Jerry Seinfeld, #NFDB
54:One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments. ~ Rudy Rucker, #NFDB
55:Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining. ~ Bill Gaede, #NFDB
56:Many such experiments taught me that the real seat of taste was not the tongue but the mind. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
57:The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
58:we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
59:If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
60:If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
61:Never assume,’ he used to say, during experiments, ‘because to assume makes an ASS out of U and ME. ~ Paula Daly, #NFDB
62:Rama’s experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In ~ Jaron Lanier, #NFDB
63:There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
64:Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth. ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
65:I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
66:I don't place much faith in my intuitions, except as a starting place for designing experiments. ~ Elizabeth Spelke, #NFDB
67:I always begin my stories as experiments - on large yellow tablets - a mixture of writing and sketching. ~ Bill Peet, #NFDB
68:It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
69:I wanted to understand the secrets behind my chemical experiments and behind the processes in nature. ~ Richard Ernst, #NFDB
70:One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
71:Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle. ~ Sally Ride, #NFDB
72:Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
73:You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
74:You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments! ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
75:You need courage to say the experiments must be wrong. I will explain where that courage comes from later. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
76:Wouldn’t you agree that we are all ‘created’ and all of our lives are . . . ‘experiments’ to some degree? ~ James Morris, #NFDB
77:In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened. ~ Elizabeth Loftus, #NFDB
78:If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
79:The right to err, which means the freedom to try experiments, is the universal condition of all progress. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
80:Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. ~ Alison Gopnik, #NFDB
81:Ideas do not always come in a flash but by diligent trial-and-error experiments that take time and thought. ~ Charles K Kao, #NFDB
82:All my experiments in Ahimsa have taught me that nonviolence in practice means common labour with the body. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
83:My purpose is to describe experiments in the science ofsatyagraha and not at all to describe how good I am. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
84:They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
85:Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments. ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
86:There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser. ~ Eric Allin Cornell, #NFDB
87:Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
88:There are only 24 hours in a day, and my top priority is working on my films, but I love short film experiments. ~ David Lynch, #NFDB
89:I get offers all the time from film makers, but they are unknown quantities. I don't go there and do experiments. ~ Dan Aykroyd, #NFDB
90:I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. ~ Edward Mills Purcell, #NFDB
91:To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
92:M. K. Gandhi. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Dover Publications: Mineola, New York, 1983, ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
93:The loveliest theories are being overthrown by these damned experiments; it's no fun being a chemist anymore. ~ Justus von Liebig, #NFDB
94:Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
95:If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance. ~ Richard Wagner, #NFDB
96:It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians. ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
97:Since Einstein derived his famous equation, literally millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
98:A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
99:Okay, it's a matter of company policy from now on. You must build a reverse polarity setting into all experiments. ~ Brian Clevinger, #NFDB
100:I simply want to tell the story of my experiments with truth...as my life consists of nothing but those experiments. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
101:Journey into Madness, a nonfiction work that details the horrible MKULTRA experiments of Dr. Ewan Cameron in Montreal. ~ H P Albarelli, #NFDB
102:Men of learning began to set experiments aside...to form theories...and to substitute these in the place of experiments. ~ John Wesley, #NFDB
103:Their experiments caused them to destabilize the structure of the continent and thus Atlantis sank beneath the waves. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
104:In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone’s favorite luxury—butter. ~ Mark Kurlansky, #NFDB
105:Our goal in building products is to be able to run experiments that will help us learn how to build a sustainable business. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
106:Unless we do experiments with compassion and nonviolence, it is very difficult to understand its value and transforming power. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
107:... science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
108:She could not make herself ask whether he would be conscious and aware during these experiments. She hoped he would be. ~ Octavia E Butler, #NFDB
109:The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she adds. But they’re not the ones that get published. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
110:All legislative experiments in the way of making forcible distribution of the wealth produced in any country have failed. ~ Leland Stanford, #NFDB
111:Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current. ~ Alfred Korzybski, #NFDB
112:The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
113:I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
114:Every man is a valuable member of society, who, by his observations, researches, and experiments, procures knowledge for men. ~ James Smithson, #NFDB
115:Small nonlinearities were easy to disregard. People who conduct experiments learn quickly that they live in an imperfect world. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
116:dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress. ~ Thor Heyerdahl, #NFDB
117:Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
118:Results for "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
119:The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
120:Jonas knew for a fact that it had been purchased by the Admiralty with a view to carrying out some very hush-hush experiments! ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
121:Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration. ~ David E Goldberg, #NFDB
122:What’s a little crazy here and there? I’m supposed to be doing experiments… why not see which is brighter: your aura or the sun? ~ Richelle Mead, #NFDB
123:I regret that I've been so busy with clinical work that I haven't been able to spend much time on experiments and outcome studies. ~ Albert Ellis, #NFDB
124:It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful? ~ V S Pritchett, #NFDB
125:A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ~ Bill Gaede, #NFDB
126:Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
127:...In the vast majority of drug experiments, it is not uncommon for none or one or two of hundreds of patients to benefit from the drug. ~ Ted Gup, #NFDB
128:People take things a little too personal. I write these songs, and they're experiments with thoughts. That's it. I'm not a teacher. ~ Cass McCombs, #NFDB
129:As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container. ~ Alan Bradley, #NFDB
130:We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before. ~ James Truslow Adams, #NFDB
131:What’s a little crazy here and there? I’m supposed to be doing experiments…
why not see which is brighter: your aura or the sun? ~ Richelle Mead,#NFDB
132:As was the case with all of our other experiments, we found that people cheat when they have a chance to do so, but not by a whole lot. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
133:But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not. ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
134:Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn. ~ Philip Kitcher, #NFDB
135:For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours. ~ Nina Fedoroff, #NFDB
136:Keynes, far from being a wholehearted lover of freedom, viewed with some sympathy the fascist and Communist ‘experiments’ of the 1930s. ~ Ralph Raico, #NFDB
137:the difficulties of making temperature experiments [on fully grown alligators] would be great and can be best left to the imagination.”) ~ Brian Switek, #NFDB
138:All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about. The problem that I have as an artist is being way too critical. ~ Amy Sillman, #NFDB
139:From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
140:I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations. ~ Galileo Galilei, #NFDB
141:it taught me the most important thing I know about science: that experiments are not about getting the world to do what you want it to do. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
142:Because death is fucking predictable... but life has science experiments and free time and surprise naps and who knows what comes next? ~ Brian K Vaughan, #NFDB
143:Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
144:I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations. ~ Galileo Galilei, #NFDB
145:may I have a workshop at Alver? For experiments? If I promise faithfully not to blow the house up? If you please, Cousin Alverstoke … ? ~ Georgette Heyer, #NFDB
146:many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
147:Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
148:So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb. ~ Matt Ridley, #NFDB
149:Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
150:These human experiments have gone largely unchallenged and unquestioned by Congress, the medical profession, and the scientific community at large. ~ Ted Gup, #NFDB
151:All the quantum physics experiments have occurred chiefly on the atomic scale and we are taught to believe that nature's laws are consistent. ~ Mitch Horowitz, #NFDB
152:A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague. ~ Marianne Moore, #NFDB
153:This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded in principles of honesty, not of mere force. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
154:Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just "virtual reality". ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
155:Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong. ~ Francis Collins, #NFDB
156:The experiments showed further that the mean filial regression towards mediocrity was directly proportional to the parental deviation from it. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
157:The problem with experiments has always been that human beings make the decisions on whether or not the animals have benefitted from the treatment. ~ James Randi, #NFDB
158:To assume all the powers is not good for anybody. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All those experiments have a bad ending. ~ Rafael Correa, #NFDB
159:Don't be so hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead. ~ Dan Harmon, #NFDB
160:Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
161:In physics, opinions don't matter, only demonstrated experiments. The day the fellow succeeds, if ever, he won't need anybody else's opinion. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
162:We must distrust complicated experiments on the mind, which are not easy to make; they are often sufficient to upset the mental state we wish to study. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
163:You accept failure as a possible outcome of some of the experiments. If you don't get failures, you're not pushing hard enough on the objectives. ~ John Poindexter, #NFDB
164:Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.' ~ Philip Zimbardo, #NFDB
165:Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false). ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
166:The twentieth century was marked by two broad trends: the regulation of capitalism and the deregulation of democracy. Both experiments overreached. ~ Fareed Zakaria, #NFDB
167:It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly, #NFDB
168:I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks". ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
169:Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. ~ Beatrice Warde, #NFDB
170:Before Lind's experiments, scurvy was not clearly defined as a disease.The term was used as a catchphrase to include all manner of nautical ailments. ~ Stephen R Bown, #NFDB
171:Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (1822–1863), #NFDB
172:Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 ~ Robert J Gordon, #NFDB
173:Repeated similar experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from colors which it carries and therefore influences. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
174:We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
175:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
176:In Lerner’s experiments, the desperate need to make sense of events can lead people to inaccurate conclusions (for example, a woman “led on” a rapist); ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
177:The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. ~ Joshua Foer, #NFDB
178:Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects” – a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased – ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
179:We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture. ~ Hannes Alfven, #NFDB
180:Animal experiments are no joke. Thank goodness scientists are finding better, more humane ways to develop treatments for cancer and other killer diseases. ~ Carol Leifer, #NFDB
181:It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them. ~ Barbara Ward Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, #NFDB
182:This is the country for cruel experiments—it’s where idealists are sent to die, my friend. Killing people who believe in things is our national sport.” With ~ Philip Kerr, #NFDB
183:Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium. ~ John B S Haldane, #NFDB
184:But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself. ~ Seanan McGuire, #NFDB
185:What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. ~ Norbert Wiener, #NFDB
186:And what would I do ? Part of me was immobile, stunned with despair, like those rats that lose hope in laboratory experiments and lie down in the maze to starve. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
187:It takes 20 or 30 minutes to run one of these experiments,” Murch said, “several weeks to process it, and a year to scratch our heads to see if we’re crazy or not. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
188:The experiments I am about to relate ... may be repeated with great ease, whenever the sun shines, and without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one. ~ Thomas Young, #NFDB
189:Nor should failure be considered a total loss. Once you start thinking like a Freak and running experiments, you’ll find that failure can provide valuable feedback. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
190:The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion. ~ Chris Ofili, #NFDB
191:Fact #34 Kissing is like one of those electrical experiments in which one makes a fascinating new discovery but is fried like a mutton-chop in the process. Still, ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
192:I think my formative experiences were really in junior high, where at a typical public school we were doing little genetic experiments, very classic experiments. ~ Joseph DeRisi, #NFDB
193:We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
194:"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." ~ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #NFDB
195:I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food. ~ Nathan Myhrvold, #NFDB
196:Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap. ~ Vladimir Arnold, #NFDB
197:Experiments show that just as the brain can build new or stronger circuits through physical or mental practice, those circuits can weaken or dissolve with neglect. ~ Nicholas Carr, #NFDB
198:Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out. ~ Sigmar Polke, #NFDB
199:I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
200:I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
201:In all experiments one must exercise ingenuity in finding other causes besides the one to be studied which may possibly influence a result, and in eliminating these. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
202:I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
203:Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas. ~ John Forbes Nash, #NFDB
204:To pry into the secrets of this world, we must make experiments. But experiment is a clumsy instrument, afflicted with a fatal determinacy which destroys causality. ~ Banesh Hoffmann, #NFDB
205:Hundreds of my own little experiments have revealed this: The person who does the most talking and the person who is the most successful are rarely the same person. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
206:Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like. ~ Phillip E Johnson, #NFDB
207:That's absolutely correct and in addition to that life just isn't an accident of the laws of physics. There's a long list of experiments that suggest just the opposite. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
208:Torture, but more methodical than the simple cuts and burns designed to extract information. They were performing medical experiments on these people. She shuddered. ~ Lindsay Buroker, #NFDB
209:We can, however, assess regularities by running precise and thorough experiments on how people react under certain conditions, and keep a tally of what we see. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
210:I think everybody's always attracted to both sexes. I mean, I think that women are very attractive. I've kissed girls, but everybody experiments. It's part of growing up. ~ Monica Keena, #NFDB
211:Above all, I regret that scientific experiments-some of them mine-should have produced such a terrible weapon as the hydrogen bomb. Regret, with all my soul, but not guilt. ~ Harold Urey, #NFDB
212:Einstein’s theory of relativity, with its vivid thought experiments, has given an empirically tested texture to my grasp of Nagarjuna’s theory of the relativity of time. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
213:Thus, the right way to think about the product development process in a Lean Startup is that it is responding to pull requests in the form of experiments that need to be run. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
214:We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
215:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #NFDB
216:Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo, #NFDB
217:I’ve learned to put great store in my own observations of everyday life, because while laboratory experiments are one way to study human nature, they aren’t the only way. ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
218:But I hope that it will also be demonstrated soon that in my experiments in the West I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
219:Field experiments to date have shown that microfinance—the provision of small loans, typically to women or groups of women—is not particularly effective in reducing poverty.14 ~ Dani Rodrik, #NFDB
220:if you started to slowly rotate a hockey rink, it could tilt up to 50 degrees before the players would all slide to one end. Clearly, experiments are needed to confirm this.) ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
221:In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
222:The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
223:Classical physics has been superseded by quantum theory: quantum theory is verified by experiments. Experiments must be described in terms of classical physics. ~ Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, #NFDB
224:For his book Willpower, psychologist Roy Baumeister analyzed findings from hundreds of experiments to determine why some people can retain focus for hours, while others can’t. ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
225:I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws ~ Alex Gaskarth, #NFDB
226:Morbidly interested in genetics and medical research, Mengele rose to become physician in chief at Auschwitz, where he unleashed a series of monstrous experiments on twins. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
227:civilization able to produce a Mahavira, a Mirabai, a Malik Ambar, a Periyar, a Muhammad Iqbal and a Mohandas Gandhi is a place open to radical experiments with self-definition. It ~ Sunil Khilnani, #NFDB
228:It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
229:That's what I've noticed in my experiments: almost everything in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy .Probably even believing in self-fulfilling prophecies is a self-fulfilling prophecy ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
230:Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation, ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
231:The opsin would have to be smuggled into the cell using a virus, but at a concentration that would not kill the neuron. Deisseroth told Zhang that the experiments could be transformative. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
232:Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
233:Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
234:After developing a primitive theory (1968) I therefore did not pursue this subject. However, the work was taken up by others and in 1974 the first experiments were done in the ISR. ~ Simon van der Meer, #NFDB
235:Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at. ~ Rupert Sheldrake, #NFDB
236:The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
237:From the classical guitar right through to the furthest electrical experiments and everything in-between, it's amazing what the guitar can actually do. I mean, when one thinks about sounds. ~ Jimmy Page, #NFDB
238:In performing experiments, it is necessary... that they be simplified as much as possible, and that every circumstance that could complicate the results should be completely removed. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
239:…numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments. ~ D Arcy Wentworth Thompson, #NFDB
240:Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
241:Mina Lee was right. The isolation is driving us crazy. We just hadn’t realized it yet.”
“Not the isolation. The mad science experiments. They’ve spiked the water with hallucinogens. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
242:exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
243:I've just looked for ideas and great characters that I relate to and that I think I can offer something to the audience, and I no longer look at them as experiments or genre exercises at all. ~ Ron Howard, #NFDB
244:Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science. ~ Seth Lloyd, #NFDB
245:They’re not TV shows. They’re experiments in how to create attention deficit disorders in the entire population with endless commercials and ads that pop up right in the middle of programs. ~ Diana Palmer, #NFDB
246:1. Dailies, or Solving Problems Together 2. Research Trips 3. The Power of Limits 4. Integrating Technology and Art 5. Short Experiments 6. Learning to See 7. Postmortems 8. Continuing to Learn ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
247:Because you scratched my itch and then you kissed me—both of which freaked me out because neither of which are in the course syllabus for laboratory experiments this semester. And, furthermore— ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
248:Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
249:He nodded again. “We didn’t know Lexis was pregnant when we both volunteered for some…experiments to enhance our DNA. Unfortunately, those experiments affected Sunny more than me and Lexis. ~ Gena Showalter, #NFDB
250:I can always see ways to improve what I've done. At the same time, knowing it's all an ongoing life's work allows me to be less precious about blind alleys, failed experiments, and misfires. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
251:Other classic experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch show how adults readily adopt the opinion of others in simple tasks, such as matching a line to one of a set of other lines ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
252:You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments! ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
253:Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common. ~ Denis Diderot, #NFDB
254:My job in space will be to observe and write a journal. I am also going to be teaching a class for students on earth about life in space and on the space shuttle and conducting experiments. ~ Christa McAuliffe, #NFDB
255:Groups of people who shared painful experiences, such as plunging their hands into ice water, were more tightly bonded and cooperative than other groups, according to a recent series of experiments. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
256:In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the behaviorists, whose endless experiments with lab rats aimed to show how easily the mammalian mind was shaped by its environment. Harlow ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
257:I knew the truth - that the world was being run by sick bastards who’d happily conduct experiments on innocent people just because they have too much time on their hands and a dark curiosity to feed. ~ Matt Shaw, #NFDB
258:Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
259:THESE experiments suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of interactions, including those that the babies most likely have never seen before. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
260:Beyond the bourne of thought experiments, children do not grow like
weeds. The sunlight that opens up the mind and heart is focused most clearly in
the care and love that parents give. ~ Lenn Evan Goodman,#NFDB
261:I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with Truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments; it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
262:But natural experiments don’t have to be explicitly random, like lotteries. Once you start looking for randomness, you see it everywhere—and can use it to understand how our world works. ~ Seth Stephens Davidowitz, #NFDB
263:Clearly, binary outcomes are not very prevalent in life; they mostly exist in laboratory experiments and in research papers. In life, payoffs are usually open-ended, or, at least, variable. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
264:Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. —NIKOLA TESLA ~ Peter Clines, #NFDB
265:A lot of inspiration comes from the sounds that we are attracted to when we come across them in our experiments and may lead us into a certain direction because of inherent possibilities we hear in them. ~ Tim Gane, #NFDB
266: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, #NFDB
267:Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books. ~ Derek Bok, #NFDB
268:Money does not represent such a value as men have placed upon it. All my money has been invested into experiments with which I have made new discoveries enabling mankind to have a little easier life. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
269:You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components. ~ Edwin Land, #NFDB
270:Just as a rat can be conditioned to press a lever in return for a reward of food, so a human being can be conditioned by professional rewards to ignore the ethical issues raised by animal experiments. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
271:Just as the victorious United States appropriated the Third Reich’s discoveries in rocket science and the exploration of outer space, the Nazi drug experiments were imported to explore inner worlds.41 ~ Norman Ohler, #NFDB
272:The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
273:I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with Truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments; it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
274:The data on which philosophical theorizing is based are rather the intuited contents themselves, concerning the various thought experiments. At least that is so outside the epistemology of the a priori. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
275:The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
276:We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them. ~ Amar Bose, #NFDB
277:Later, on the basis of this and subsequent experiments, under Theo’s guidance, Karen wrote her first published paper, “The Cryptobiotic Characteristics of Specific Cephalopodic Scavengers on Eridan. ~ Helen Mary Hoover, #NFDB
278:Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution. ~ Mark Kurlansky, #NFDB
279:Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing. ~ Beaumont Newhall, #NFDB
280:The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out. ~ Iris Chang, #NFDB
281:Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively story of primitive life. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
282:If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
283:If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve. ~ Jeff Bezos, #NFDB
284:The observations and experiments of science are so wonderful that the truth that they establish can surely be accepted as another manifestation of God. God shows himself by allowing man to establish truth. ~ Derek Barton, #NFDB
285:A series of controlled experiments and field studies in organizations shows that when teams engage in conflict over ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect, they develop better ideas and perform better . ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
286:As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry. ~ Simon Armitage, #NFDB
287:But 'the physical level of rigor' is higher on certainty than the logical one, since reproducible experiments are more reliable than anybody's, be it Hilbert's, Einstein's or Gödel's intuition. ~ Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, #NFDB
288:I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. ~ Sydney Brenner, #NFDB
289:No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
290:Whether epidemiology alone can, in strict logic, ever prove causality, even in this modern sense, may be questioned, but the same must also be said of laboratory experiments on animals. —Richard Doll ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
291:My approach tends to be from experiments. I need the challenge. If I know how to do something well, there's no need to do it all the time because it becomes a little monotonous. So I like to find a challenge. ~ Robert Ryman, #NFDB
292:Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
293:My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
294:We have adopted the policy of Sorel of propaganda of the deed. The best rhetoric comes from building and testing models and running experiments. Let philosophers weave webs of words; such webs break easily. ~ Herbert A Simon, #NFDB
295:A mathematician experiments, amasses information, makes a conjecture, finds out that it does not work, gets confused and then tries to recover. A good mathematician eventually does so - and proves a theorem. ~ Steven G Krantz, #NFDB
296:It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance
betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
297:One of the things that should go into the writer's notebook is a set of experiments with the sentence. A convenient and challenging place to begin is with the long sentence, one that runs to at least two pages. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
298:After many ponderous experiments the first crematorium was opened in December 1920 in Petrograd. It could manage barely 120 bodies a month, and, in February 1921, cremated itself when the wooden roof caught fire. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
299:To independence!” added Pocked Louise. “No fussy old widows telling us when not to speak, and how to set the spoons when an earl’s niece comes to supper. And telling us to leave scientific experiments to the men. ~ Julie Berry, #NFDB
300:We have a constantly-changing portfolio of social media experiments. The first time we tried applying social technologies in a customer service department it became the most productive department in the company. ~ Sandy Carter, #NFDB
301:It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me! ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
302:Customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost drive your growth, and you’ll run experiments to try to capture more loyal users for less, tweaking how you charge, when you charge, and what you charge for. ~ Alistair Croll, #NFDB
303:Franklin’s scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin’s experiments, he wrote in 1941, “afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity.”16 Franklin ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
304:It’s best not to experiment on yourself. Bacon practically froze himself to death in one of his experiments and died of pneumonia.”
{Right! Bacon must be heated. Knew that already, but thanks for the reminder.} ~ Kevin Hearne,#NFDB
305:Men who believe too firmly in their theories, do not believe enough in the theories of others. So ... these despisers of their fellows ... make experiments only to destroy a theory, instead of to seek the truth. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
306:I am the Grand Marquis Fornas, leader of twenty-nine of Hell’s legions, corrupter of the sciences, defiler of the experiments, and despoiler of the philosophies. I am a warrior, a poet, a scholar, and your doom. ~ John G Hartness, #NFDB
307:Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive. ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
308:An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It's not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases and their unique life histories. That's butterfly collecting. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
309:Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments? ~ John Constable, #NFDB
310:Animal experiments occupy a central place in the material and spiritual edifice of our whole civilization. We are speaking here of one of those foundation stones whose removal could cause the whole house to collapse. ~ Rudolf Bahro, #NFDB
311:The mind that asks and experiments and evaluates will die one day, but will provide a richer life for its owner. The mind that does nothing but rest inside the brain doesn't sidestep the puddle. It's sitting in it. ~ Josh Hanagarne, #NFDB
312:What I always think about, I told him, are experiments that show that animals in captivity would rather have to search for their food than have it given to them. Seeking is the lever that tips our dopamine gush. ~ Michelle McNamara, #NFDB
313:As much I love to imagine being alone in an orderly lab, I also know you can't stay in there forever and expect to do good work. Life is one of those experiments meant to be conducted in a stimulating, messy environment. ~ Sara Zarr, #NFDB
314:It is telling commentary on economic orthodoxy that a whole subdiscipline--behavioral economics--and a raft of lab experiments are needed to show that humans often fail to behave with the rationality expected of them. ~ Kaushik Basu, #NFDB
315:Experiments upon vegetation give reason to believe that light combines with certain parts of vegetables, and that the green of their leaves, and the various colors of flowers, is chiefly owing to this combination. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
316:My love of writing is an outgrowth of my love of reading. Both helped me to escape boredom, to perform thought experiments, and to deal with the daily news. I can create a world that makes more sense than this one. ~ Octavia E Butler, #NFDB
317:One end accepts too much, the other end accepts too little, and there in the middle is the western magical tradition exemplified by the experiments of John Dee and Edward Kelley, or Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuberg. ~ Gordon White, #NFDB
318:Fibroblasts are the main cells in connective tissue and are found in all sorts of organs including skin. They’re really easy to extract and they grow very easily in culture, so are a great source of cells for experiments. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
319:Science emerges from the other progressive activities of man to the extent that new concepts arise from experiments and observations, and that the new concepts in turn lead to further experiments and observations. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
320:The story is recycled out of a 1983 French film named Les Comperes, as part of a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made in English with all of the humor taken out. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
321:Just as many people today assume that the most recent experiments in science or psychology will surpass earlier ones, so the gnostics anticipated that the present and future would yield a continual increase in knowledge. ~ Elaine Pagels, #NFDB
322:There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself. If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you - and His experiments always succeed. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
323:There is alas no law against incompetency; no striking example is made. They learn by our bodily jeopardy and make experiments until the death of the patients, and the doctor is the only person not punished for murder. ~ Pliny the Elder, #NFDB
324:The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help. ~ Charles Krauthammer, #NFDB
325:Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments. ~ Robert Walpole, #NFDB
326:new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to revert to our old ways of thinking and doing. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
327:Nothing is settled; no truth finds general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
328:The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
329:The whole art of making experiments in chemistry is founded on the principle: we must always suppose an exact equality or equation between the principles of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
330:What I’m saying is, when different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
331:Although empirical knowledge constrains the attribution of essential properties, results are more often reached through a subtle interplay of logic and the imagination. The crucial experiments are thought experiments. ~ Timothy Williamson, #NFDB
332:boy who had grown up with a monster. “That,” he said, “is a matter of opinion. Some would say he was a perfect creation of Silence. Totally without emotion, without empathy. To him, the murders were interesting experiments. ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
333:Is it necessary to practice all these asanas, further and further? Is it necessary to develop scientific researches further and further? To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
334:I'm talking to a guy who says he was taken up in a flying saucer and had sexual experiments done on him - which, I got to say, is probably the only sexual experiments he's ever had done on him, that didn't involve a heifer. ~ John Sandford, #NFDB
335:Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical. ~ Martin Rees, #NFDB
336:To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed. ~ Christopher J Nolan, #NFDB
337:Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles. ~ Scott D Anthony, #NFDB
338:Last time MCB was out here was when a hard rain revealed one of their experiments. A deer was exposed to it and grew tentacles instead of antlers. Tentacle deer...The Army doesn't pay me enough to deal with that kind of shit. ~ Larry Correia, #NFDB
339:Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science. ~ Paul Nurse, #NFDB
340:My love of writing is an outgrowth of my love of reading. Both helped me to
escape boredom, to perform thought experiments, and to deal with the daily
news. I can create a world that makes more sense than this one. ~ Octavia E Butler,#NFDB
341:But the better you are at asking the right questions, engaging in the right observations, eliciting ideas and feedback through networking with the right people, and running experiments, the less likely you are to fail. ~ Clayton M Christensen, #NFDB
342:Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
343:Creativity involves provocation, exploration and risk taking. Creativity involves "thought experiments." You cannot tell in advance how the experiment is going to turn out. But you want to be able to carry out the experiment. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
344:It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
345:One can forget the meaninglessness of his own existence by occupying himself with scientific experiments of dubious import. Countless scientists and scholars spend their lives in the search of truths that are irrelevant to them. ~ John Silber, #NFDB
346:Experiments were not attempted at that time, we did not believe in the usefulness of the concept anyway, and I finished my thesis in 1962 with a feeling like an artist balancing on a high rope without any interested spectators. ~ Richard Ernst, #NFDB
347:It is not a simple matter to differentiate unsuccessful from successful experiments. . . .[Most] work that is finally successful is the result of a series of unsuccessful tests in which difficulties are gradually eliminated. ~ Robert H Goddard, #NFDB
348:Propose theories which can be criticized. Think about possible decisive falsifying experiments-crucial experiments. But do not give up your theories too easily-not, at any rate, before you have critically examined your criticism. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
349:If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere. ~ P D James, #NFDB
350:In other words, experiments with large numbers of people show that if you are kind and compassionate, your friends, your friends’ friends, and even your friends’ friends’ friends are more likely to become kind and compassionate. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
351:Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
352:Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
353:To solve a problem is to create new problems, new knowledge immediately reveals new areas of ignorance, and the need for new experiments. At least, in the field of fast reactions, the experiments do not take very long to perform. ~ George Porter, #NFDB
354:But the moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
355:I'm just kind of interested in focusing on what I'm interested in and just kind of solidifying it, or at least experimenting, or actualizing some of the experiments that I've had in my head for years, either filmicly or with audio. ~ Reggie Watts, #NFDB
356:In 1984, a group of former Holmesburg prisoners sued the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. Nearly all of the men were African Americans, as were most of the inmates used in all the experiments at the prison. ~ H P Albarelli, #NFDB
357:The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to fill bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
358:I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable to you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
359:Rats given sweetened water in experiments find it significantly more pleasurable than cocaine, even when they’re addicted to the latter, and more than heroin as well (although the rats find this choice more difficult to make). Addict ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
360:About 1960, it became clear that it was best for me to bring the experimental part of my research program to a close - there was too much to do on the theoretical aspects - and I began the process of winding down the experiments. ~ Rudolph A Marcus, #NFDB
361:Bruce conducted some groundbreaking experiments showing that our genes do not control biology. The idea that genes control biology is a faulty scientific assumption that was debunked by the Human Genome Project around the year 2003, a ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
362:F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
363:I believe that I have really found the relationship between gravitation and electricity, assuming that the Miller experiments are based on a fundamental error. Otherwise, the whole relativity theory collapses like a house of cards. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
364:If any particle we haven’t yet found lasted long enough and interacted with ordinary matter with sufficient strength that it could possibly affect the physics of everyday goings-on, we would have produced it in experiments by now. One ~ Sean Carroll, #NFDB
365:In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
366:It is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
367:Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
368:The evidence is clear that increasing the severity of punishment is a far less effective deterrent than increasing the perception that a person will be caught and sanctioned. With respect to interrogations, experiments reveal the benefits ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
369:Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
370:Fang snorted in disbelief. "On one hand, we have a mythical nice family that wants to adopt me. On the other, we have a gang of insane scientists desperate to do genetic experiments on innocent children. Guess which hand I get dealt? ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
371:I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
372:I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable to you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
373:We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea. ~ Robert Menzies, #NFDB
374:B.F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
375:I congratulate you both on a fine piece of work which I am sure will ultimately prove of importance. I am personally very much interested in your results... In the past I have tried a number of experiments... but without any success. ~ Ernest Rutherford, #NFDB
376:A startup’s job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
377:My experiments are experiments with love, compassion and blessings. From the top of the Himalaya, I always send positive vibrations to every part of the world and let there be positive transformations, and by the grace of the Supreme it works. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
378:People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced-all the mysteries of art-will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid at this idea is, this is roughly it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
379:The psychic life of civilized man is full of problems...Our psychic processes are made up to a large extent of reflections, doubts, experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
380:Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., qualities that cannot be increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
381:You're my brother." "Those words don't mean anything where we're concerned. We aren't human. Their rules don't apply to us. Stupid laws about what DNA can be mixed with what. Hypocritical, really, considering. We're already experiments. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
382:A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience. A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science. ~ Francisco J Ayala, #NFDB
383:And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error. ~ Tim Harford, #NFDB
384:Geometric shapes hold an energy pattern, and scientists did some experiments which say certain geometric shapes can affect matter around them. It's simply because when a human looks at a shape, they instantly receive energy from their brain. ~ Tom DeLonge, #NFDB
385:I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically. ~ Noto, #NFDB
386:I was interested in scientific communication, in truth I much preferred working in the lab and trying new experiments to thinking about the theoretical, long-term implications of my research and trying to explain them to nonscientists. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
387:Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways. ~ Alison Gopnik, #NFDB
388:the second place, and giving my own personal opinion, a child's flesh is not a satisfying diet; it is too insipid, too sweet; and the criminal, in making these experiments, could have satisfied neither his conscience nor his appetite. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
389:I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't. ~ Lawrence Lessig, #NFDB
390:The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
391:We do know that dreams have a healing function even when they are not understood. From experiments in dream laboratories we know that if we stop people from dreaming, we could even kill them. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, The Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, #NFDB
392:In moments they would be here — the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
393:Juanita found herself at Old Jeemy's radio station in a room she could have sworn was a laboratory where creatures with antennas in their heads, knobs for eyes, jagged arms, and dangly legs conducted experiments on the bodies of dead vocalists. ~ Dan Jenkins, #NFDB
394:One series of experiments showed that focusing on feelings of gratitude raises your happiness level, at least temporarily, improves your sleep, stimulates you to engage in more generous and helpful acts, and also somehow gets you exercising more. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
395:I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
396:Many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are Iying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people, and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year. ~ Vernon Coleman, #NFDB
397:From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
398:Government reporters may cover City Hall. Education reporters may write about schools and school boards. Science writers may report on asteroids one day, HIV vaccine experiments the next, sonar technology the next, a universe without boundaries. ~ Deborah Blum, #NFDB
399:most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
400:A space planner provides spaces for playing basketball, performing laboratory experiments, manufacturing widgets, or staging theatrical productions; an architect imbues the experience of these places with poignancy, richness, fun, beauty, and irony. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
401:Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child),” Mau’s maxim went. “Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day. ~ Chris Baty, #NFDB
402:We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us came in at the same door. But each of us-experiments of the depths-strives towards his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
403:You're my brother."
"Those words don't mean anything where we're concerned. We aren't human. Their rules don't apply to us. Stupid laws about what DNA can be mixed with what. Hypocritical, really, considering. We're already experiments. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
404:I'm tired and I have ocean hair. So listen up, all of you. You've been hauling me in here for months. Using my blood for experiments without my consent, and violating every word of the Patient's Rights Act. Now, let's cut the crap. I need answers. ~ Chelsea Cain, #NFDB
405:Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences. ~ Josef Albers, #NFDB
406:In 2010 alone, we conducted 8,157 A/B tests and more than 2,800 one-percent tests. Put another way, every single day in 2010 we ran more than thirty experiments to uncover what would best serve our users. And this was just for our search product. We ~ Laszlo Bock, #NFDB
407:In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
408:Our experiments have simply not yet been fruitful and have caused negative side effects.” “Negative side effects?” echoed Sam, disbelievingly. “It’s not like they’ve got the shits or something, is it? They’re deformed and half out of their minds. ~ Suzanne Wright, #NFDB
409:A lodestone is a wonderful thing in very many experiments, and like living things. And one of its remarkable virtues in that which the ancients considered to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes and in the stars, in the sun and in the moon. ~ William Gilbert, #NFDB
410:The house looked on to other tenement-like structures, experiments in architectural insignificance, that intruded upon a central concentration of buildings, commanding and antiquated, laid out in a quadrilateral, though irregular, style. Silted-up ~ Anthony Powell, #NFDB
411:After some abandoned experiments with static compilation, we looked around and saw how successfully JIT techniques are being applied in the JavaScript space: Chrome’s V8 engine, in particular, has greatly pushed the status quo of JavaScript performance. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
412:This great contemporary psychologist has shown by experiments with animals and with humans that when criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
413:Among all the methods non-violence is most successful and I strongly believe that only non-violence can set the true mood of peace and harmony among the nuclear nations. Our experiments with non-violence should be more wide, more engaging and more humble. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
414:In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort. ~ W S Gilbert, #NFDB
415:It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity. ~ Albert Hofmann, #NFDB
416:In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
417:The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage. ~ Marcus du Sautoy, #NFDB
418:They brought with them seventeen American POWs who were secretly imprisoned in Villa Marista for advanced experiments with drugs.” It was hard to imagine being taken prisoner in Vietnam, tortured there, then being shipped to Cuba for more of the same. ~ Nelson DeMille, #NFDB
419:A library is that venerable place where men preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans... in books may be found the recipes for daily living - the prescriptions for the mind and the heart. ~ Georges Duhamel, #NFDB
420:I think about the schoolchildren who saw their experiments blow up on Orbital, rebuilt them, and saw them blow up on SpaceX. I hope they will get a third chance. There is a lesson here, I guess, about risk and resilience, about endurance and trying again. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
421:Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day. ~ Bruce Mau, #NFDB
422:Medical science in particular will get exponentially better, especially once computers will be powerful enough to digitally simulate entire human brains, meaning medical experiments that would normally take years can be digitally run taking only hours. ~ Benjamin Stone, #NFDB
423:If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes? ~ Galileo Galilei, #NFDB
424:I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
425:Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater, #NFDB
426:Scientists have just built the world's biggest supercollider, and they're doing experiments to see what makes up protons. I hope that if the experiment's successful, the whole of our reality will dissolve, and a big sign will up come that says: Level Two. ~ Frankie Boyle, #NFDB
427:There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made. ~ Edward Albee, #NFDB
428:[Hillary Clinton] is giving money to N.I.M.H. [National Institute for Mental Health] ultimately to conduct more experiments on two- to four-year-olds. What they're going to do is conduct a lot of clinical studies which actually drug two- to four-year-olds. ~ Peter Breggin, #NFDB
429:Leonardo’s optics experiments produced discoveries that would not be rediscovered for another century.23 In addition, they were important in honing his ability to match theory with experiment, and they became an underpinning of his studies on perspective. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
430:Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
431:Mother Earth is now stronger than She ever was before. It is almost like taking penicillin. You take it for a few days and then stop, and it makes the illness stronger. The Earth since nuclear experiments is very strong. Everything has been changing. ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
432:Furthermore, everyone is constantly learning, fostering a hypothesis-driven culture where the scientific method is used to ensure nothing is taken for granted—we do nothing without measuring and treating product development and process improvement as experiments. ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
433:Up to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were “elementary” particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
434:I learned what research was all about as a research student [with] Stoppani ... Max Perutz, and ... Fred Sanger... From them, I always received an unspoken message which in my imagination I translated as "Do good experiments, and don't worry about the rest." ~ Cesar Milstein, #NFDB
435:In several experiments, people were able to resist the effects of ego depletion when given a strong incentive to do so. In contrast, increasing effort is not an option when you must keep six digits in short-term memory while performing a task. Ego depletion ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
436:Roy Baumeister analyzed findings from hundreds of experiments to determine why some people can retain focus for hours, while others can’t. He discovered that self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.8 ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
437:The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience. ~ Ben Kingsley, #NFDB
438:There's no scientific basis for zombieism -- except for some experiments in the Caribbean with blowfish toxins that put people in a state of near death with almost imperceptible respiration and pulse, but there was no actual, you know, raising of the dead. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
439:Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently. ~ Brian Stableford, #NFDB
440:We're taking up some science experiments, some crystal growth things, we have a refrigerator that carries up some samples, new samples that go into the station, we bring the old ones home; we have a lot of clothing, we have a lot of food-U.S. and Russian food. ~ Linda M Godwin, #NFDB
441:I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening. ~ Bruce Sterling, #NFDB
442:In going on with these Experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves oblig'd to destroy! If there is no other Use discover'd of Electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain Man humble. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
443:The musical instuments may be western but my voice never wavers away from my own ragas. it is good to make experiments and I do a lot of them but my thoughts always round the centre and that centre is the tradition of my elders and it is classical music... ~ Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, #NFDB
444:imaginative cook, and her experiments weren’t always edible. I was surprised, and sad, that he seemed to remember that far back. “Steak and potatoes,” I answered, and he looked relieved. He seemed to feel awkward standing in the kitchen doing nothing; he lumbered ~ Stephenie Meyer, #NFDB
445:Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution. In the case of the evolution of life-forms, the most notable early example is DNA, which provides a recorded and protected transcription of life’s design from which to launch further experiments ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
446:Napping is often seen as a form of laziness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of experiments have demonstrated the enormous benefits associated with even the shortest of sleeps, and so it is vital that you make napping part of your daily routine. ~ Richard Wiseman, #NFDB
447:After many unhappy experiments in the direction of an ideal Republic, it was found that what may be described as a Despotism tempered by Dynamite provides, on the whole, the most satisfactory description of ruler - an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic power. ~ W S Gilbert, #NFDB
448:As for my memory, I have a particularly good one. I never keep any record of my investigations or experiments. My memory files all these things away conveniently and reliably. I should say, though, that I didn’t cumber it up with a lot of useless matter. ~ Charles Proteus Steinmetz, #NFDB
449:I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed. ~ Wilkie Collins, #NFDB
450:Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer. ~ Sugata Mitra, #NFDB
451:If this is not an age of decay and declining vitality, it is at least one of headlong and arbitrary experimentation:— and it is probable that a superabundance of bungled experiments should create an overall impression as of decay— and perhaps even decay itself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
452:No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things — the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold — were false to you. ~ Beryl Markham, #NFDB
453:Some experiments show that light is wave-like. Other experiments show equally well that light is particle-like. If we want to demonstrate that light is a particle-like phenomenon or that light is a wave-like phenomenon, we only need to select the appropriate experiment. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
454:I do not think that you can try and systematize education for the whole world. I would try experiments in small communities and in schools to see how they work out, instead of taking the children of an entire nation and trying to bring them up on the same system. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
455:Various species of animals react differently to the same drug. Not only do the variations in the metabolism of a drug make it difficult to extrapolate results of animal experiments to man but they create a serious obstacle to the development of new therapeutic drugs. ~ Bernard Brodie, #NFDB
456:A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
457:For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiments. Astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. ~ Sir Arthur Sullivan, #NFDB
458:The slowing down of time in high-speed travel is known as “time dilation” and is routinely taken into account in physics experiments, particularly those in which subatomic particles are accelerated in “atom smashers” such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. ~ Jim Al Khalili, #NFDB
459:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
460:Interference and diffraction are phenomena that only happen with waves, though, so after Young’s experiment (and subsequent experiments by the French physicist Augustin Fresnel), everybody was convinced that light was a wave. Things stayed that way for about a hundred years. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
461:What good were these experiments?” went the skeptic’s question. To which Franklin replied, “What good is a new-born babe?” In some versions he continued: “He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him. ~ Stacy Schiff, #NFDB
462:Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path... But each of us - experiments of the depths - strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
463:Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all. ~ Charles Stross, #NFDB
464:An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is completed, he or she knows how it should have been started and conducted. ~ Donald Cram, #NFDB
465:(...) but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
466:When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data. There ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
467:My opinion - nay more, my conviction - is that, in the present state of science, as you rightly say, spontaneous generation is a chimera; and it would be impossible for you to contradict me, for my experiments all stand forth to prove that spontaneous generation is a chimera. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
468:Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
469:Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ~ Nikola Tesla, "Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World", in Modern Mechanics and Inventions (July 1934)., #NFDB
470:And the second reason is that the terrestrial being who made these experiments, thanks to the knowledge of cosmic vibrations he had acquired, was the sole and unique being who, during the many centuries that I existed upon the Earth, recognized and came to know my true nature. ~ G I Gurdjieff, #NFDB
471:The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick). ~ Robert Hooke, #NFDB
472:The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute. ~ Donella Meadows, #NFDB
473:Ants offer special advantages for some important kinds of basic biological research. The colony is a superorganism. It can be analyzed as a coherent unit and compared with the organism in the design of experiments, with the individuals treated as the rough analogues of cells. ~ Bert Holldobler, #NFDB
474:Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably. ~ Robert Nozick, #NFDB
475:When I examine my experimental research, I find to my embarrassment I rarely provided a control condition. What could I have possibly learned from these ill-designed experiments? The answer (it surprised me) is that you can test theoretical models without a control condition. ~ Herbert A Simon, #NFDB
476:All of my early images were really visual experiments to me. They were attempts to answer unasked questions like, what happens if you put images of six men and six women together, or if we combined a monkey's image with a human, would the result approximate an image of early man? ~ Nancy Burson, #NFDB
477:experiments have shown that players rely on several heuristics. The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high up in the air: Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
478:But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
479:His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
480:That no generally applicable law of the formulation and development of hybrids has yet been successfully formulated can hardly astonish anyone who is acquainted with the extent of the task and who can appreciate the difficulties with which experiments of this kind have to contend. ~ Gregor Mendel, #NFDB
481:If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things. ~ Kenneth E Boulding, #NFDB
482:It's easy to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments by assuming that whatever you decide now needs to work for years on end. It's just not so, especially for a small business. If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary. ~ Jason Fried, #NFDB
483:A one year study by the Washington Post has documented 620 cases in which experimental drugs have been implicated in the deaths of cancer patients....And they amount to merely a fraction of the thousands of people who in recent years have died or suffered terribly from cancer experiments. ~ Ted Gup, #NFDB
484:He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
485:Using both experiments and field data, a recent study found that economic insecurity was associated with increased consumption of painkillers and produced actual physical pain and reduced pain tolerance, with the absence of control providing one mechanism explaining these results. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer, #NFDB
486:Willpower, psychologist Roy Baumeister analyzed findings from hundreds of experiments to determine why some people can retain focus for hours, while others can’t. He discovered that self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.8 ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
487:But however mysterious is nature , however ignorant the doctor, however imperfect the present state of physical science , the patronage and the success of quacks and quackeries are infinitely more wonderful than those of honest and laborious men of science and their careful experiments. ~ P T Barnum, #NFDB
488:I have always believed that raising kids means more than just being a good parent and trying to do the right things. It means surrounding your kids with amazing people who can bring science experiments and jam cookies, laughter and joy, and beautiful experiences into their lives. ~ Karina Yan Glaser, #NFDB
489:He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
490:Not only in order to act morally, but even to formulate theoretical questions, devise experiments, choose which ones to perform and what conclusions to draw from then - we must presuppose that we are free. That's the sense in which it is true that for Kant "we must assume we are free." ~ Allen W Wood, #NFDB
491:Chemistry is yet, indeed, a mere embryon. Its principles are contested; experiments seem contradictory; their subjects are so minute as to escape our senses; and their result too fallacious to satisfy the mind. It is probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
492:I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats. ~ Paul Bley, #NFDB
493:I strongly believe that non-violence should be taught at school levels as an important subject. Specially experiments with non-violence should be taught with due importance. I urge the United Nations to play its role to spread the value of non-violence in the school levels across the world. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
494:At the circus, a careless mother may let her child take part in the experiments of a Chinese magician. He puts him in a box. He opens the box; it's empty. He closes it again. He opens it; the child reappears and goes back to his seat. Now it is no longer the same child. Nobody doubts it. ~ Jean Cocteau, #NFDB
495:...great difficulties are felt at first and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments .. and then be conceiving certain hypotheses ... But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune. ~ Christiaan Huygens, #NFDB
496:He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
497:Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments. ~ Jenny Offill, #NFDB
498:I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
499:Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
500:We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook "experimented" with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work. ~ Christian Rudder, #NFDB
501:Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
502:What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
503:There is good reason to believe that the administration of justice is infected by predictable incoherence in several domains. The evidence is drawn in part from experiments, including studies of mock juries, and in part from observation of patterns in legislation, regulation, and litigation. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
504:Men who have excessive faith in their theories ... make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
505:The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
506:We expect him to take up a lot of space in his gangly experiments with life, and we teach him, through task, work, game, activity, and experience how to use that space. Above all, we give him mentoring and supervision that respects and teaches his gifts, his visions, even his shadowy inner demons ~ Michael Gurian, #NFDB
507:When there are conflicts of observation, when experiments cannot be replicated, scientists may then retreat to a study of the various specific observations so as to explain the conflict, in the course of which they would make use of the concept of observation, or of some specification of that concept. ~ Ernest Sosa, #NFDB
508:Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things; a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippy world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
509:Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things. ~ Billy Gibbons, #NFDB
510:I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
511:Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
512:The first time I had sushi, I hated it. And the second time was no different, and then, I just started loving it. I actually crave for sushi. It's one of the healthiest meals. My experiments with food began when I was working in New York as an architect, be it Korean or Ethiopian food or fusion food. ~ Riteish Deshmukh, #NFDB
513:The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . . . ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
514:If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
515:I know damn well that if there had been a way to get to success without traveling through disaster someone would have already done it and thus rendered the experiments unnecessary, but there’s still no journal where I can tell the story of how my science is done with both the heart and the hands. Eventually ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
516:Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. The ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
517:The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
518:When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV. ~ Tyne Daly, #NFDB
519:On the basis of decades of experiments, plants are starting to be regarded as beings capable of calculation and choice, learning and memory. A few years ago, Switzerland, amid much less rational polemics, became the first country in the world to affirm the rights of plants with a special declaration. But ~ Stefano Mancuso, #NFDB
520:For much of the Communist era, scholars tended to look back on Sun as one more unsuccessful, reform-minded leader, and his Three People’s Principles as just another of modern China’s many dead-end political experiments. As one biographer wrote: “If Sun Yat-sen had one consistent talent, it was for failure. ~ Orville Schell, #NFDB
521:If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago. ... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism. ~ Fritjof Capra, #NFDB
522:We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
523:Also, some dreams can incorporate events that happened a few hours earlier, just before sleep. But dreams mostly incorporate memories that are a few days old. For example, experiments have shown that if you put rose-colored glasses on a person, it takes a few days before the dreams become rose-colored as well. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
524:Millennials think Maxine Waters is God-sent. She's an oracle! She holds the magic truths. She's one of the few Democrats willing to say what she says, and these young Millennials are just glomming onto her like you can't believe. It's one of the most amazing social science experiments to look at this happen. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
525:This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
526:This is historically what happens whenever revolutionaries begin to take the oppression and suffering of their fellow beings seriously, whether human or nonhuman. It's regrettable that certain scientists are willing to put their families at risk by choosing to do wasteful animal experiments in this day and age. ~ Jerry Vlasak, #NFDB
527:We need to learn to listen to what the people need and want and not try to impose on them a whole schema that they may not. This is historically difficult stuff: how do we balance the project of raising consciousness, advancing a vision of utopia, with the real and honest engagement in real-world experiments? ~ Gar Alperovitz, #NFDB
528:I write constantly, so it flows from one project to the next, and I would edit everything endlessly if I had the chance. I can always see ways to improve what I've done. At the same time, knowing it's all an ongoing life's work allows me to be less precious about blind alleys, failed experiments, and misfires. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
529:Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses. ~ Lisa Randall, #NFDB
530:You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea...You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. ~ Marilynne Robinson, #NFDB
531:Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
532:None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair? ~ Austin Grossman, #NFDB
533:If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
534:This man looked like…well, like a gentleman of independent means and an inquiring mind, perhaps, the kind of man who goes for long walks in the morning and spends the afternoons improving his mind in his own private library or doing small interesting experiments on parsnips and never, ever, worrying about money. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
535:Even people who are aware that the traditional family farm has been taken over by big business interests, and that some questionable experiments go on in laboratories, cling to a vague belief that conditions cannot be too bad, or else the government or the animal welfare societies would have done something about it. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
536:We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo's deep words recalling Hamlet's speech "is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience." Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these "reasons of nature" force themselves into experience. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
537:In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon, #NFDB
538:Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
539:The most successful social media experiments-whether spearheaded by one person, a group of individuals, a company, or an institution-invite you in, treat you as a friend, and make you feel at home. Look around, they say, and tell us how we can make things better; get to know us. Get involved and tell us what you think. ~ Melinda Blau, #NFDB
540:This does not mean we cannot talk about causes; there are ways to escape the narrative fallacy. How? By making conjectures and running experiments, or as we shall see in Part Two (alas) by making testable predictions. The psychology experiments I am discussing here do so: They suggest a problem, and run a test. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
541:We aren't upset when Paramount makes a $200 million movie that flops, but if a charity experiments with a $5 million fundraising event that fails, we call in the attorneys. So charities are petrified of trying bold new revenue-generating endeavors and can't develop the powerful learning curves the for-profit sector can. ~ Dan Pallotta, #NFDB
542:You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
543:high-performing manufacturing operations require and actively promote learning—instead of work being rigidly defined, the system of work is dynamic, with line workers performing experiments in their daily work to generate new improvements, enabled by rigorous standardization of work procedures and documentation of the results. ~ Gene Kim, #NFDB
544:recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
545:When it was first proposed to establish laboratories at Cambridge, Todhunter, the mathematician, objected that it was unnecessary for students to see experiments performed, since the results could be vouched for by their teachers, all of them of the highest character, and many of them clergymen of the Church of England. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
546:You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters – or mice. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
547:Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
548:Japanese soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the fetuses; they tied up local farmers and used them for target practice; they tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the Gestapo at its worst; and they were pursuing deadly medical experiments long before Dr. Mengele and Auschwitz. ~ Laurence Rees, #NFDB
549:No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
550:Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
551:Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
552:The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
553:Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards, and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke. ~ Garrison Keillor, #NFDB
554:Science in the past (and partly in the present), was dominated by one-sided empiricism. Only a collection of data and experiments were considered as being ‘scientific’ in biology (and psychology); forgetting that a mere accumulation of data, although steadily piling up, does not make a science. ~ Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, #NFDB
555:...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death would save a single human life or benefit humans in any way at all; but the same can be said of millions of their experiments performed each year in the United States alone. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
556:Better yet, combine your warmth and flattery with requests that they do a small favor or two FOR YOU. This strategy is akin to what author David McRaney calls “the Benjamin Franklin effect,” which is based on experiments that show we come to like people that we do nice things for and to dislike people that we treat unkindly. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
557:Little-boy love...the cleanest pain I've ever known. Love without desire, conditions, or limits - a pure and radiant glow in the heart that could make me giddy and sad and glorious all at once. Where does it go? Why, in all their experiments, did the Magi never try to capture that purity in a bottle? Perhaps they couldn't. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
558:LSD caused a lot of experimenting going on. And we're thinking, 'Wait a minute, what if we've got...' I always thought, 'What if some of those experiments actually had worked?' And what if they did? We probably wouldn't know that they existed. We heard that they were shut down, but we probably wouldn't be told if they succeeded. ~ Len Wiseman, #NFDB
559:We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience. ~ R Buckminster Fuller, #NFDB
560:Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
561:A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset. No one could explain exactly why, but the phenomenon was easily observed in experiments. Something to do with multiple axes of spin, and wobble, and aerodynamics, and the general difference between theory and practice. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
562:In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth. ~ Evan Osnos, #NFDB
563:None of the patients could say the experiments didn't yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day fora ll staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated. ~ Alan Brennert, #NFDB
564:Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create. ~ Julia Child, #NFDB
565:Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel's initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
566:Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. ~ Claudia Rankine, #NFDB
567:Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
568:As the conversation turned to the medical experiments Dad performed on the dog that had been dumped in our yard last week, I tuned out and tried to think of what I would get if I crossed an Iceberg rose with a Sunsprite. A nice pale yellow and only a few thorns. Could be interesting. If Grandma were still alive, she’d appreciate it. ~ Kimberly Loth, #NFDB
569:Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3 ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
570:My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
571:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
572:These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence; second, there is more than one way to do science, depending on the nature of the questions and the methods typical of the field. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
573:The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
574:What motivated Newton to suspect that something like the Zeroth law had to be true was not painstaking experiments but, rather, powerful intuition, derived from his religion, about how the world is built. Newton had no doubt about God's existence, and he saw his task in science as revealing God's method of governing the physical world. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
575:I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments that are made from east to west, and the elevation of the North Star from north to south. ~ Christopher Columbus, #NFDB
576:It was Broom’s habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
577:The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
578:For years, NASA has run experiments replicating the environments of space and alien planets. Rovers and robotics have been tested in the Arizona desert and in the Canadian Arctic. “Human factor” studies in preparation for space-station duties have been carried out in a capsule at the Johnson Space Center and in an underwater lab off Key Largo. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
579:I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
580:The contradictory experiments of chemists leave us at liberty to conclude what we please. My conclusion is, that art has not yet invented sufficient aids to enable such subtle bodies [air, light, &c.] to make a well-defined impression on organs as blunt as ours; that it is laudable to encourage investigation but to hold back conclusion. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
581:Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth. ~ Eric Kandel, #NFDB
582:Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again; you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. —Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
583:Like musicians, like mathematicians—like elite athletes—scientists peak early and dwindle fast. It isn’t creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport. To produce that single illuminating experiment, a thousand nonilluminating experiments have to be sent into the trash; it is battle between nature and nerve. Avery ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
584:New studies conducted by psychology researcher Joseph Forgas show that mild sadness can actually have a number of benefits that could reflect its value. In his experiments, people who were in a sad mood had better judgment and memory, and were more motivated, more sensitive to social norms, and more generous than the happier control group. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
585:Hundreds of experiments show that encounters with rude, insulting, and demeaning people undermine others’ performance—including their decision-making skills, productivity, creativity, and willingness to work a little harder and stay a little later to finish projects and to help coworkers who need their advice, skills, or emotional support. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
586:There could, in principle, be an institution that looked like what we call "science" but in which there was no genuine responsiveness to the world. Experiments would be no more than expensive "PR" exercises, and theories
would change via a process of negotiation between factions. How do we know that our own science is not like this? ~ Peter Godfrey Smith,#NFDB
587:It is true that the more we see some connection in what happens to us, the more we are confirmed in the opinion we have about the reality of our appearances; and it is also true that the more we examine our appearances closely, the more we find them well-sequenced, as microscopes and other aids in making experiments have shown us. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
588:I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town. ~ Stanley Milgram, #NFDB
589:Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
590:I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
591:I thought that I had found something new. But then I convinced myself that the Abbot Gregor Mendel in Brünn, had, during the sixties, not only obtained the same result through extensive experiments with peas, which lasted for many years, as did de Vries and I, but had also given exactly the same explanation, as far as that was possible in 1866. ~ Carl Correns, #NFDB
592:Marine Salvage—A science of vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive experiments and performed with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and questionable mentality” —C. A. Bartholomew, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy, Department of Navy, 2010. ~ Tobias E Carlisle, #NFDB
593:One of the challenges over the last decade is America has done experiments in nation building in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and we've neglected, for example, developing our own economy, our own energy sectors, our own education system. And it's very hard for us to project leadership around the world when we're not doing what we need to do. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
594:We are not at all to wonder [...] that we having but some few superficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the senses from without, or by the mind, reflecting on what it experiments in itself within, have no knowledge beyond that, much less of the internal constitution, and true nature of things, being destitute of faculties to attain it. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
595:An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off. ~ Edwin Land, #NFDB
596:a recent event hosted by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with film makers to discuss what both groups have learned---the scientists through painstaking experiments and analysis, and the film makers by intuition and experience---about the mechanisms of attention and perception. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
597:In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world. ~ Howard Gardner, #NFDB
598:In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world. ~ Howard Gardner, #NFDB
599:You like to explore things, and your parents don't like it because it gets the pots and pans dirty, and because it's noisy - but for you it's fun, you're resting. You're actually doing experiments... Just tell your parents that they're experiments, and you want to become a scientist, and then they won't stop you from doing anything you want. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
600:A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
601:A scientific theory is the one explanation that is confirmed by all the known and validated experiments performed to date. Experiments involving evolution have numbered in the hundreds of thousands over the past 150 years. A theory is thus among the most certain forms of scientific knowledge, with evolution among the most certain of theories. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
602:Science, with its experiments and logic, tries to understand the order or structure of the universe. Religion, with its theological inspiration and reflection, tries to understand the purpose or meaning of the universe. These two are cross-related. Purpose implies structure, and structure ought somehow to be interpretable in terms of purpose. ~ Charles Hard Townes, #NFDB
603:I hurried forward and looked into the room to my left. It was a chemistry lab with a sweeping view of the snowy terrain outside, complete with large black islands in the middle of the room, independent sinks with an eyewash and a shower in the corner, silver fixtures with gas taps to run experiments with fire—
Hrmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Hehehehehe. ~ Robert J Crane,#NFDB
604:The impulse to form group identities and favor in-group members has a neurological basis. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists have scanned people’s brains while conducting experiments similar to the one just described. Their findings, as one writer puts it, suggest that: “group identification is both innate and almost immediate. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
605:It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life. Towards this end, experiments on living animals in classrooms should be stopped. To encourage cruelty in the name of science can only destroy the finer emotions of affection and sympathy, and breed an unfeeling callousness in the young towards suffering in all living creatures. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
606:But those who are incapable of
pitying animals are, as a matter of fact, incapable of pitying men.
A physician who would cut a living rabbit in pieces -- laying bare
the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling them out with
forceps -- would not hesitate to try experiments with men and women
for the gratification of his curiosity. ~ Robert G Ingersoll,#NFDB
607:This is how nature has worked for millions of years. Innovation doesn't happen centrally, according to plan, but at the edges, all the time, when some organism senses a change in the environment and experiments to find a response. Some attempts to fail catch on; others rapidly spread to all corners of the ecosystem. Reality is the ultimate reference. ~ Frederic Laloux, #NFDB
608:you’re looking for a quick and dirty definition of the term, try the unofficial motto of Silicon Valley: “Fail early, fail often, fail forward.”8 Bold ventures—especially the world-changing type we’re advocating here—require this kind of experimental approach. Yet as most experiments fail, real progress requires trying out tons of ideas, decreasing ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
609:celebrities’ societal role is to live pitiably empty and ignorant lives with zero privacy while being chain-whipped by the flying monkeys of Rupert Murdoch (or his epoch-specific equivalent) during embarrassing political scandals, mass mind-control experiments, the mass extermination of the underprivileged, or other leadership crises in government. This ~ Cintra Wilson, #NFDB
610:Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. You’re looking for a strong signal in the signal/noise noise ratio, something like five of the first 12 customers you call on saying “I need this right now, even if it’s still buggy.” Early tests aren’t necessarily precise, but should give you a “good enough” signal to proceed. ~ Steve Blank, #NFDB
611:Sure, the camp had a hospital, but did George ever wonder what happened to the doctors and nurses from Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the rest? The ones who performed ghastly experiments and brutally hastened the deaths of millions? They were repurposed, sent to DP camps to take care of those who survived, those they’d already tortured but not quite killed. ~ Michelle Gable, #NFDB
612:Although no explanation can be expected to be satisfactory, it remains a possibility among others that Mendel was deceived by some assistant who knew too well what was expected. This possibility is supported by independent evidence that the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations. ~ Ronald Fisher, #NFDB
613:Aside from being worked to death, there were more than sixty methods of murder catalogued in Mauthausen including beatings, shootings, hangings, medical experiments, injection with petrol, and various forms of torture. The final death toll in the camp complex is unknown, as many prisoners were killed in a mobile van or sent to a nearby castle to be gassed ~ Wendy Holden, #NFDB
614:Thus prepared, I was able to proceed to new experiments on my own account. This is not the place for a report of these experiments, and I will only note that at this time I attempted an original method for the teaching of reading and writing, a part of the education of the child which was most imperfectly treated in the works of both Itard and Séguin. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
615:The Bible's "it's better to give than receive" was not the raving of a lunatic. It goes back to a recurring theme that I've found in almost all my experiments: behaviour shapes your thoughts. My brain sees me giving a gift to Julie. My brain concludes I must really love her. I love her all the more. Which means I'm happier in my relationship, if a bit poorer. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
616:When two plants, constantly different in one or several traits, are crossed, the traits they have in common are transmitted unchanged to the hybrids and their progeny, as numerous experiments have proven; a pair of differing traits, on the other hand, are united in the hybrid to form a new trait, which usually is subject to changes in the hybrids' progeny. ~ Gregor Mendel, #NFDB
617:The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
618:But if sugar actually causes insulin resistance—as the biochemistry and the animal experiments suggest—then it also is the very likely trigger of excess fat accumulation and thus obesity. Remove the sugar, and the insulin resistance improves and weight is lost, not because the subjects ate less, which they may have, but because their insulin resistance resolved. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
619:It is one of the sad facts of biomedical science that the road to scientific progress is littered with the bodies of both humans and animals. The modern era of human experimentation began with the Nazis. Doctors and scientists performed horrific experiments on people held in concentration camps, and all of this was justified in the name of scientific progress. ~ Gregory Berns, #NFDB
620:The laughter in response to my question unmasked the double standard our deconstructionists espouse. And that is precisely the double standard of atheism! It is possible to dress up and romanticize our bizarre experiments in social restructuring while disavowing truth or absolutes. But one dares not play such deadly games with the foundations of good thinking. ~ Ravi Zacharias, #NFDB
621:All this is very good advice, but we should not get carried away. High-quality paper, bright colors, and rhyming or simple language will not be much help if your message is obviously nonsensical, or if it contradicts facts that your audience knows to be true. The psychologists who do these experiments do not believe that people are stupid or infinitely gullible. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
622:Experiments in the visual arts (the invention of new ways of seeing things), are made because, due to the way the apparatus that makes up the mind is made, old processes and patterns have continually to be broken up in order to make it possible to perceive the new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness. The great enemy of intelligence is complacency. ~ John Dos Passos, #NFDB
623:On the contrary, to know that you are an individual not put here for some mysterious reason by some supernatural means, and that you are not protected by unknown powers or beings; to know that you are a product of millions of experiments in the evolutionary process and not the result of a seed thrown on this planet by extraterrestrials—that, to me, is very exciting. ~ James Randi, #NFDB
624:Why aren't crazy people content to take over, like, one town? It always has to be the whole word. They can't just control maybe twenty people. The have to control everyone. The can't just be stinking rich. The can't just do genetic experiments on a couple unlucky few. They have to put something in the water. In the air. To get everyone. I was tired of all of it. ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
625:can connect dots, you need to have dots to connect. The more material you’re exposed to in the world, the more grist you’ll have for your imagination mill. Tesla fully immersed himself in the world of electricity. He read hundreds of books. He conducted thousands of experiments and took copious notes. The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more like ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
626:[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ~ Jonah Lehrer, #NFDB
627:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
628:Certainly this is what many people feel during empty moments or deliberate experiments at meditation: a churning unease that says "I should be doing something". This cultural compulsion is so strong that even spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer are easily converted into just another thing to do, moments mortgaged to the campaign of improving life. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
629:You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men. ~ Esi Edugyan, #NFDB
630:B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
631:many such episodes it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Christian experiments with church-state blending, whether in Geneva under Calvin or in Spain and Latin America under the Inquisition, may have worked for a time but inevitably provoked a backlash against the church, such as that seen in secular Europe today.* ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
632:In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
633:I was obsessed with the scientific instruments people were building and all the weird experiments they were doing. I did actually wind up working in some of that, but there were whole sections I'd written about these instruments that ultimately had to be abandoned when I realized that the book really was about Margaret Cavendish. I couldn't justify using all of them. ~ Danielle Dutton, #NFDB
634:What's so wonderful about experiments is that often they don't work. They do blow up in the oven; the Bride of Frankenstein does crawl out and strangle you with a black leotard while you shout your last prayers. It's only once you've tasted your own shocking failures, harebrained ideas, and sudden departures that you will realize something quite wonderful. ~ Susie Bright, #NFDB
635:In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running around inside wheels and conduction frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
636:All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
637:B.F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticising, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment. Hans ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
638:We should stop using the word “requirements” in product development, at least in the context of nontrivial features. What we have, rather, are hypotheses. We believe that a particular business model, or product, or feature, will prove valuable to customers. But we must test our assumptions. We can take a scientific approach to testing these assumptions by running experiments. ~ Jez Humble, #NFDB
639:Not until the twentieth century did the idea of randomized trial experiments, careful measurement, and statistical power take hold. “Is the application of the numerical method to the subject-matter of medicine a trivial and time-wasting ingenuity as some hold, or is it an important stage in the development of our art, as others proclaim it,” the Lancet asked in 1921. The ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
640:The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns …it is safe to predict that… such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, facism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern methods ~ Ralph Linton, #NFDB
641:Unlike its competitors who sell preassembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there’s a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product—by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, Ariely believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
642:You and Jace – you’re not quite normal, are you? I mean, not normal Shadowhunters. There’s something special about you both. Like the Seelie Queen said. You were experiments.” He smiled at her startled look. “I’m not stupid. I can put these things together. You with your rune powers, and Jace, well…no one could be that annoying without some kind of supernatural assistance. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
643:A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
644:Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
645:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
646:It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
647:The terribly tragic outcome of Halsted’s experiments with cocaine was his own addiction. The doctor began injecting cocaine directly into his veins for its stimulative effects, quickly becoming an addict. Eventually, he was sent to Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where the recognized treatment for drug addiction was injecting the patient with large doses of morphine. ~ Lydia Kang, #NFDB
648:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
649:Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
650:American spy agencies seemed rattled by the experiments too. I was shocked when the next Worldwide Threat Assessment — the annual report presented by the U.S. intelligence community to the Senate Armed Services Committee — described genome editing as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
651:The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work. ~ Charles de Lint, #NFDB
652:THE YEAR 1977 marked the first significant victory in the history of the anti-vivisection movement, which had existed for over a century without stopping a single experiment. The campaign, run by activist Henry Spira, succeeded in ending experiments on mutilated cats at the American Museum of Natural History and was such a triumph that it mobilized the modern animal rights movement. ~ Melanie Joy, #NFDB
653:Life displays mad hospitality. The Korean biologist Kwang Jeon of the University of Tennessee received in the 1970s a batch of amoebas infected with a deadly bacterial strain. Most died. In a set of careful experiments after culturing the survivor amoebas for several generations, he found that the survivors, with fewer bacteria per cell, could no longer live without their infection. ~ Dorion Sagan, #NFDB
654:My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
655:Depression is a kind of constricted consciousness,” Bill Richards, who also led the experiments at Johns Hopkins, told me. “You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they’re capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can’t see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know? ~ Johann Hari, #NFDB
656:But more than anything, they worried that since everyone was using different media ingredients, recipes, cells, and techniques, and few knew their peers’ methods, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one another’s experiments. And replication is an essential part of science: a discovery isn’t considered valid if others can’t repeat the work and get the same result. ~ Rebecca Skloot, #NFDB
657:It turned out I was pretty good in science. But again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn't afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, I think that class was called Religion. Religion class was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
658:For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It's about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words - 'I might be wrong.' ~ David Brin, #NFDB
659:People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures! ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
660:The head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., promised all 60,000 employees loans to build fallout shelters—and arranged to sell any employees construction materials at cost. In the preceding years, the government had conducted several large-scale shelter experiments, including one with California inmates who received a day off their sentences for each day they lived in an underground shelter; ~ Garrett M Graff, #NFDB
661:They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It's built to accommodate the largest frames, there's that. And they're naked. But it's something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
662:Although I speak from my own experience, I feel that no one has the right to impose his or her beliefs on another person. I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable for you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it. His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
663:Every culture has a myth of the world before creation, and of the creation of the world [.]
These myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
664:witch. A being born a little different, he preferred to phrase it. He remembered reading something about the Rhine experiments, at Duke University. Some people, those sober scientists had proved, perceived the world with something beyond the ordinary physical senses. Some people, they had demonstrated, displayed a direct control over probability, without the use of any physical agency. ~ Jack Williamson, #NFDB
665:A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work." ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
666:During the 1980s, a remote viewing project called Stargate was done at Fort Meade. It used binaural beat tones, transmitted through earphones, that altered brain waves. A hemi-sync that device played two different frequencies into each ear was found to produce altered states of consciousness. Perhaps this technology was derived from these experiments done in the 1960s on MKULTRA subjects. ~ Alison Miller, #NFDB
667:Isolated facts and experiments have in themselves no value, however great their number may be. They only become valuable in a theoretical or practical point of view when they make us acquainted with the law of a series of uniformly recurring phenomena, or, it may be, only give a negative result showing an incompleteness in our knowledge of such a law, till then held to be perfect. ~ Hermann von Helmholtz, #NFDB
668:It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity. That means that you look for something, you have a certain plan, and then you find something else, different, that may nevertheless be useful. ~ Albert Hofmann, #NFDB
669:But when we face the great questions about gravitation Does it require time? Is it polar to the 'outside of the universe' or to anything? Has it any reference to electricity? or does it stand on the very foundation of matter-mass or inertia? then we feel the need of tests, whether they be comets or nebulae or laboratory experiments or bold questions as to the truth of received opinions. ~ James Clerk Maxwell, #NFDB
670:One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
671:Science does not enter a chaotic society to put order into it anymore, to simplify its composition, and to put an end to controversies. It does enter it, but to add new uncertain ingredients... to all the other ingredients that make up the collective experiments. When scientists add their findings to the mix, they do not put an end to politics; they add new ingredients to the collective process. ~ Bruno Latour, #NFDB
672:The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
673:You make experiments and I make theories. Do you know the difference? A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.
{Remark to scientist Herman Francis Mark} ~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
674:Hockey players can also brace pretty hard against the ice. A player skating at full speed can stop in the space of a few meters, which means the force they’re exerting on the ice is pretty substantial. (It also suggests that if you started to slowly rotate a hockey rink, it could tilt up to 50 degrees before the players would all slide to one end. Clearly, experiments are needed to confirm this.) ~ Randall Munroe, #NFDB
675:I prefer not to starve, to live by the practice of medicine, which combines the best features of both science and philosophy with that imponderable and enlightening element, disease, unknown in its normality to either. But, like Pasteur, when he was young, or anyone else who has something to do, I wish I had more money for my literary experiments.”
William Carlos Williams, c. 1931 ~ William Carlos Williams,#NFDB
676:Scientific evidence for God's existence is being claimed today by theists, many of whom carry respectable scientific or philosophical credentials. He who is neither a she nor an it supposedly answers prayers and otherwise dramatically affects the outcome of events. If these consequences are as significant as believers say, then the effects should be detectable in properly controlled experiments. ~ Victor J Stenger, #NFDB
677:Luckily, literature—and by “literature” I mean comic books—provides us a way to discuss issues like these without having to experience them. We don’t have to trick people into standing in front of a runaway trolley, and we don’t have to have a real-life Batman and Joker. That’s what thought experiments are for—they let us play through an imaginary scenario and imagine what we should or shouldn’t do. ~ William Irwin, #NFDB
678:We’ve come a long way since Herschel’s experiments with rays that were “unfit for vision,” empowering us to explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems to be. Herschel would be proud. We achieved true cosmic vision only after seeing the unseeable: a dazzlingly rich collection of objects and phenomena across space and across time that we may now dream of in our philosophy. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
679:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
680:The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place. ~ Norman Mailer, #NFDB
681:...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
682:After 'cat', Lilah next learned 'flower'. Flowers (scrunch up nose as if sniffing) were everywhere, first only outside on plants, but soon she generalized to flowers on her clothes or her shoes, or in pictures in books and magazines. I wanted to hook up wires and do experiments and comparisons and studies to understand it all.
'You want to do what?' Diane would say.
But really, who wouldn't? ~ Mike Brown,#NFDB
683:After more than a thousand of these buzz-report-introspect-text moments, Graham looked over the data and found that couples who routinely performed difficult tasks together as partners were also more likely to like each other. Over the course of his experiments, he found that partners tended to feel closer, more attracted to, and more in love with each other when their skills were routinely challenged. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
684:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
685:The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
686:Because taxes are so high - in part to pay for state-serving science experiments, a lot of parents feel they both need to work and so the mum can't breastfeed her kid. These fucking scientists, these fucking fascist corporations, these fucking warmongers, these military industrial clusterfucks, these arsehole academics are literally profiting from the ripping of mothers milk out of the mouths of babes. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
687:The very essence of the scientific process is to question long-held assumptions about the nature of the universe, to dream up experiments that test those questions, and, based on the resulting observations, to incrementally build knowledge that is independent of our beliefs, assumptions, and identities, and independently verifiable no matter who does the measuring—in other words, that is objective. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
688:The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
689:We tried some experiments in mind reading which were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others minds, twould stop civilization and everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or hundred thousand centuries when mankind have become perfect by evolution then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to the state. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
690:In the early days of space travel, one interesting problem emerged from experiments with weightlessness. Americans found that ... normal ink pen would not work without gravity feed. Scientists undertook extensive research, finally developed high-technology pen to work in conditions of no gravity. In Russia, scientist faced with the same problem found a different solution. Instead of pen, they used pencil. ~ Marina Lewycka, #NFDB
691:Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
692:Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
693:I've had only one idea in my life - a true idee fixe. To put it as bluntly as possible - the idea of having my own way. 'Control!' expresses it. The control of human behavior. In my early experimental days it was a frenzied, selfish desire to dominate. I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought! ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
694:There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
695:The United States government continues to pour billions of dollars into research on cancer, while it also subsidizes the tobacco industry. Much of the research money goes toward animal experiments, many of them only remotely connected with fighting cancer—experimenters have been known to relabel their work “cancer research” when they found they could get more money for it that way than under some other label. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
696:Fall forward. Here's what I mean: Reggie Jackson struck out 2,600 times in his career - the most in the history of baseball. But you don't hear about the strikeouts. People remember the home runs. Fall forward. Thomas Edison conducted 1,000 failed experiments. Did you know that? I didn't either - because number 1,001 was the light bulb. Fall forward. Every failed experiment is one step closer to success. ~ Denzel Washington, #NFDB
697:He made imaginative leaps and discerned great principles through thought experiments rather than by methodical inductions based on experimental data. The theories that resulted were at times astonishing, mysterious, and counterintuitive, yet they contained notions that could capture the popular imagination: the relativity of space and time, E=mc2, the bending of light beams, and the warping of space. Adding ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
698:His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort towards reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either "positive practice" (refraining from the habit) or "negative practice" (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
699:It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man—in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
700:The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
701:The way I think about it, if you want to invent, if you want to do any innovation, anything new, you’re going to have failures because you need to experiment. I think the amount of useful invention you do is directly proportional to the number of experiments you can run per week per month per year. So if you’re going to increase the number of experiments, you’re also going to increase the number of failures. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
702:John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet’s experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
703:My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.
Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps ~ Susan Griffin,#NFDB
704:A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you're told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
705:Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space. Outside, in the streets, the Communist state was busy performing such experiments for real. In response, Krzhizhanovsky's prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.... It is a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear. ~ Adam Thirlwell, #NFDB
706:though. Before you can connect dots, you need to have dots to connect. The more material you’re exposed to in the world, the more grist you’ll have for your imagination mill. Tesla fully immersed himself in the world of electricity. He read hundreds of books. He conducted thousands of experiments and took copious notes. The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more likely you are to be able to create ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
707:In reality, all that is needed are a syringe and a few cubic centimeters of semen. Should current experiments with fertilizing eggs with DNA taken from other eggs be extended from mice to humans, soon we will not even need that. The fact that the necessary techniques were invented by men merely adds offense to injury. It is as if each time men try to help women along, men only make themselves more superfluous. ~ Martin van Creveld, #NFDB
708:Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. . . . There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base claims of knowledge, it can truly be said that . . . the assertion of Darwinian molecular evolution is merely bluster. ~ Michael Behe, #NFDB
709:Such pretensions to nicety in experiments of this nature, are truly laughable! They will be telling us some day of the WEIGHT of the MOON, even to drams, scruples and grains-nay, to the very fraction of a grain!-I wish there were infallible experiments to ascertain the quantum of brains each man possesses, and every man's integrity and candour:-This is a desideratum in science which is most of all wanted. ~ Robert Sutton Harrington, #NFDB
710:The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
711:If you look across a host of measures at adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty. ~ Steve Sailer, #NFDB
712:The concept of “confirmation bias”—the tendency of people to favor information, true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs—was introduced in the 1960s by Peter Wason, a British psychologist. Wason did a famous series of experiments that explored how people give lesser weight to data that contradicts what they think is true. (As if we needed more proof that what’s hidden can make us draw the wrong conclusions.) ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
713:Many experiments have shown that categories appear to be coded in the mind neither by means of lists of each individual member of the category, nor by means of a list of formal criteria necessary and sufficient for category membership, but, rather, in terms of a prototype of a typical category member. The most cognitively economical code for a category is, in fact, a concrete image of an average category member.
~ Rosch, 1977, p. 30,#NFDB
714:These experiments demonstrate the conceptual synesthesia connecting our ideas of the concrete experience of space and the abstract experience of time. Our concept of physical motion through space is scaffolded onto our concept of chronological motion through time. Experiencing one-indeed, merely thinking about one-influences our experience of and thoughts about the other, just as the theory of embodied cognition suggests. ~ James Geary, #NFDB
715:Many psychologists ... thought by turning their attention to their own consciousness to be able to explain what happened when we were thnking. Or they sought to attain the same end by asking another person a question, by means of which certain processes of thought would be excited, and then by questioning the person about the introspection he had made. It is obvious ... that nothing can be discovered in such experiments. ~ Wilhelm Wundt, #NFDB
716:The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers. ~ John Dos Passos, #NFDB
717:We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research--and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's--shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line. ~ Philip Zimbardo, #NFDB
718:Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value. ~ Kenny Smith, #NFDB
719:Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
720:That which the sciences can add to the privileges of the human race has never been more marked than at the present moment. ... The air seems to become as accessible to him as the waters.... The name of Montgolfier, the names of those hardy navigators of the new element, will live through time; but who among us, on seeing these superb experiments, has not felt his soul elevated, his ideas expanded, his mind enlarged? ~ Jean Sylvain Bailly, #NFDB
721:Wylan, tell me you're packing more than pens, ink, and weevil makings."
"I've got two flash bombs and something new I rigged up with a little more, um, wallop."
"Bombs?" Jesper's father asked, blinking as if to wake himself from a bad dream.
Jesper shrugged helplessly. "Think of them as science experiments?"
"What kind of numbers are we up against?" asked Wylan.
"Look at you, asking all the right questions. ~ Leigh Bardugo,#NFDB
722:But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography—much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
723:It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; and that, whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of by the reason. But this was a great mistake; experience shows very often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see from experiment that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of education. ~ Immanuel Kant, in his university lectures "On Pedagogy", #NFDB
724:When you believe you have found an important scientific fact, and are feverishly curious to publish it, constrain yourself for days, weeks, years sometimes, fight yourself, try and ruin your own experiments, and only proclaim your discovery after having exhausted all contrary hypotheses. But when, after so many efforts you have at last arrived at a certainty, your joy is one of the greatest which can be felt by a human soul. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
725:The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen. ~ Fritz Haber, #NFDB
726:The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican? It is evident that no other form would be reconcileable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the revolution; or with that honourable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
727:There’s a catch to “combinatorial creativity,” though. Before you can connect dots, you need to have dots to connect. The more material you’re exposed to in the world, the more grist you’ll have for your imagination mill. Tesla fully immersed himself in the world of electricity. He read hundreds of books. He conducted thousands of experiments and took copious notes. The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more lik ~ Sean Patrick, #NFDB
728:When I reached the age of seventeen, I had one great companion. That companion was nothing but great books. Throughout my life, books enriched me. I would suggest and recommend all of you to read the following books: • Light from Many Lamps by Lillian Eichler • Empires of the Mind by Denis Waitley • Thirukkural by Thiruvalluvar • Everyday Greatness by Steven R. Covey • The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi ~ A P J Abdul Kalam, #NFDB
729:Damasio has produced an influential theory about emotion-laden decision making, rooted in the philosophies of Hume and William James; this will soon be discussed.61 Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. ~ Robert M Sapolsky, #NFDB
730:When one studies strongly radioactive substances special precautions must be taken if one wishes to be able to take delicate measurements. The various objects used in a chemical laboratory and those used in a chemical laboratory, and those which serve for experiments in physics, become radioactive in a short time and act upon photographic plates through black paper. Dust, the air of the room, and one's clothes all become radioactive. ~ Marie Curie, #NFDB
731:Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction. ~ Steven Kotler, #NFDB
732:The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
733:This will give you a somewhat wrong impression of science. It suggests that we keep on guessing possibilities and comparing them with experiment, and this is to put experiment into a rather weak position. In fact experimenters have a certain individual character. They like to do experiments even if nobody has guessed yet, and they very often do their experiments in a region in which people know the theorist has not made any guesses. For ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
734:I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
735:Those who favor a “grand plan” over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn’t work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures. ~ Charles G Koch, #NFDB
736:Look,” cried Buster. “Arthur just went into the witch’s house!”
“She’ll probably put Arthur and D.W. into her oven, just like Hansel and Gretel,” said Sue Ellen.
“Maybe she’s using them for weird scientific experiments,” said the Brain.
“I bet she locked them in the cellar to starve,” said Buster.
“Maybe we should follow him,” said Francine.
“Maybe we should call the police,” said Muffy.
Everyone was too scared to move. ~ Marc Brown,#NFDB
737:There is no such thing as a world without combat, no civilization which doesn't start off by laying down the rules for relations between people. But the rules are there for the weak. The strong man experiments to find out how far they can be stretched, he creates his own rules. You would like everything to be based on the goodwill and charity of one's fellow men. But if there is no private profit to be made, there will be no progress. ~ Henning Mankell, #NFDB
738:I've always been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, who articulated his Dream of an America where people are judged not by skin color but "by the content of their character." In the scientific world, people are judged by the content of their ideas. Advances are made with new insights, but the final arbitrator of any point of view are experiments that seek the unbiased truth, not information cherry picked to support a particular point of view. ~ Steven Chu, #NFDB
739:Pay attention to both experiments, though, and the conclusion is radically different. Removing the ovaries from a rat literally makes its fat tissue absorb calories from the circulation and expand with fat. If the animal can eat more to compensate for the calories that are now being stashed away as fat (the first experiment), it will. If it can’t (the second), then it expends less energy, because it now has fewer calories available to expend. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
740:We are talking about mutated women, the result of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person. ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
741:Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient's brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: I wanted to go get a Coke. ~ Michael Gazzaniga, #NFDB
742:The experiments progress slowly," Mendel wrote. "At first a certain amount of patience was needed, but I soon found that matters went better when I was conducting several experiments simultaneously." With multiple crosses in parallel, the production of data accelerated. Gradually, he began to discern patterns in the data-unanticipated constancies, conserved ratios, numerical rhythms. He had tapped, at last, into heredity's inner logic. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee, #NFDB
743:5x5x5 Rapid Innovation Method, a very concrete way of putting Shiv’s notion into practice. “The idea is fairly simple and straightforward,” he says. “A company looking to drive breakthroughs in a particular area sets up five teams of five people and gives each team five days to come up with a portfolio of five ‘business experiments’ that should take no longer than five weeks to run and cost no more than five thousand dollars each to conduct. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
744:parts of the world, governments are no longer in charge. Once a new technology is out in the world anyone can use it. At that point it becomes a weapon in human conflicts and an embodiment of human dreams. We are not masters of the tools we have invented. They affect our lives in ways we cannot control – and often cannot understand. The world today is a vast, unsupervised laboratory, in which a multitude of experiments are simultaneously under way. ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
745:What we contemplate here is more than ecological restoration; it is the restoration of relationship between plants and people. Scientists have made a dent in understanding how to put ecosystems back together, but our experiments focus on soil pH and hydrology—matter, to the exclusion of spirit. We might look to the Thanksgiving Address for guidance on weaving the two. We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
746:It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape. The future experience of Christendom, and chiefly of the American states, must settle this problem, as yet new in the history of the world, abundant, as it has been, in experiments in the theory of government. ~ Joseph Story, #NFDB
747:It’s a chicken instinct. He’s here for a reason. It’s time to step in, face Deus Brânquia, force Hoffstetler’s experiments to completion. No, not Deus Brânquia. The asset, that’s all it is. Why has he started thinking of it as Deus Brânquia again? He’s got to stop that. The good old Alabama Howdy-do, the heavy-duty Farm-Master 30 cattle prod, is long and straight in his palm, a handrail guiding him from an opiate haze back into the real world. ~ Guillermo del Toro, #NFDB
748:After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldnt be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
749:Assisted by Samuel Collins, the tsar embarked on a series of scientific and alchemical experiments, to conduct which he imported a range of new devices – phials, metals, lenses and measuring instruments – from the German lands. These were exotica in their own right, and since they had no native Russian names, many were called by their original German ones, beginning a long tradition of importing German scientific terms into the Russian language. ~ Catherine Merridale, #NFDB
750:Although behaviorist experiments dominate the canine research literature, there have been a few experiments demonstrating social learning between dogs. An old experiment found that puppies that observe littermates pulling a cart by a string can copy that behavior. Another study showed that puppies that watched their mother, a police dog, search for narcotics did better when learning this task compared to puppies that did not observe their mother first. ~ Gregory Berns, #NFDB
751:Compare two startups. The first company sets out with a clear baseline metric, a hypothesis about what will improve that metric, and a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis. The second team sits around debating what would improve the product, implements several of those changes at once, and celebrates if there is any positive increase in any of the numbers. Which startup is more likely to be doing effective work and achieving lasting results? ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
752:My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
753:Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California, ~ Paul A Offit, #NFDB
754:were suddenly up for discussion. In all sorts of ways, the American society of the 1950s was in a state of fermentation: black citizens wanted equal rights; students and artists were experimenting in a bid to find alternatives to the consumer society; conservatives were carrying out experiments of their own in an attempt to hold on to their religion and traditions; and women had begun to realise they were suffocating in the pretty-pretty life of the suburbs. ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
755:When a television news program presents a split screen with a scientist on one half representing the knowledge accumulated from tens of thousands of experiments performed by thousands of scientists, and then presents a charismatic advocate with an opposing opinion on the other half, as if the knowledge and opinion carry equal weight, this creates false balance. It skews democracy toward extremes by giving equal weight to both opinion and knowledge. ~ Shawn Lawrence Otto, #NFDB
756:you’re looking for a quick and dirty definition of the term, try the unofficial motto of Silicon Valley: “Fail early, fail often, fail forward.”8 Bold ventures—especially the world-changing type we’re advocating here—require this kind of experimental approach. Yet as most experiments fail, real progress requires trying out tons of ideas, decreasing the lag time between trials, and increasing the knowledge gained from results. This is rapid iteration. ~ Peter H Diamandis, #NFDB
757:How do they find out with the experiments?''...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.''But isn't that unkind to the animal?''Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration. ~ Richard Adams, #NFDB
758:We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
759:What I tend to do is to wake about five in the morning-this happens quite often-think about the invention, and then image it in my mind in 3D, as a kind of construct. Then I do experiments with the image...sort of rotate it, and say, 'Well what'll happen if one does this?' And by the time I get up for breakfast I can usually go to the bench and make a string and sealing wax model that works straight off, because I've done most of the experiments already. ~ James Lovelock, #NFDB
760:In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them. ~ Jean Piaget, #NFDB
761:The experiments made on the mutual electrical relations of bodies have taught us that they can be divided into two classes: electropositive and electronegative. The simple bodies which belong to the first class, as well as their oxides, always take up positive electricity when they meet simple bodies or oxides belonging to the second class; and the oxides of the first class always behave with the oxides of the other like salifiable bases with acids. ~ Jons Jacob Berzelius, #NFDB
762:We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow. When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data. ~ Mark Manson, #NFDB
763:Despite the conviction that our era is revolutionary, we must also recognize that under the appearance of movement and development we are in fact living in complete stasis. There is undoubtedly much chaos and violence, there is technical progress, there are social and political experiments. But in reality our world is static, because its structures remain absolutely fixed and its development unfolds along a completely expected rather than revolutionary path. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
764:When I was 14-15 years old I was able to earn a little money from time to time but I'm not complaining since, very soon I could provide a normal living. I was discovered also by other musicians and they asked me to work with them. Even in my early age several well-known artists asked for my services both on the stage and in the studio. This experience proved to be very useful, musicians showed me various musical situations and various music experiments. ~ Richard Clayderman, #NFDB
765:That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
766:Group identification can powerfully reinforce these conformity effects. In experiments similar to Asch’s landmark study, subjects have been found to conform much more when presented with judgments said to come from members of an in-group, and much less when judgments are said to come from out-group members. And it’s not just that people tend to think what their fellow tribe members think. They will do what their fellow tribe members do—even to the point of savagery. ~ Amy Chua, #NFDB
767:People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
768:As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. ~ Isaac Newton, #NFDB
769:Though the parallel is not complete, it is safe to say that science will never touch them unaided by its practical applications. Its wonders may be catalogued for purposes of education, they may be illustrated by arresting experiments, by numbers and magnitudes which startle or fatigue the imagination but they will form no familiar portion of the intellectual furniture of ordinary men unless they be connected, however remotely, with the conduct of ordinary life. ~ Arthur Balfour, #NFDB
770:The army had little attraction for him, but it afforded him the possibility of taking a great step toward his goal. After all, if the military saw fit to replace the body that he was planning to liberate from the earth's gravity with an explosive charge, this was a mere detail, at any rate so far as the preliminary experiments were concerned. Creative science should be able to take advantage, without remorse, of the substantial sums allocated by destructive folly. ~ Pierre Boulle, #NFDB
771:For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits. ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
772:My experiments with single traits all lead to the same result: that from the seeds of hybrids, plants are obtained half of which in turn carry the hybrid trait (Aa), the other half, however, receive the parental traits A and a in equal amounts. Thus, on the average, among four plants two have the hybrid trait Aa, one the parental trait A, and the other the parental trait a. Therefore, 2Aa+ A +a or A + 2Aa + a is the empirical simple series for two differing traits. ~ Gregor Mendel, #NFDB
773:One caliph in the eighth century went so far as to conduct a series of experiments to freeze a range of different furs to see which offered the best protection in extreme conditions. He filled a series of containers with water and left them overnight in ice-cold weather, according to one Arabic writer. ‘In the morning, he had the [flasks] brought to him. All were frozen except the one with black fox fur. He thus learned which fur was the warmest and the driest.’22 ~ Peter Frankopan, #NFDB
774:Experiments in geology are far more difficult than in physics and chemistry because of the greater size of the objects, commonly outside our laboratories, up to the earth itself, and also because of the fact that the geologic time scale exceeds the human time scale by a million and more times. This difference in time allows only direct observations of the actual geologic processes, the mind having to imagine what could possibly have happened in the past. ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, #NFDB
775:The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. ~ Paul Dirac, #NFDB
776:But I also buy the opposite argument that regulating street signs does not seem to reduce risks; drivers become more placid. Experiments show that alertness is weakened when one relinquishes control to the system (again, lack of overcompensation). Motorists need the stressors and tension coming from the feeling of danger to feed their attention and risk controls, rather than some external regulator—fewer pedestrians die jaywalking than using regulated crossings. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
777:Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience. What the State can usefully do, is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
778:The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
779:What? This cleric wants to give Jennie religious instruction? How peverse!” I explained that he was really a harmless old man who Jennie was quite fond of. Dr. Prentiss found the whole idea diabolical. It would ruin her experiment! Well, I thought about that for all of two seconds and decided that what was right for Jennie was not necessarily right for Dr. Prentiss and her experiments. There are times, you know, when a mother simply has to do what she thinks is right. ~ Douglas Preston, #NFDB
780:Then there is the machine that belonged to Louis Blériot himself. I found an old newspaper article by the Dutch correspondent Alexander Cohen, dealing with a series of aviation experiments at the parade grounds in Issy-les-Moulineaux late on a dusky Friday afternoon, 22 November, 1907. Cohen watched M. Farman leave the ground in a ‘giant insect’ of canvas, bamboo and aluminium, and fly for several hundred metres. Which was more than could be said of Blériot’s ‘flying beast’. ~ Geert Mak, #NFDB
781:Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.17 Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
782:It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic. ~ Susan Blackmore, #NFDB
783:Egypt is the mind of the Earth. The heart actually is in Mexico, and some say in Columbia. Tahiti/Morea sits in the feminine South Pole of the Christ grid and that is why they did the nuclear experiments there. The area inside the tube torus that moves up through there enters into the very center of the beam of the Earth. That's why I called it the womb - it goes right into the private personal aspect of the Earth. And they exploded the bombs, right down this center. ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
784:Laplace considers astronomy a science of observation, because we can only observe the movements of the planets; we cannot reach them, indeed, to alter their course and to experiment with them. "On earth," said Laplace, "we make phenomena vary by experiments; in the sky, we carefully define all the phenomena presented to us by celestial motion." Certain physicians call medicine a science of observations, because they wrongly think that experimentation is inapplicable to it. ~ Claude Bernard, #NFDB
785:The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
786:Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically. ~ Stewart Brand, #NFDB
787:In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation. ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
788:I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan. I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
789:So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species? ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
790:What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting. ~ Brit Marling, #NFDB
791:How do they find out with the experiments?'
'...one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one that works.'
'But isn't that unkind to the animal?'
'Well, I suppose it is...but I mean, there isn't a dad anywhere who would hesitate, is there, if he knew it was going to make [his child] better? It's changed the whole world during the last hundred years, and that's no exaggeration. ~ Richard Adams,#NFDB
792:We need a means for measuring the sizes of different infinite collections of universes. It is this information that we need in order to work out how likely it is that we reside in one type of universe rather than another. Until we find a fundamental dictum for how we should compare infinite collections of universes, we won't be able to foretell mathematically what typical multiverse dwellers-us-should see in experiments and observations. Solving the measure problem is imperative. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
793:It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. That is impossible. Not only would it make every experiment fruitless, but even if we wished to do so, it could not be done. Every man has his own conception of the world, and this he cannot so easily lay aside. We must, example, use language, and our language is necessarily steeped in preconceived ideas. Only they are unconscious preconceived ideas, which are a thousand times the most dangerous of all. ~ Henri Poincare, #NFDB
794:When you look at any experimental work not directly related to economics, but trying to test rational behavior in other ways, experiments have conspicuously failed to show rational behavior. Macro evidence certainly suggests deviations from rationality, but I don't want to say the rationality hypothesis is completely wrong. If you have any introspective idea or experimental idea about people's behavior, it seems to be incompatible with the really full scale rational expectations. ~ Kenneth Arrow, #NFDB
795:Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones. ~ Imre Lakatos, #NFDB
796:The possibility that all recognition of images is connected with projections and visual anticipations is strengthened by the results of recent experiments. It appears that if you show an observer the image of a pointing hand or arrow, he willt end to shift its location somehow in the direction of the movement. Without this tendency of ours to see potential movement int he form of anticipation, artists would never have been able to create the suggestion of speed in stationary images. ~ E H Gombrich, #NFDB
797:As an innovation... the establishment of Free Schools was the boldest ever promulgated, since the commencement of the Christian era... Time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. It was one of those grand mental and moral experiments... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
798:Depending on which frothy-mouthed Internet pulpit-beater I chose to believe, Holzter Point might conceal anything from alien artifacts to Bigfoot’s sperm samples, plus a few pickled flipper babies from Three Mile Island and Jimmy Hoffa’s stomach contents. I’d like to make fun of those guys, but I had information from a blind vampire that the storage facility held details of medical experiments conducted by the military on the unwilling undead. So far be it from me to call anyone nuts. ~ Cherie Priest, #NFDB
799:Some of my scientific friends and colleagues confess that they cannot for the life of them see why I don't abandon ship and join them. The short answer is that I have managed, by straddling the boundaries, to have the best of both worlds. By working with scientists I get a rich diet of fascinating and problematic facts to think about, but by staying a philosopher without a lab or a research grant, I get to think about all the theories and experiments and never have to do the dishes ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
800:The laws of thermodynamics, as empirically determined, express the approximate and probable behavior of systems of a great number of particles, or, more precisely, they express the laws of mechanics for such systems as they appear to beings who have not the fineness of perception to enable them to appreciate quantities of the order of magnitude of those which relate to single particles, and who cannot repeat their experiments often enough to obtain any but the most probable results. ~ J Willard Gibbs, #NFDB
801:While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
802:After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
803:I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. ~ John B S Haldane, #NFDB
804:This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
805:Everybody goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, disorderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen, no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
806:I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
807:Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
808:...the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric. It values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week...If I as a human being were told that the standards by which animals are being measured in these experiments are human standards, I would be insulted. ~ J M Coetzee, #NFDB
809:I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer: in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs. Our laboratory experiments were predesigned to work perfectly and elegantly every time, and the more of them that you did, the bigger the machines and the more exotic were the chemicals that they let you use. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
810:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
811:I see that you have hitherto been one of that herd who, in order to learn how matters such as this take place, and in order to acquire a knowledge of natural effects, do not exhaust themselves in waking and studying, and mortify themselves with experiments and observations, but retire into their studies and glance through an index and a table of contents to see whether Aristotle has said any thing about them; and, being assured of the true sense of his text, consider that nothing else can be known. ~ Galileo Galilei, #NFDB
812:Open offices, for example, might create more opportunities for collaboration,* but they do so at the cost of “massive distraction,” to quote the results of experiments conducted for a British TV special titled The Secret Life of Office Buildings. “If you are just getting into some work and a phone goes off in the background, it ruins what you are concentrating on,” said the neuroscientist who ran the experiments for the show. “Even though you are not aware at the time, the brain responds to distractions. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
813:In revamping our education systems, we can learn much from South Korea’s embrace of gifted and talented education. These programs seek to identify and realize the potential of the country’s top technical minds, an approach suited to creating the material prosperity that can then be broadly shared across society. Schools around the globe can also draw lessons from American experiments in social and emotional education, fostering skills that will prove invaluable to the human-centric workforce of the future. ~ Kai Fu Lee, #NFDB
814:The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages, and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are also impatient for their food to be served, and they seem impatient for little else. After undergoing years of punishing trials at the hands of determined clinicians, a few have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their placards at each other. (pg. 20) ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
815:Don't waste your life on experiments. There are proven paths. They are marked out in the Word of God. They are understandable. They are precious. They are hard. And they are joyful. Search the Scriptures for these paths. When you find them, step on them with humble faith and courage. Set your face like flint toward the cross and the empty tomb-- your cross and your empty tomb. Then, for the joy set before you, may a lifetime of sacrifices in the paths of love seem to you as a light and momentary affliction. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
816:I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the ordinary things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep - great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery. ~ Edward Mills Purcell, #NFDB
817:Yes, I'm a materialist. I'm willing to be shown wrong, but that has not happened — yet. And I admit that the reason I'm unable to accept the claims of psychic, occult, and/or supernatural wonders is because I'm locked into a world-view that demands evidence rather than blind faith, a view that insists upon the replication of all experiments — particularly those that appear to show violations of a rational world — and a view which requires open examination of the methods used to carry out those experiments. ~ James Randi, #NFDB
818:Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,-the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
819:Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified properties separately examined. The body of natural science, then, consists of facts; is analogy,—the relation of resemblance of facts by which its different parts are connected, arranged, and employed, either for popular use, or for new speculative improvements. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
820:There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
821:The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
822:The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
823:Who can think that this eviction of Germans was undertaken only as a temporary experiment? Those who adopted the decision on the eviction of the Germans from these territories, and who understood that Poles from other Polish districts would at once move into these territories, cannot suggest after a while to carry out reverse measures. The very idea of involving millions of people in such experiments is unbelievable, quite apart from the cruelty of it, both towards the Poles and the Germans themselves. ~ Vyacheslav Molotov, #NFDB
824:I have no reason to believe that the social scientists at Facebook are actively gaming the political system. Most of them are serious academics carrying out research on a platform that they could only have dreamed about two decades ago. But what they have demonstrated is Facebook’s enormous power to affect what we learn, how we feel, and whether we vote. Its platform is massive, powerful, and opaque. The algorithms are hidden from us, and we see only the results of the experiments researchers choose to publish. ~ Cathy O Neil, #NFDB
825:The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock. ~ Gordon Allport, #NFDB
826:And we daily in our experiments electrise bodies plus or minus, as we think proper. [These terms we may use till your Philosophers give us better.] To electrise plus or minus, no more needs to be known than this, that the parts of the Tube or Sphere, that are rubb'd, do, in the Instant of Friction, attract the Electrical Fire, and therefore take it from the Thin rubbing; the same parts immediately, as the Friction upon them ceases, are disposed to give the fire they have received, to any Body that has less. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
827:It turned out that between 1945 and 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium, specifically: 11 at Rochester, New York, 3 at the University of Chicago, 3 at UC San Francisco, and 1, Ebb Cade, at Oak Ridge. Several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee of Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate these and other experiments funded by the United States government. Their final report was published in 1996. ~ Denise Kiernan, #NFDB
828:Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman. . . . [Perhaps] you could resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found the Art of lying together?” Adams must have been mortified. He blushed but stammered cleverly, or so he remembered, that the first couple surely “flew together . . . like two Objects in electric Experiments.” “Well,” the lady responded, “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy Shock.”21 ~ John Ferling, #NFDB
829:He’s the father of modern empiricism, or the scientific method. Before he came along, people conducted all their arguments through a series of logical fallacies or simply shouting louder than the other guy, or, if they did use facts, they only selected ones that reinforced their prejudices and advanced their agenda.” “More than ever. But Bacon showed us a way to shed preconceived notions and conduct experiments in such a way that the results were verifiable and repeatable. It gave people a way to construct truths ~ Kevin Hearne, #NFDB
830:If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation.
Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system. ~ Marcus du Sautoy,#NFDB
831:They say much about the Einstein's theory now. According to Einstein the ether does not exist and many people agree with him. But it is a mistake in my opinion. Ether's opponents refer to the experiments of Maykelson - Morli [Michelson-Morley] who made attempts to detect the Earth's movement relative to the fixed-bed ether. These experiments failed, however it didn't mean the ether's non-existence. I always based as fact the existence of mechanical ether in my works and therefore I could achieve positive success. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
832:I wish that one would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved [by large studies]; the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion. ~ Alfred Binet, #NFDB
833:Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work-and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification. ~ Donald Cram, #NFDB
834:Experiments recently conducted by Merle Lawrence (Princeton) and Adelbert Ames (Dartmouth) in the latter’s psychology laboratory at Hanover, N.H., prove that what you see when you look at something depends not so much on what is there as on the assumption you make when you look. Since what we believe to be the “real” physical world is actually only an “assumptive” world, it is not surprising that these experiments prove that what appears to be solid reality is actually the result of “expectations” or “assumptions. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
835:It is known to all persons who are conversant in experimental philosophy, that there are many little attentions and precautions necessary to be observed in the conducting of experiments, which cannot well be described in words, but which it is needless to describe, since practice will necessarily suggest them; though, like all other arts in which the hands and fingers are made use of, it is only much practice that can enable a person to go through complex experiments, of this or any kind, with ease and readiness. ~ Joseph Priestley, #NFDB
836:Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.* That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
837:Two experiments demonstrated that subvocalization is of value in reading for certain types of meaning. Blocking subvocalization by requiring subjects to count or say “cola-colacola …” aloud impaired their reading comprehension but generally not their listening comprehension. The effect of blocking subvocalization was found to be specific to tests that required integration of concepts within or across sentences, as contrasted with tests that required only memory of individual word concepts. ~ Maria L. Slowiaczek, Charles Clifton Jr., #NFDB
838:When we say that humans have a “right” not to be used for these purposes, this means simply that the interest of humans in not being used as non-consenting subjects in experiments will be protected even if the consequences of using them would be very beneficial for the rest of us. The question, then, is why do we think that it is morally acceptable to use nonhumans in experiments but not to use humans?
Vivisection, Part Two: The Moral Justification of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach ~ Gary L Francione,#NFDB
839:Some months ago we discovered that certain light elements emit positrons under the action of alpha particles. Our latest experiments have shown a very striking fact: when an aluminium foil is irradiated on a polonium preparation [alpha ray emitter], the emission of positrons does not cease immediately when the active preparation is removed: the foil remains radioactive and the emission of radiation decays exponentially as for an ordinary radio-element. We observed the same phenomenon with boron and magnesium. ~ Frederic Joliot Curie, #NFDB
840:In this and so many other ways, it seems, the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only of this powerful molecule but also of the preparation and expectations of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards’s flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear it, the minds of the designers of the experiments. ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
841:It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
842:Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. ~ William James, #NFDB
843:Evolutionary theory, properly understood, does not conflict with the idea that God occasionally intervenes in nature - for example, by once or twice causing a beneficial mutation to occur. Biologists have not detected any such interventions despite the data and theory they have assembled about mutation. However, I think it is a mistake to expect biological experiments to be able to detect such one-off acts of divine intervention, especially if those acts occurred in the distant past. Science isn't in that line of work. ~ Elliott Sober, #NFDB
844:one does not need experiments to do science. While this claim may sound strange and counterintuitive at first, a moment's reflection will show that it is obviously true: astronomers do not conduct experiments, and yet we think of astronomy as solidly situated within the sciences, not the humanities or the pseudosciences. Why? Because astronomers can carry out the two fundamental activities that, jointly considered, truly characterize a science: systematic observations and the construction and testing of hypotheses. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
845:Regardless of perspective, conservative or not, the resulting confluence of mathematical results with experimental observations is extremely impressive. I am not a fan of hyperbole, but I view these developments as among the most exciting advances in decades. Mathematical manipulations that utilize strings moving through a particular ten-dimensional spacetime tell us something about quarks and gluons living in a four-dimensional spacetime-and the "something" the calculations tell us seems to be borne out by experiments. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
846:While Europe was mired in its dark years of medieval superstition, the work of combining theory and experiment was advanced primarily in the Islamic world. Muslim scientists often also worked as scientific instrument makers, which made them experts at measurements and applying theories. The Arab physicist Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazen, wrote a seminal text on optics in 1021 that combined observations and experiments to develop a theory of how human vision works, then devised further experiments to test the theory. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
847:Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
848:The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on each other. We discover Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggs as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service. ~ Audrey Niffenegger, #NFDB
849:However, repeating the experiments and expanding on them led the researchers to a different conclusion. While dopamine is involved in motivation or the pleasures of the hunt, that’s not the only way we can feel good. Dopamine is not necessary, it seems, for enjoying sweetness, comfort, satiation, and calmness—research suggests that these pleasures are more strongly linked to the brain’s natural opioids, or heroin-like chemicals, instead of to dopamine. And this has implications for the broader understanding of addiction. ~ Maia Szalavitz, #NFDB
850:In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
851:the twentieth century ran a series of experiments, imposing quite different institutions on two sets of Germans (in West and East), two sets of Koreans (in North and South) and two sets of Chinese (inside and outside the People’s Republic). The results were very striking and the lesson crystal clear. If you take the same people, with more or less the same culture, and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on another, almost immediately there will be a divergence in the way they behave. Many ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
852:Patience’s own books were a far more eclectic and battered collection. There was a book on horseshoeing and smithing, with notes in Patience’s hand about her own experiments. There were books on butterflies and birds and famous highwaymen and legends of sea monsters. There was an old vellum on the managing of pecksies and how to bind them so that they must do all your housework, and a set of little scrolls on distilling and flavoring spirits. There were three old tablets, much worn, on ways a woman might make herself fecund. But ~ Robin Hobb, #NFDB
853:Experiments in attachment. My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband. I meet him in the cafe; he looks terrible - his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot... He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listening to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar... He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die. ~ Don Paterson, #NFDB
854:At some point, Fatio had to tear those eyes away from Eliza and begin the same sort of dance cum duel with Waterhouse. Again, if Fatio had been a fellow of the Royal Society or a doctor at some university, Waterhouse would have had some idea what to make of him. As it was, Fatio had to conjure his credentials and bona fides out of thin are, as it were, by dropping names and scattering references to books he’d read, problems he’d solved, inflated reputations he had punctured, experiments he had performed, creatures he had seen. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
855:The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self. ~ Hermione Lee, #NFDB
856:There's a huge amount of pressure on every astronaut, because when you get right down to it, the experiments that are conducted on a space flight, or the satellites that are carried up, the work that's to be done, is important and expensive work, and you are up there for a week or two on a Space Shuttle flight. The country has invested a lot of money in you and your training, and the Space Shuttle and everything that's in it, and you have to do things correctly. You can't make a mistake during that week or two that you're in space. ~ Sally Ride, #NFDB
857:We know – it has been measured in many experiments – that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success depends on the ability to delay gratification, which is precisely what a consumerist culture undermines. At every stage, the emphasis is on the instant gratification of instinct. In the words of the pop group Queen, “I want it all and I want it now.” A whole culture is being infantilised. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
858:involved experiments with African Americans. These subjects were given experimental vaccines known to have unacceptably high lethality, were enrolled in experiments without their consent or knowledge, were subjected to surreptitious surgical and medical procedures while unconscious, injected with toxic substances, deliberately monitored rather than treated for deadly ailments, excluded from lifesaving treatments, or secretly farmed for sera or tissues that were used to perfect technologies such as infectious-disease tests. ~ Harriet A Washington, #NFDB
859:The overwhelming impression is of professionals transformed into psychopaths – morally blinded, perhaps, by their narrow specialisms (that, at least, was the historian Friedrich Meinecke’s theory). Whether collecting rail fares, conducting experiments, devising slogans, writing theses or designing ovens, it was thousands of people like Scholz, Prü fer, Fischer and Oberhäuser who turned Hitler’s deranged dream of genocide into reality. They, just as much as the sadistic SS-men described by Rudolf Reder, were the real perpetrators. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
860:All experiments that are related to the games when you have humans versus machines in the games - whether it's chess or "Go" or any other game - machines will prevail not because they can solve the game. Chess is mathematically unsolvable. But at the end of the day, the machine doesn't have to solve the game. The machine has to win the game. And to win the game, it just has to make fewer mistakes than humans. Which is not that difficult since humans are humans and vulnerable, and we don't have the same steady hand as the computer. ~ Garry Kasparov, #NFDB
861:One recent study of rats showed that when pregnant rats were fed a low-protein diet for just the first four days of pregnancy—before the embryo had even implanted in the uterus—their babies were prone to high blood pressure. Experiments with sheep showed similar maternal effects. Pregnant sheep that were underfed during the early days of pregnancy—again, even before the embryo implanted in the mother’s uterus—gave birth to off spring that rapidly developed thickened arteries because their slower metabolisms stored more food as fat. ~ Sharon Moalem, #NFDB
862:That whole summer in Colorado was a data-gathering bust, but it taught me the most important thing I know about science: that experiments are not about getting the world to do what you want it to do. While tending to my wounds that fall, I shaped a new and better goal out of the debris of the disaster. I would study plants in a new way—not from the outside, but from the inside. I would figure out why they did what they did and try to understand their logic, which must serve me better than simply defaulting to my own, I decided. Every ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
863:For chemistry is no science form'd à priori; 'tis no production of the human mind, framed by reasoning and deduction: it took its rise from a number of experiments casually made, without any expectation of what follow'd; and was only reduced into an art or system, by collecting and comparing the effects of such unpremeditated experiments, and observing the uniform tendency thereof. So far, then, as a number of experimenters agree to establish any undoubted truth; so far they may be consider'd as constituting the theory of chemistry. ~ Herman Boerhaave, #NFDB
864:I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
865:The President must be true to his word. He must keep his faith with the folks who elected him twice. In other words, he must replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a strict constructionist. The president has a God-given opportunity to change the balance on the Supreme Court. On issue after issue—abortion, sodomy, public display of the Ten Commandments—O'Connor has sided with the court's liberal bloc. Time and again, Justice O'Connor and her colleagues have used the Constitution as an excuse to force weird social experiments on the nation. ~ Rick Scarborough, #NFDB
866:The investigation of causal relations between economic phenomena presents many problems of peculiar difficulty, and offers many opportunities for fallacious conclusions. Since the statistician can seldom or never make experiments for himself, he has to accept the data of daily experience, and discuss as best he can the relations of a whole group of changes; he cannot, like the physicist, narrow down the issue to the effect of one variation at a time. The problems of statistics are in this sense far more complex than the problems of physics. ~ Udny Yule, #NFDB
867:The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
868:Typically, defenders of experiments on animals do not deny that animals suffer. They cannot deny the animals' suffering, because they need to stress the similarities between humans and other animals in order to claim that their experiments may have some relevance for human purposes. The experimenter who forces rats to choose between starvation and electric shock to see if they develop ulcers (which they do) does so because the rat has a nervous system very similar to a human being's, and presumably feels an electric shock in a similar way. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
869:While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate. ~ Naomi Oreskes, #NFDB
870:Recent evidence in the field of cardiology has shown that the nature of a patient’s emotional ties drastically affects whether or not this patient will get heart disease. Experiments have shown that a patient’s blood chemistry changes when that patient has a bitter thought. Doctors are now including, in their treatment of heart patients, training in becoming more loving and trusting. A person’s ability to love and connect with others lays the foundation for both psychological and physical health. This research illustrates that when we are in a ~ Henry Cloud, #NFDB
871:Bohm and Aharonov found that under the right circumstances an electron is able to "feel" the presence of a magnetic field that is in a region where there is zero probability of finding the electron. This phenomenon is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when the two men first published their discovery, many physicists did not believe such an effect was possible. Even today there is enough residual skepticism that, despite confirmation of the effect in numerous experiments, occasionally papers still appear arguing that it doesn't exist. ~ Michael Talbot, #NFDB
872:In the spiritual life it is not necessary to have a complete map of the path in order to begin traveling. On the contrary, having such complete knowledge may actually hinder rather than help the onward march. The deeper secrets of spiritual life are unraveled to those who take risks and who make bold experiments with it. They are not meant for the idler who seeks guarantees at every step. Those who speculate from the shore about the ocean shall know only its surface, but those who would know the depths of the ocean must be willing to plunge into it. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
873:The problem is that there may not be any way to really prove animal consciousness with data. Clever experiments can show that animals perform behaviorally in ways that people behave when they are in a particular state of phenomenal consciousness. But we can create robots that behave the way humans behave when we are having a phenomenal experience. Consciousness is, and probably always will be, an inner experience that is unobservable to anyone other than the experiencing organism. And in the absence of verbal report, there is little to measure. ~ Joseph E LeDoux, #NFDB
874:incalculable failed experiments.” She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
875:The theory obviously turned on the stark difference in people’s feelings when they faced potential losses rather than potential gains. A loss, according to the theory, was when a person wound up worse off than his “reference point.” But what was this reference point? The easy answer was: wherever you started from. Your status quo. A loss was just when you ended up worse than your status quo. But how did you determine any person’s status quo? “In the experiments it’s pretty clear what a loss is,” Arrow said later. “In the real world it’s not so clear. ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
876:We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis. ~ Antoine Lavoisier, #NFDB
877:The most convincing proof of the conversion of heat into living force [vis viva] has been derived from my experiments with the electro-magnetic engine, a machine composed of magnets and bars of iron set in motion by an electrical battery. I have proved by actual experiment that, in exact proportion to the force with which this machine works, heat is abstracted from the electrical battery. You see, therefore, that living force may be converted into heat, and that heat may be converted into living force, or its equivalent attraction through space. ~ James Prescott Joule, #NFDB
878:Perhaps the most shocking element in the whole story of Unit 731 was MacArthur’s agreement, after the Japanese surrender, to provide immunity from prosecution to all involved, including General Ishii. This deal allowed the Americans to obtain all the data they had accumulated from their experiments. Even after MacArthur had learned that Allied prisoners of war had also been killed in the tests, he ordered that all criminal investigations should cease. Soviet requests to prosecute Ishii and his staff at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal were firmly rejected. ~ Antony Beevor, #NFDB
879:[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at first amused myself with making experiments on the fixed air [carbon dioxide] which I found ready made in the process of fermentation . When I removed from that house I was under the necessity of making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind. ~ Joseph Priestley, #NFDB
880:In 2008, in an article in the journal Progress in Physics, Elmira A. Isaeva said, “The problem of quantum physics, as a choice of one alternative at quantum measurement and a problem of philosophy as to how consciousness functions, is deeply connected with relations between these two. It is quite possible that in solving these two problems, it is likely that experiments in the quantum mechanics will include workings of a brain and consciousness, and it will then be possible to present a new basis for the theory of consciousness.” This—in a physics journal! ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
881:test subjects played a gambling game while Knutson and his team looked at which areas of their brains became more active. The startling results showed that the nucleus accumbens was not activating when the reward (in this case a monetary payout) was received, but rather, in anticipation of it. The study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward. The stress of desire in the brain appears to compel us, just as it did in Olds’ and Milner’s lab mouse experiments. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
882:Borely could remember fighting some of Augurc’s men five years ago, and during some of his nighttime searches for Areo in subsequent years. For whatever reason, many of them never responded to his questions, even when they were maimed and severely injured. Instead, they would just keep on fighting. The others—those who didn’t undergo experiments to their minds—were too difficult for Borely to defeat, their fighting skills heightened in other ways. It was a strange, unpredictable world now, and everything about it had become foreign to Borely. Even himself. ~ Aaron McGowan, #NFDB
883:They have never affirm'd any thing, concerning the cause, till the trial was past: whereas, to do it before, is a most venomous thing in the making of Sciences: for whoever has fix'd on his Cause, before he has experimented; can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment, and his Observations, to his Own Cause, which he had before imagin'd; rather than the Cause to the Truth of the Experiment itself. Referring to experiments of the Aristotelian mode, whereby a preconceived truth would be illustrated merely to convince people of the validity of the original thought. ~ Thomas Sprat, #NFDB
884:Most decisions are wrong. Most experiments fail. It is tempting to believe that if we entrusted the future of our companies, our industries, our countries, to the right people, they would lead us unerringly to the promised land. Such hopes are always disappointed. Most of Thomas Edison’s inventions did not work, Ford, Morris and Mao ended their careers as sad, even risible figures. Bill Gates missed the significance of the Internet, Mrs Thatcher introduced the poll tax, and Napoleon died in exile on St Helena. Even extraordinarily talented people make big mistakes. ~ John Kay, #NFDB
885:Unlike its competitors who sell pre-assembled merchandise, IKEA puts its customers to work. It turns out there’s a hidden benefit to making users invest physical effort in assembling the product — by asking customers to assemble their own furniture, Ariely believes they adopt an irrational love of the furniture they built, just like the test subjects did in the origami experiments. Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
886:Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
887:Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a “population” of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience. Similar ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
888:It’s between $1 million and $10 million that the team needs to focus on cash. Growth sucks cash, and since this is the first time the company will make a tenfold jump in size, the demands for cash will soar. In addition, at this stage of organizational development, the company is still trying to figure out its unique position in the marketplace, and these experiments (or mistakes) can be costly. This is when the cash model of the business needs to be worked out (e.g., “How is the business model going to generate sufficient cash for the company to keep growing?”). ~ Verne Harnish, #NFDB
889:This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
890:A more generous assessment of the learning styles movement is that, in attempting to address the inherent diversity of classrooms, it has broadened the range of pedagogical options available. As Jim Scrivener (2012: 106) argues, even if learning styles are simply unfounded hunches, ‘perhaps their main value is in offering us thought experiments along the lines of “what if this were true?” – making us think about the ideas and, in doing so, reflecting on our own default teaching styles and our own current understanding of learner differences and responses to them. ~ Scott Thornbury, #NFDB
891:Educated at Durmstrang, a school famous even then for its unfortunate tolerance of the Dark Arts, Grindelwald showed himself quite as precociously brilliant as Dumbledore. Rather than channel his abilities into the attainment of awards and prizes, however, Gellert Grindelwald devoted himself to other pursuits. At sixteen years old, even Durmstrang felt it could no longer turn a blind eye to the twisted experiments of Gellert Grindelwald, and he was expelled. Hitherto, all that has been known of Grindelwald’s next movements is that he ‘travelled abroad for some months’. ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
892:Human children, on the other hand, are inherently cooperative. From the earliest ages, they desire to help others, to share information and to participate in pursuing common goals. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if infants aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help. If the adult pretends to have lost an object, children from as young as 12 months will helpfully point out where ~ Nicholas J Wade, #NFDB
893:Avigail, however, did not. Like the few other survivors, she’d suffered permanent internal damage and almost constantly felt pain. But in this, she also regarded herself as lucky. The SS doctors carried out sterilization experiments on some of the women. “When Rebekah arrived at the camp, she had a daughter, just a year old. I’m not sure why the guards let her keep the child. Rebekah was strikingly beautiful and from the start, she was treated differently. The things they made her do…” Avigail’s voice cracked, “The only reason she did not end it all herself was the child. ~ Dan Eaton, #NFDB
894:I was asked by the National Institute of Health to be their scientific discussant on the effects of these drug [Ritalin] at a big conference they held. Beforehand, I reviewed all of the important literature on the issue. Even with experiments on animals. When they're given these drugs they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. We make good caged animals with these drugs. And we make good caged kids by knocking their spontaneity out of them. And, Michael, the other thing is that these drugs enforce obsessive behavior. ~ Peter Breggin, #NFDB
895:At this point, we are living one of the greatest experiments in humankind - to create something that has, throughout history, been considered a contradiction in terms - a passionate marriage. Passion has always existed, but it took place somewhere else. Everything that we wanted from a traditional marriage - companionship, family, children, economic support, a best friend, a passionate lover, a trusted confidante, an intellectual equal - we are asking from one person what an entire village once provided. And couples are crumbling under the weight of so much expectation. ~ Esther Perel, #NFDB
896:Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one’s a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one’s theoretical models. The results of experiments that I will describe here are not only timely, they are also unexpected. ~ Lawrence M Krauss, #NFDB
897:Sanders truly believed in these barbaric techniques. He held conferences, and even wrote a book called Psychic Driving—you can still find a copy now and then. The most illustrious doctors came to hear him lecture. It was at that point, at the beginning of the 1950s, that the CIA got in touch with him. The agency was strongly interested in his techniques and his writings. It secretly integrated him into Project MK-Ultra, and for years provided the funding for him to pursue his brainwashing experiments at the hospital. And that’s how MK-Ultra entered Canadian territory. ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
898:Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
899:I'm at a funny crossroads, personally. I really want to turn my attention away from planet-hunting towards Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at UC-Berkeley. I'm in this lucky position that my career has been more successful than I could have ever imagined. It's time for me to roll the dice, try something that's a long shot. Younger scientists can't put their eggs in that basket, because if you spend your time on SETI, your chances of success are low. But I have the luxury. There are some experiments we can do to hunt for the great galactic Internet. ~ Geoffrey Marcy, #NFDB
900:During the time that [Karl] Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of imununology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
901:John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”39 The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis’s hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings claimed in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves.40 ~ Nate Silver, #NFDB
902:It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. The state-vector of a system is, indeed, not measurable , in the sense that one cannot ascertain, by experiments performed on the system, precisely (up to proportionality) what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be (again up to proportionality) a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
903:The difference when I'm writing a story versus writing a joke is that writing a joke is so much more about the structure and it's less about the conversation. To me, the thing that I love about stand-up is the intimacy between performer and audience.To get it even more conversational was something that really appealed to me and that I really enjoyed doing. My early experiments with it, with just telling a story from my life on stage, it was so satisfying to do. And seemingly for the audience as well. It's a different thing, and it's a different feeling and a different vibe. ~ Paul F Tompkins, #NFDB
904:Einstein’s discovery of special relativity involved an intuition based on a decade of intellectual as well as personal experiences.9 The most important and obvious, I think, was his deep understanding and knowledge of theoretical physics. He was also helped by his ability to visualize thought experiments, which had been encouraged by his education in Aarau. Also, there was his grounding in philosophy: from Hume and Mach he had developed a skepticism about things that could not be observed. And this skepticism was enhanced by his innate rebellious tendency to question authority. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
905:Through experiments over the past few decades physicists have discovered matter to be completely mutable into other particles or energy and vice-versa and on a subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty in definite places, but rather shows 'tendencies' to exist. Quantum physics is beginning to realise that the Universe appears to be a dynamic web of interconnected and inseparable energy patterns. If the universe is indeed composed of such a web, there is logically no such thing as a part. This implies we are not separated parts of a whole but rather we are the Whole. ~ Barbara Brennan, #NFDB
906:If only she had begged him to stay. Now everything in the house scares her: the creaking stairs, shuttered windows, empty rooms. The clutter and silence. Etienne tries performing silly experiments to cheer her: a vinegar volcano, a tornado in a bottle. “Can you hear it, Marie? Spinning in there?” She does not feign interest. Madame Manec brings her omelets, cassoulet, brochettes of fish, fabricating miracles out of ration tickets and the dregs of her cupboards, but Marie-Laure refuses to eat. “Like a snail,” she overhears Etienne say outside her door. “Curled up so tight in there. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
907:In this age people are experiencing a delight, the tremendous delight that you get when you guess how nature will work in a new situation never seen before. From experiments and information in a certain range you can guess what is going to happen in a region where no one has ever explored before. It is a little different from regular exploration in that there are enough clues on the land discovered to guess what the land that has not been discovered is going to look like. These guesses, incidentally, are often very different from what you have already seen – they take a lot of thought. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
908:The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
909:Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
910:Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, was to simulate the conditions on Earth in primordial times, three or four billion years ago, when life appeared for the first time. The experiments were intended to see if they could make something come alive using nothing but nonliving chemicals. Do you know what emerged? Not life, but something fascinating all the same. The chemicals gave rise to significant chemical compounds: a handful of amino acids, essential components in the chemistry of life. Amino acids are molecules that hook together to form the proteins that run almost every aspect of biology. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
911:The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have. ~ Christopher Zeeman, #NFDB
912:After this study of the methods in use throughout Europe I concluded my experiments upon the deficients of Rome, and taught them throughout two years. I followed Séguin's book, and also derived much help from the remarkable experiments of Itard. Guided by the work of these two men, I had manufactured a great variety of didactic material. These materials, which I have never seen complete in any institution, became in the hands of those who knew how to apply them, a most remarkable and efficient means, but unless rightly presented, they failed to attract the attention of the deficients. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
913:This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
914:At the end of the day, no matter how confident we are in our observations, our experiments, our data, or our theories, we must go home knowing that 85 percent of all the gravity in the cosmos comes from an unknown, mysterious source that remains completely undetected by all means we have ever devised to observe the universe. As far as we can tell, it’s not made of ordinary stuff such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, or any form of matter or energy that interacts with them. We call this ghostly, offending substance “dark matter,” and it remains among the greatest of all quandaries. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
915:In a famous hoax, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a leading journal of cultural studies purporting to describe how quantum gravity could produce a “liberatory postmodern science.” The article, which parodied the convoluted style of argument in the fashionable academic world of cultural studies, was promptly published by the editors. Sokal announced that his intention was to test the intellectual standards of the discipline by checking whether the journal would publish a piece “liberally salted with nonsense.” Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” April 15, 1996, ~ Dani Rodrik, #NFDB
916:One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of temperament. We make our temperament and our natural affinities barriers to coming to Jesus. The first thing we realize when we come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatever to our natural affinities. We have the notion that we can consecrate our gifts to God. You cannot consecrate what is not yours; there is only one thing you can consecrate to God, and that is your right to yourself (Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you. God’s experiments always succeed ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
917:It seems to me that the novel is very much alive as a form. Without any question, every epoch has its own forms, and the novel nowadays cannot resemble that of the nineteenth century. In this domain all experiments are justified, and it is better to write something new clumsily than to repeat the old brilliantly. In the nineteenth century, novels dealt with the fate of a person or of a family; this was linked to life in that period. In our time the destinies of people are interwoven. Whether man recognizes it or not, his fate is much more linked to that of many other people than it used to be. ~ Ilya Ehrenburg, #NFDB
918:Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and... ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
919:Unfortunately, the wave model comes out all wrong: it predicts that the energy of the electrons leaving the atoms should depend on the intensity of the light—the brighter the light, the harder the shaking, and the faster the bits flying away should move. In experiments, though, the energy of the electrons doesn’t depend on the intensity at all. Instead, the energy depends on the frequency, which the wave model says shouldn’t matter. At low frequencies, you never get any electrons no matter how hard you shake, while at high frequency, even gentle shaking produces electrons with a good deal of energy. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
920:The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications—that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches—but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous. Many ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
921:Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
922:The doubts only motivated Deisseroth. “I felt a sort of personal need to see what was possible,” he says. Malenka told me that this understates the case considerably: “There’s this drive of, like, ‘You think I’m wrong about this, motherfucker? I’m going to show you I was right.’ ” Deisseroth began working furiously. “He was getting up at 4 or 5 A.M. and going to bed at one or two,” Monje says. He kept up this schedule for five years, until optogenetic experiments began working smoothly. “There are people who don’t need as much sleep,” Monje says. “Karl is not one of those people. He’s just that driven. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
923:Attempts were made in 1941 to design a similar proximity fuze, using a tiny Radar set arranged to explode the warhead when the projectile passed near the aircraft. Successful preliminary experiments were made, but before this fuze was developed in England the Americans, to whom we imparted our knowledge, actually succeeded not only in perfecting the instrument but in reducing its size so much that the whole thing could be put into the head not merely of a rocket but of a shell. These so-called “Proximity Fuzes”, made in the United States, were used in great numbers in the last year of the war, ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
924:How to convey, to someone who had never seen even depictions on film or holograph, the centuries of mass destruction berserkers had visited upon the galaxy, the documented cases of individual horrors? Whole planets had been sterilized, whole solar systems laid waste by the unliving enemy. People by the thousands or tens of thousands had perished in berserkers’ experiments aimed at discovering what made the strange two-legged Earth- descended blobs of protoplasm so resistant to the fundamental truth-assumption of the berserkers’ programming: that life was a disease of matter that had to be expunged. ~ Fred Saberhagen, #NFDB
925:Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.
We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads. ~ Matthew Syed,#NFDB
926:The results of five experiments involving more than a thousand participants showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to detect and understand other people's emotions. But it can't be any sort of fiction. The researchers distinguished between "popular fiction" (where the author leads you by the hand as a reader) and "literary fiction" (in which you must find your own way and fill in the gaps). Instead of being told why a certain character behaves as they do, you have to figure it out yourself. That way, the book becomes not just a simulation of a social experience, it is a social experience. ~ Meik Wiking, #NFDB
927:After seven experiments with hundreds of children, we had some of the clearest findings I’ve ever seen: Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance. How can that be? Don’t children love to be praised? Yes, children love praise. And they especially love to be praised for their intelligence and talent. It really does give them a boost, a special glow—but only for the moment. The minute they hit a snag, their confidence goes out the window and their motivation hits rock bottom. If success means they’re smart, then failure means they’re dumb. That’s the fixed mindset. ~ Carol S Dweck, #NFDB
928:I always think fondly of my years inside Detention Center LC/766B.
The women and the children I met had all lost people they loved, but they never wallowed in despair.
Dying is one of the few experiences we'll eventually all enjoy firsthand, and like most shit that's commonplace, it's boring to dwell on.
My fellow inmates/classmates (and really, what's the difference?) showed me it was more interesting to concentrate on the living.
Because death is fucking predictable...
...but life has science experiments and free time and surprise naps and who knows what comes next? ~ Brian K Vaughan,#NFDB
929:Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error, in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments. For having given a beginning, what follows from it must necessarily be a natural development of such a beginning, unless it has been subject to a contrary influence, while, if it is affected by any contrary influence, the result which ought to follow from the aforesaid beginning, will be found to partake of this contrary influence in a greater or lesser degree in proportion as the said influence is more or less powerful than the aforesaid beginning. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
930:Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women--foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried. Illogical and shameful as they seemed in retrospect, those experiences enriched modern Man. Few races had made so many mistakes in so short a time, or tried so many tentative solutions to hopeless problems. ~ David Brin, #NFDB
931:Later Michel went up to the priest as he was packing away the tools of the trade. “I was very interested in what you were saying earlier…” The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particle, once united, are forever and inseparable whole, “which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh.” The priest’s smile froze slightly. “What I’m trying to say, “Michel went on enthusiastically, “is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector in Hilbert space. Do you see what I mean? ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
932:This way of thinking suggests that it’s not varying environments, false negatives, or bad experiments that are obscuring evidence of the brains of women and men being sexually dimorphic. It’s that there isn’t dimorphism in the brain to begin with. “Every brain is different from every other brain,” Gina Rippon explains. “We should take more of a fingerprint type of approach. So there is some kind of individual characteristic of the brain, which is true of the life experiences of that person. That’s going to be much more interesting than to try to put them all together, trying to squeeze into some kind of category. ~ Angela Saini, #NFDB
933:The theory behind primate experimentation was that these animals were closer biologically to man. In the 1950's, several laboratories even attempted experiments on gorillas, going to great trouble and expense to work with these seemingly most human of animals. However, by 1960 it had been demonstrated that of the apes, the chimpanzee was biochemically more like man than the gorilla. (On the basis of similarity to man, the choice of laboratory animals is often surprising. For example, the hamster is preferred for immunological and cancer studies, since his responses are so similar to man's, while for studies of the heart ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
934:The principle I’m describing here—iterative trial and error—has long-recognized value in science. When scientists have a question, they construct hypotheses, test them, analyze them, and draw conclusions—and then they do it all over again. The reasoning behind this is simple: Experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding. That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information. If your experiment proved your initial theory wrong, better to know it sooner rather than later. Armed with new facts, you can then reframe whatever question you’re asking. ~ Ed Catmull, #NFDB
935:Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to detect particles always detect particles; experiments designed to detect waves always detect waves. No experiment shows the electron behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time. ~ John Gribbin, #NFDB
936:Their findings can be summarized in three statements which Aldous Huxley, following Leibnitz, has called the Perennial Philosophy because they appear in every age and civilization: (1) there is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change; (2) this same reality lies at the core of every human personality; (3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is, to realize God while here on earth. These principles and the interior experiments for realizing them were taught systematically in “forest academies” or ashrams – a tradition which continues unbroken after some three thousand years. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
937:Avigail Stern, daughter of a rabbi, and Rebekah Weizmann, whose crime against the Reich was to have a father that was a prominent Jewish industrialist. They became firm friends in a place where friendship inevitably meant pain and loss. Avigail said, “In the camp infirmary, the SS doctors subjected the prisoners to medical experiments, causing terrible wounds that imitated those sustained by soldiers on the battlefield. They treated us with various experimental medicines to prevent infections. Some worked, some did not. Testing was also done on amputation techniques and setting and transplanting bones. Most of the women died. ~ Dan Eaton, #NFDB
938:To see the future of science, take a peek inside a lab at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, where a robot by the name of Adam is hard at work figuring out which genes encode which enzymes in yeast. Adam has a model of yeast metabolism and general knowledge of genes and proteins. It makes hypotheses, designs experiments to test them, physically carries them out, analyzes the results, and comes up with new hypotheses until it’s satisfied. Today, human scientists still independently check Adam’s conclusions before they believe them, but tomorrow they’ll leave it to robot scientists to check each other’s hypotheses. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
939:On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
940:The very heart of his system was his finding that effort was the one big deterrent to either breaking a bad habit or learning a new one. Making an effort to refrain from the habit actually reinforced the habit, he found. His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort toward reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either “positive practice” (refraining from the habit) or “negative practice” (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
941:Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying, illustrating that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling creates a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality with a steady stream of labels. It is the same way with space, which is solely the conceptual mind’s way of clearing its throat, of pausing between identified symbols. At any rate, the subjective truth of this is now supported by actual experiments (as we saw in the quantum theory chapters) that strongly suggest distance (space) has no reality whatsoever for entangled particles, no matter how great their apparent separation. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
942:In 1938 the biological warfare establishment Unit 731 had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners. They also carried out anthrax, mustard-gas and frostbite experiments on their victims, whom they referred to as maruta or ‘logs’. ~ Antony Beevor, #NFDB
943:When all these data were collected they came into the hands of Kepler,* who then tried to analyse what kind of motion the planets made around the sun. And he did this by a method of trial and error. At one stage he thought he had it; he figured out that they went round the sun in circles with the sun off centre. Then Kepler noticed that one planet, I think it was Mars, was eight minutes of arc off, and he decided this was too big for Tycho Brahe to have made an error, and that this was not the right answer. So because of the precision of the experiments he was able to proceed to another trial and ultimately found out three things. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
944:Everything comes so easy for you, doesn’t it, Maya? School, boys, friends, sports. Even your precious animals. You can’t just take care of them like any normal person. You have to be some kind of animal whisperer. Magical healer. So damned special. Like Serena, captain of the swim team and the best singer on the freaking island, and how much does she practice? Sings in the shower. Paddles around the lake. Do you know how hard I work? It’s never enough. You two get the trophies and the solos and the As and the boys.”
You’re crazy, I thought. Did they do this to you with their experiments? Or is this just you? ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
945:As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a grave-yard. ~ Edith Wharton,#NFDB
946:Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
947:Most notably, FDR defied the orthodoxy of his time by abandoning the gold standard in a series of steps in 1933. With the money supply no longer constrained by the amount of gold held by the government, deflation stopped almost immediately. Roosevelt also quelled the raging financial crisis by temporarily shutting down the nation’s banks (a bank holiday), permitting only those judged sound to reopen, and by pushing legislation establishing federal deposit insurance. These measures brought intense criticism from orthodox economists and conservative business leaders. And they were indeed experiments. But, collectively, they worked. ~ Ben S Bernanke, #NFDB
948:may not, now or hereafter, enter into a detailed account of the experiments in dietetics, for I did so in a series of Gujarati articles which appeared years ago in Indian Opinion, and which were afterwards published in the form of a book popularly known in English as A Guide to Health. Among my little books this has been the most widely read alike in the East and in the West, a thing that I have not yet been able to understand. It was written for the benefit of the readers of Indian Opinion. But I know that the booklet has profoundly influenced the lives of many, both in the East and in the West, who have never seen Indian Opinion. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
949:Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behaviour is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
950:Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.
Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. ~ Charlie Brooker,#NFDB
951:the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
952:Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.
Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. ~ Charlie Brooker,#NFDB
953:Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
954:Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
955:These experiments showed that there was a region on the X chromosome that was vitally important for X inactivation. This region was dubbed the X Inactivation Centre. In 1991 a group from Hunt Willard’s lab at Stanford University in California showed that the X Inactivation Centre contained a gene that they called Xist, after X-inactive (Xi) specific transcript10. This gene was only expressed from the inactive X chromosome, not from the active one. Because the gene was only expressed from one of the two X chromosomes, this made it an attractive candidate as the controller of X inactivation, where two identical chromosomes behave non-identically. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
956:I am reminded of one of my father’s novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes or with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
957:He moved fractionally closer. As he did, she noticed that her hand was still held inside his. She tugged lightly to free herself.
He didn't let go.
"Lord Northcote."
"Lady Esme," he said, the faintest trace of mocking amusement in his voice.
"You may release me now."
"Oh, I will. After we've sealed our bargain."
"What do you mean by that? I've already consented to marry you."
"Indeed, but aren't you the least bit curious to see if we're compatible?"
An electrical charge, rather like one of her brother Drake's experiments, surged through her as Northcote wrapped his free arm around her waist and tugged her to him. ~ Tracy Anne Warren,#NFDB
958:in experimental quantum mechanics we have run right up against what was previously perceived to be a purely philosophical barrier. The experiments are telling us that we can know nothing of reality-in-itself. We have to accept that the properties we ascribe to quantum particles like photons, such as energy, frequency, spin, polarization, position (‘here’ or ‘there’), are properties that have no meaning except in relation to a measuring device that allows them to be projected into our empirical reality of experience. We can no longer assume that the properties we measure necessarily reflect or represent the properties of the particles as they really are. ~ Jim Baggott, #NFDB
959:Many experiments show that when people are put into a good mood (e.g., by giving them candy or showing them a funny movie), they are more creative. For example, they are better at inventing diverse and unusual ways for getting a candle to burn without dripping, or at finding more obscure and remote associations between words and ideas.22 People in good moods are “more cognitively flexible —more able to make associations, to see dimensions, and to see potential relationships among stimuli—than are persons in a neutral state.”23 In other words, they generate more varied ideas and combinations of those ideas, which are crucial aspects of creative work. ~ Robert I Sutton, #NFDB
960:One day Cunegonde, while walking near the castle, in a little wood which they called a park, saw between the bushes, Dr. Pangloss giving a lesson in experimental natural philosophy to her mother’s chamber-maid, a little brown wench, very pretty and very docile. As Miss Cunegonde had a great disposition for the sciences, she breathlessly observed the repeated experiments of which she was a witness; she clearly perceived the force of the Doctor’s reasons, the effects, and the causes; she turned back greatly flurried, quite pensive, and filled with the desire to be learned; dreaming that she might well be a sufficient reason for young Candide, and he for her. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
961:Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4 ~ Alfred W McCoy, #NFDB
962:Technology builds from harnessing phenomena largely uncovered by science. And equally science builds from technology-or, better to say, forms from its technologies-from the use of the instruments and methods and experiments it develops. Science and technology co-evolve in a symbiotic relationship. Each takes part in the continued creation of the other, and as it does, takes in, digests, and uses the other; and in so doing becomes thoroughly intermingled with the other. The two cannot be separated, they rely completely on one another. Science is necessary to uncover and understand deeply buried phenomena, and technology is necessary to advance science. ~ W Brian Arthur, #NFDB
963:A futurist is always listening for signals, and she is always considering the implications of scenarios and strategies, even when the F.U.T.U.R.E. Test is passed. She asks “Why?” as often as “Why not?” How does it address the trend identified, and does it solve for our basic human needs? What good will this technology bring to humanity? How will it improve our lives? What consequences may it bring, and are we prepared for what may come as a result of our actions? For that, she looks again and again to the fringe in order to understand how adjacent trends collide and how new layers of ideas, experiments, tools, businesses, and socioeconomic structures are built. ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
964:Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
965:Fracturing of the psyche is said to be conducive to creating the phenomenon that has been termed sleeper assassins. According to such theories, the first psychiatrists employed to master mind control studied mental patients who had been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, which medical science has since renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many of those psychiatrists are said to have been Paperclip Nazi doctors who were brought to the US after conducting radical psychiatric experiments on patients during the Holocaust – the same doctors whose victims not only included Jews, Gyspies, political agitators and homosexuals, but also the mentally ill. ~ Lance Morcan, #NFDB
966:Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
967:You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. ~ Roger Scruton,#NFDB
968:Impressed by the success of high-level mathematics in the formulation of the general theory of relativity in 1915, we find that Einstein's life-long quest for a unified field theory was dominated by the search for more general mathematical formalisms that could bring together the existing descriptions of gravity and electromagnetism. We find none of Einstein's compelling thought experiments and beautifully simple physical reasoning that lay at the heart of his early success. As the last quotation tells, he had become convinced that by pursuing mathematical formalisms alone, the compelling simplicity of a unified description of the world would become inescapable. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
969:must choose a geological deposit to mark our time, one that is uniquely human-born, I would suggest the area of Mare Tranquilitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, on the Moon, where the Apollo 11 astronauts first stepped onto the soil of another world, hopped about, did experiments, took rocks and soil, and left behind machines, flags, and footprints. Those boot marks will fade in a few million years as micrometeorites grind them into the surrounding dust, but the overall disturbance of this site, including the alien artifacts we left there, will surely be detectable for as long as there is an Earth and a Moon. This could not have been produced by any other species. ~ David Grinspoon, #NFDB
970:everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
971:The most dramatic of these animal obesity models is known as hypothalamic obesity, and it served as the experimental obesity of choice for researchers from the 1930s onward. It also became another example of the propensity to attribute the cause of obesity to overeating even when the evidence argued otherwise. The interpretation of these experiments became one of a half-dozen critical turning points in obesity research, a point at which the individuals involved in this research chose to accept an interpretation of the evidence that fit their preconceptions rather than the evidence itself and, by so doing, further biased the perception of everything that came afterward. ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
972:Supposedly several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a dolerite hammer stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. And yet, the video that is played in a hall at the Aswan quarry site still portrays that the hewing of the stone for the unfinished and all other obelisks was done this way [...]. The experiments of Dr. Lehner reveal, there is no way that simple stone pounders could possibly have been the main tool to quarry and shape the granite obelisks. ~ Brien Foerster, #NFDB
973:Our ability to tap into the senses of others is not limited to hypnotic states. In a now famous series of experiments physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute in California found that just about everyone they tested had a capacity they call “remote viewing,” the ability to describe accurately what a distant test subject is seeing. They found that individual after individual could remote-view simply by relaxing and describing whatever images came into their minds. Puthoff and Targ's findings have been duplicated by dozens of laboratories around the world, indicating that remote viewing is probably a widespread latent ability in all of us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
974:During the time that Landsteiner gave me an education in the field of immunology, I discovered that he and I were thinking about the serologic problem in very different ways. He would ask, What do these experiments force us to believe about the nature of the world? I would ask, What is the most. simple and general picture of the world that we can formulate that is not ruled by these experiments? I realized that medical and biological investigators were not attacking their problems the same way that theoretical physicists do, the way I had been in the habit of doing. ~ Linus Pauling, #NFDB
975:The increased risk for bipolar illness among identical twins is even true if the identical twins are separated at birth and raised by different families. Although the adoption of identical twins by separate families is rare, it does happen on occasion. In some cases, scientists have been able to locate the twins later in life to determine how similar or different they are. These "natural" experiments can tell us a great deal about the relative importance of genes versus environment because the separately raised identical twins have identical genes but their environments are different. Such studies highlight the importance of strong genetic influences in bipolar disorder. ~ David D Burns, #NFDB
976:One appears to conclude from these experiments that: (i) the conscious act of 'free will' is a pure illusion, having been, in some sense, already preprogrammed in the preceding unconscious activity of the brain; or (ii) there is a possible 'last-minute' role for the will, so that it can sometimes (but not usually) reverse the decision that had been unconsciously building up for a second or so before; or (iii) the subject actually consciously wills the finger-flexing at the earlier time of a second or so before the flexing takes place, but mistakenly perceives, in a consistent way, that the conscious act occurs at the much later time, just before the finger is indeed flexed. ~ Roger Penrose, #NFDB
977:Establishing yourself as a scientist takes an awfully long time. The riskiest part is learning what a true scientist is and then taking the first shaky steps down that path, which will become a road, which will become a highway, which will maybe someday lead you home. A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs. ~ Hope Jahren, #NFDB
978:Some say that eating chocolate is better than kissing, and scientists have dutifully tested this hypothesis by carrying out a set of experiments. In 2007, a team led by Dr. David Lewis recruited pairs of passionate lovers, whose brain activity and heart rate were monitored first while they kissed each other and then while they ate chocolate (separately). The researchers found that although kissing set the heart pounding, the effect did not last as long as when the participants ate chocolate. The study also showed that when the chocolate started melting, all regions of the brain received a boost far more intense and longer lasting than the brain activity measured while kissing. ~ Mark Miodownik, #NFDB
979:This hinted at something that no one had ever suspected -- that the brain tracks moving things more easily that still things. We have a built-in bias toward detecting action. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes subtly over its surface. Experiments have even proven that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
980:In this way we consumed the newt whom we had come to know as Hans; Hans was an educated and intelligent animal with a special talent for scientific work; it had worked in Dr. Hinkel’s department as a laboratory assistant and could even be trusted with delicate chemical analyses. We would spend entire evenings talking with Hans who enjoyed boundless curiosity. It became unfortunately necessary to dispose of Hans after he became blind after my experiments with trepanation. Hans’s meat was dark and with a slight flavour of mushrooms, but left no unpleasant effects. There is no doubt that in the event of need arising from war it would be possible to use newt meat as a cheap substitute for beef.] ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
981:And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
982:In 1977, I was barely twenty-five. The law office of Joseph Rauth, Washington, D.C. Two men, a father and son, arrived in Joseph’s office. The son, David Lavoix, was holding an article from the New York Times, and the father seemed…troubled, absent. David Lavoix held out the clipping, which talked about Project MK-Ultra. Just so you know, the Times had sent the first shot across the bow two years earlier, in 1975, by revealing that in the fifties and sixties the CIA had conducted mind-control experiments on American citizens, mostly without their knowledge or consent. Investigative hearings were held and the American people were officially informed about the existence of this top secret project. ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
983:For the West, restraint, compromise, and keeping promises are all attributes one can expect to find in a rational actor; the Russian political elite, however, interpret these attributes as signs of weakness. For them, rational behavior includes unpredictability, tolerance for the use of force, and a callous disregard for human lives in the service of their objective. This is exactly the reason why the Kremlin cannot afford to cave in the face of sanctions, even if doing so risks economic collapse. The absence of external restraints (along with the lack of internal ones, such as independent institutions and strong public opinion) will drive the Kremlin toward even riskier experiments in self-affirmation. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
984:(Man) fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. We may smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed to failure, that mane learned from experience the futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and which continue to be repeated merely because the operator is unaware of their failure. ~ James George Frazer, #NFDB
985:Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
986:Late at night, when Pearl was fast asleep, her consciousness a safe distance from my own, I'd think of these tiny pieces of us and wonder if our feelings remained in them, even though they were mere particles. I wondered if the pieces hated themselves for their participation in the experiments. I imagined that they did. And I longed to tell them that it wasn't their fault, that the collaboration wasn't a willing one, that they'd been stolen, coerced, made to suffer. But then I'd realize how little influence I had over these pieces - after we'd been parted, they answered only to nature and science and the man who called himself Uncle. There was nothing I could do on their numerous, microscopic behalfs. ~ Affinity Konar, #NFDB
987:disputing about those already made. I therefore never answered M. Nollet, and the event gave me no cause to repent my silence; for my friend M. le Roy, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, took up my cause and refuted him; my book was translated into the Italian, German, and Latin languages; and the doctrine it contain'd was by degrees universally adopted by the philosophers of Europe, in preference to that of the abbe; so that he lived to see himself the last of his sect, except Monsieur B----, of Paris, his eleve and immediate disciple. What gave my book the more sudden and general celebrity, was the success of one of its proposed experiments, made by Messrs. Dalibard and De Lor at Marly, for drawing ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
988:Of course, I hated my fellow clerks one and all, and I despised them all, yet at the same time I was, as it were, afraid of them. In fact, it happened at times that I thought more highly of them than of myself. It somehow happened quite suddenly that I alternated between despising them and thinking them superior to myself. A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments. But whether I despised them or thought them superior I dropped my eyes almost every time I met anyone. I even made experiments whether I could face so and so's looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my eyes. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
989:Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that frogs were stupid. One of the students happened to be a reporter for the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, and the next day, Harry was in print: “Professor Harlow says that the frog is the dumbest of all animals.... Professor Harlow’s experiments showed that the frog does not seem to be able to learn anything at all.” It was a natural story for any journalist. The next day, one of the local papers rewrote the student version. It now carried the headline: “Frog Dumbest of Animals, Experimenters Discover.” That ~ Deborah Blum, #NFDB
990:the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
991:In order to find out more about this, experimenters have gone on to study phenomena at very high energy. They hit neutrons and protons together at very high energy to produce peculiar things, and by studying these peculiar things we hope to understand better the forces between neutrons and protons. Pandora’s box has been opened by these experiments! Although all we really wanted was to get a better idea of the forces between neutrons and protons, when we hit these things together hard we discovered that there are more particles in the world. In fact more than four dozen other particles have been dredged up in an attempt to understand these forces; we will put these four dozen others into the neutron/proton column ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
992:I’ve never heard of a Syndrome E. But there are two more things you should know. Since we have delved into these shadows, we might as well go all the way. At the beginning of the 1940s, and up until the 1960s, a law adopted by the legislative assembly of Quebec allowed the Roman Catholic Church to sell the remains of orphans who had died within their walls to the medical schools.” “That’s horrible.” “Money encourages the worst monstrosities. But that’s not all. You asked about experiments, miss, so I’ll tell you. Adult patients—living patients—were sacrificed for experimental purposes in the depths of these insane asylums. I’m talking about the involvement of the American government in Quebec’s dark period. ~ Franck Thilliez, #NFDB
993:the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
994:For all the tantalizing and provocative character of the Viking results, I know a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites. The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry and biology. Prototypes of such rovers are under development by NASA. They know on their own how to go over rocks, how not to fall down ravines, how to get out of tight spots. It is within our capability to land a rover on Mars that could scan its surroundings, see the most interesting place in its field of view and, by the same time tomorrow, be there. Every day a new place, a complex, winding traverse over the varied topography of this appealing planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
995:For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges, possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves. ~ Rosalind Miles, #NFDB
996:Einstein’s developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as every grandchild is. But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. And he generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famous thought experiments, such as imagining watching lightning strikes from a moving train or experiencing gravity while inside a falling elevator. “I very rarely think in words at all,” he later told a psychologist. “A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.”4 ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
997:Farm animals aren't the only ones that suffer at the hands of human beings. Scientists use animals for their research. It's not just rats and guinea pigs – cats, dogs, monkeys and even chimpanzees can be found in laboratories, many of them suffering pain and distress as they are drugged or given electric shocks. Singer's test to see if any research is morally acceptable is this: would we be prepared to perform the same experiment on a brain-damaged human being? If not, he believes, it is not right to perform the experiment on an animal with a similar level of mental awareness. This is a tough test, and not many experiments would pass it. In practice, then, Singer is very strongly against using animals in research. The ~ Nigel Warburton, #NFDB
998:When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain. ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
999:Representatives of the Copernicus, still the most respected global authority on all things alien, held press conferences, and individual nations did the same. Scientific and governmental authorities everywhere tried to calm nerves and avert panic. Each described experiments showing the nanites were harmless—that a person could ingest them all day, could bathe in them, without any adverse effects—and insisted that that they would reach a population equilibrium as did all organisms. They called on microbiologists to hit the airwaves, reminding people that humanity had always shared the planet with microbes, which were the dominant form of life on Earth in terms of biomass, and had been for ages, despite being invisible. ~ Douglas E Richards, #NFDB
1000:Many Western biologists appreciate the mystery inherent in the animals they observe. They comprehend that, objectively, what they are watching is deceptively complex and, subjectively, that the animals themselves have nonhuman ways of life. They know that while experiments can be designed to reveal aspects of the animal, the animal itself will always remain larger than the sum of any set of experiments. They know they can be very precise about what they do, but that that does not guarantee they will be accurate. They know the behavior of an individual animal may differ strikingly from the generally recognized behavior of its species; and that the same species may behave quite differently from place to place, from year to year. ~ Barry Lopez, #NFDB
1001:In a set of classic experiments, the psychologist Z. Y. Kuo6 showed that almost all kittens who witness their mother killing and eating a rodent eventually do so themselves. However, when kittens are raised in the same cage with a rat, never seeing any other rat, and never seeing a cat kill a rat, then they almost never kill rats themselves. When kittens have a rat for a littermate and also witness their mothers killing rats outside the cage, about half of them learn to kill—but they tend to kill only the kinds of rat they had seen their mothers kill, and not the kinds that they grew up with. Finally, when kittens are given an electric shock each time they see a rat, they soon learn not to kill rats—indeed, to run in terror from them. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1002:When these procedures have been tested, they have significantly reduced mistaken identifications without compromising accurate identifications. A field study in 2011, for example, found that “double-blind sequential line-ups as administered by police departments across the country resulted in the same number of suspect identifications but fewer known-innocent filler identifications than double blind simultaneous line-ups.”11 Some have disputed these findings and have proposed more tests. But this, in itself, represents progress. Systems are being trialed. People are using experiments. As of 2014, three states are using double-blind sequential administration, and six others have recommended them. This is what an open loop looks like. ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
1003:INTRODUCTION The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conducted experiments that should have changed the world—but did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world’s first laboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it required three steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for a thirteen-pound ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
1004:[The] period of Indian history since 1947’, writes the political theorist Sunil Khilnani, ‘might be seen as the adventure of apolitical idea: democracy.’ Viewed thus, independent India appears as the ‘third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions’. Each of these experiments ‘released immense energies; each raised towering expectations; and each has suffered tragic disappointments’. While the Indian experiment is the youngest, says Khilnani, ‘its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1005:Priming works best when you are on autopilot, when you aren’t trying to consciously introspect before choosing how to behave. When you are unsure how best to proceed, suggestions bubble up from the deep that are highly tainted by subconscious primes. In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own. In the aforementioned experiments, there was nothing else for the brain to base its unconscious attitudes on, so it focused on the business items or the clean smells and ran with the ideas. The only problem was the conscious minds of the subjects didn’t notice. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
1006:In the late 1960s, a young Martin Seligman, now the pooh-bah of the positive-psychology movement, conducted experiments with dogs. He would place a dog in a cage and give it a (supposedly harmless) electric shock. The dog, though, could escape to another side of the cage and avoid the shock, the onset of which was signaled by a loud noise and a flashing light. Then Seligman put the dog in a no-win situation. No matter what he did, he couldn’t avoid getting shocked. Then, and this is the part that surprised Seligman, when he returned the same dog to a cage where he could easily avoid the shock (by jumping over a low fence), the dog did nothing. He just sat there and endured the shocks. He had been taught to believe that the situation was hopeless. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
1007:It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn't, but who doesn't love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we're all different and some of us haven't even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I've been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well as facts. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1008:Not least in our recent history have been the lessons of the dangers of our traditional moral values. We are urged to honor our parents and never question them, whatever they have done. But when I realize that millions of people had to die so that Adolf Hitler could keep his repression intact, that millions were humiliated in the camps, so that he should never feel how he was once humiliated, then I have to say: we cannot point out these connections often enough or clearly enough so that the mindless production of evil can be made transparent. How are young people supposed to be able to recognize and condemn inhumanity and crimes if such things as medical experiments on humans go on being concealed instead of revealed in the greatest possible clarity? ~ Alice Miller, #NFDB
1009:I thought I saw someone.”
“Where?”
“I--I--” He looked around. “I don’t know. Down there maybe?” He pointed along the wharf. “I was running after you and it happened so fast, I didn’t get a good look.”
“Was it a man? Woman? Young? Old?”
“I’m…not sure.” He exhaled and leaned against the wall. “Okay, that sounds nuts. I’m not even sure I saw someone.”
“You sensed someone?”
He made a face. “Now that really sounds nuts.”
“Hey, if you’re okay with me imagining myself as a pine marten, I’m okay with you sensing unseen assailants.”
He laughed. “Mina Lee was right. The isolation is driving us crazy. We just hadn’t realized it yet.”
“Not the isolation. The mad science experiments. They’ve spiked the water with hallucinogens. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
1010:It works like this: Theorists get funding because they write about hypothetical particles that experiments can look for. Experimentalists get funding to search for the hypothetical particles, which encourages more theorists to write papers about those particles, which makes the particles appear more interesting, which gives rise to more experiments. Rinse and repeat.
This results in a lot of papers. It looks really productive, but there is no reason to think this cycle will converge on a theory that is an actually correct description of nature. More likely, it will converge on a theory that can be eternally amended so that one needs ever better experiments to find the particles. Which is basically what has been going on the past 40 years. ~ Sabine Hossenfelder,#NFDB
1011: "The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. ~ W Cleon Skousen, #NFDB
1012:The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1013:There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1014:...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. ~ Giles MacDonogh,#NFDB
1015:In this book, we will naturally be dealing primarily with the manifestations of the third level of immunity. I gather material on the biography of Homo immunologicus, guided by the assumption that this is where to find the stuff from which the forms of anthropotechnics are made. By this I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death. Only when these procedures have been grasped in a broad tableau of human 'work on oneself' can we evaluate the newest experiments in genetic engineering, to which, in the current debate, many have reduced the term 'anthropotechnics', reintroduced in 1997. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1016:Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1017:In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve—if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
1018:The first camp to be discovered in the west was the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, which the French army entered on 23 November 1944. Natzweiler-Struthof was one of the principal Nacht und Nebel camps – those institutions that were designed to make suspected Resistance fighters disappear into the ‘night and fog’. Here the French discovered a small gas chamber, where prisoners were hung by their wrists from hooks while Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room. Many of the victims were destined for the autopsy tables of Strasbourg University, where Dr August Hirt had amassed a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race through anatomical study. Others, mostly Gypsies brought here from Auschwitz, were subjected to medical experiments within the camp.21 ~ Keith Lowe, #NFDB
1019:In a modern twist to the classic overeating experiments, Feltham decided that he would eat 5794 calories per day and document his weight gain. But the diet he chose was not a random 5794 calories. He followed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet of natural foods for twenty-one days. Feltham believed, based on clinical experience, that refined carbohydrates, not total calories, caused weight gain. The macronutrient breakdown of his diet was 10 percent carbohydrate, 53 percent fat and 37 percent protein. Standard calorie calculations predicted a weight gain of about 16 pounds (7.3 kilograms). Actual weight gain, however, was only about 2.8 pounds (1.3 kilograms). Even more interesting, he dropped more than 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) from his waist measurement. He gained weight, but it was lean mass. ~ Jason Fung, #NFDB
1020:Scientists know your DNA reflects the genetic legacy of your parents, their parents, and your ancestors. It’s possible that it also reflects their emotional experiences. As researchers learn more about our DNA, maybe we’ll find that our cells have encoded the traumas of our ancestors. Experiments in mice have shown that aversion to certain smells is passed down to the offspring after the parental mice were trained to avoid a certain smell by being shocked every time they smelled it.8 While we know that a family history of heart disease may mean close relatives share genes and genetic markers, if we look back, we can often see in family stories hearts that are broken, conflicted, and prevented from loving fully. In my family, people tend to die of heart disease prematurely. My maternal ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
1021:In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of multitudinous forces. “A universal reaction seemed to bring metal, plant and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death. Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society—results demonstrated by experiments. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1022:Ten years ago, researchers in the relatively new field of behavioral economics began running a series of experiments on a group of capuchin monkeys, and in no time had turned them into . . . us. One report on the results, which found that monkeys not only quickly grasped the concept of currency but knew exactly what it was good for, ran under the headline “Gambling, Prostitution, and Theft Rampant Among Yale Monkeys.” Indeed, the capuchins were observed horse trading, bargain hunting, practicing “utility maximization,” responding to shifts in the value of their coin, occasionally lifting an unwatched token, assessing risk in potential exchanges, and finally, in what was called the first observed example of paid sex among primates other than us, achieving parity with human society.‡ ~ Melissa Holbrook Pierson, #NFDB
1023:On the Soyuz, there’s simply not room to fly someone whose main contribution is expertise in a single area. The Russian rocket ship only carries three people, and between them they need to cover off a huge matrix of skills. Some are obvious: piloting the rocket, spacewalking, operating the robotic elements of the ISS like Canadarm2, being able to repair things that break on Station, conducting and monitoring the numerous scientific experiments on board. But since the crew is going to be away from civilization for many months, they also need to be able to do things like perform basic surgery and dentistry, program a computer and rewire an electrical panel, take professional-quality photographs and conduct a press conference—and get along harmoniously with colleagues, 24/7, in a confined space. ~ Chris Hadfield, #NFDB
1024:If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
1025:I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again. ~ Alexander Shulgin, #NFDB
1026:The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration advantages spelled out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals released from formerly prescribed entropy-preoccupying tasks for their respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in further anti-entropic effectiveness. ~ Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, #NFDB
1027:The more difficult it becomes to process a series of statements, the less credit you give them overall. During metacognition, the process of thinking about your own thinking, if you take a step back and notice that one way of looking at an argument is much easier than another, you will tend to prefer the easier way to process information and then leap to the conclusion that it is also more likely to be correct. In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. Similarly, a barrage of counterarguments taking up a full page seems to be less persuasive to a naysayer than a single, simple, powerful statement. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
1028:As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1029:In 1701, a braggadocian teenager named Johann Friedrich Böttger, ecstatic at the crowd he’d rallied with a few white lies, pulled out two silver coins for a magic show. After he waved his hands and performed chemical voodoo on them, the silver pieces “disappeared,” and a single gold piece materialized in their place. It was the most convincing display of alchemy the locals had ever seen. Böttger thought his reputation was set, and unfortunately it was. Rumors about Böttger inevitably reached the king of Poland, Augustus the Strong, who arrested the young alchemist and locked him, Rumpelstiltskin-like, in a castle to spin gold for the king’s realm. Obviously, Böttger couldn’t deliver on this demand, and after a few futile experiments, this harmless liar, still quite young, found himself a candidate for hanging. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1030:Perhaps you’re thinking, Okay, Max, but I’m not color-blind. And I’m looking at the external reality right now with my own eyes, and I’d have to be paranoid to think it’s not the way it looks. But please try these simple experiments: Experiment 1: Turn your head from left to right a few times. Experiment 2: Move your eyes from left to right a few times, without moving your head. Did you notice how the first time, the external reality appeared to rotate, and the second time, it appeared to stay still, even though your eyeballs rotated both times? This proves that what your mind’s eye is looking at isn’t the external reality, but a reality model stored in your brain! If you looked at the image recorded by a rotating video camera, you’d clearly see it move as it did in Experiment 1. But your eyes are a form of ~ Max Tegmark, #NFDB
1031:Long-Term Results The practical value of the solutions obtained is one way to determine if the subjective reports of accomplishments might be temporary euphoria. The nature of these solutions covered a broad spectrum, including: A new approach to the design of a vibratory microtome A commercial building design, accepted by the client Space-probe experiments devised to measure solar properties Design of a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device An engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder A chair design modeled and accepted by the manufacturer A letterhead design approved by the customer A mathematical theorem regarding NOR-gate circuits Completion of a furniture-line design A new conceptual model of a photon found to be useful A design of a private dwelling approved by the client Table 9.3 ~ James Fadiman, #NFDB
1032:In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present. ~ Amanda Ripley, #NFDB
1033:The Sheep
The Sheep adorns the landscape rural
And is both singular and plural—
It gives grammarians the creeps
To hear one say, 'A flock of sheeps.'
The Sheep is gentle, meek and mild,
And led in herds by man or child—
Being less savage than the rabbit,
Sheep are gregarious by habit.
The Sheep grows wool and thus promotes
The making of vests, pants and coats—
Vests, pants and coats and woolen cloths
Provide good food for hungry moths.
With vegetables added to
The Sheep, we get our mutton stew—
Experiments long since revealed
The Sheep should first be killed and peeled.
Thus, with our debt to them so deep,
All men should cry 'Praise be for Sheep!'—
And, if we happen to be shepherds,
'Praise be they’re not as fierce as leopards!'
~ Ellis Parker Butler,#NFDB
1034:Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1035:Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3 The consequences for the rising generation and future generations of the statists’ immoral, politically expedient, and economically ruinous behavior and policies are unambiguous as evidenced by statistic after statistic, which are mainly ignored, discounted, or excused by most of the media, academia, and, of course, governing statists. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the eventual societal turmoil these facts and figures portend—evidence all Americans, and especially younger people, must heed. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
1036:Wilson-Donovan had already submitted their application to the FDA in January, months before. Based on the information they were developing now, they were going to ask for Vicotec to be put on the “Fast Track,” pressing ahead with human trials of the drug, and eventually early release, once the FDA saw how safe it was and Wilson-Donovan proved it to them. The “Fast Track” process was used in order to speed the various steps toward approval, in the case of drugs to be used in life-threatening diseases. Once they got approval from the FDA, they were going to start with a group of one hundred people who would sign informed consent agreements, acknowledging the potential dangers of the treatment. They were all so desperately ill, it would be their only hope, and they knew it. The people who signed up for experiments like this were ~ Danielle Steel, #NFDB
1037:In many experiments, the boundary between seeing and not seeing is relatively sharp: an image is downright invisible when presented for 40 milliseconds, but is easily seen, on most trials, when the duration is increased to 60 milliseconds. This fonding justifies the use of the words subliminal (below threshhold) and supraliminal (above threshhold). Metaphorically, the gateway to consciousness is a well-defined threshhold, and a flashed image is either in or out. The length of the threshhold varies across subjects, but it always falls close to 50 milliseconds. At this duration, one perceives the flashed image about half the time. Presenting visual stimuli at threshhold therefore offers a wonderfully controlled experimental paradigm: the objective stimulus is constant, yet its subjective perception varies from trial to trial. ~ Stanislas Dehaene, #NFDB
1038:Those who believe it is immoral to kill animals for any reason, including eating and humane medical experimentation, should reflect on this: While there are strong links between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans, there are no links between kindness to animals and kindness to humans. Cruelty to animals frequently indicates a tendency toward cruelty to fellow human beings. But kindness to animals does not indicate that a person will be kind to other people. The Nazis, noted for their cruelty to human beings, were also the most pro-animal-rights group prior to the contemporary period. They outlawed experimentation on animals—but performed widespread experiments on human beings. And Hitler was famously affectionate toward his German shepherd, Blondie, while consigning millions of people to hellish misery and agonizing death. ~ Dennis Prager, #NFDB
1039:psychologists have shown that an individual’s choices and behavior can be influenced by “priming” them with particular words, sounds, or other stimuli. Subjects in experiments who read words like “old” and “frail” walk more slowly down the corridor when they leave the lab. Consumers in wine stores are more likely to buy German wine when German music is playing in the background, and French wine when French music is playing. Survey respondents asked about energy drinks are more likely to name Gatorade when they are given a green pen in order to fill out the survey. And shoppers looking to buy a couch online are more likely to opt for an expensive, comfortable-looking couch when the background of the website is of fluffy white clouds, and more likely to buy the harder, cheaper option when the background consists of dollar coins.11 ~ Duncan J Watts, #NFDB
1040:Consider how the principles of the law of accelerating returns apply to the epochs we discussed in the first chapter. The combination of amino acids into proteins and of nucleic acids into strings of RNA established the basic paradigm of biology. Strings of RNA (and later DNA) that self-replicated (Epoch Two) provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Later on, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought (Epoch Three) with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology (Epoch Four). The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking (Epoch Five), which will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1041:Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external,” Lam, the professor, said. “To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck.” In surveys, Chinese casino gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino. The behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee have compared Chinese and American approaches to financial risk. In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth. ~ Evan Osnos, #NFDB
1042:Al Hershey had sent me a long letter from Cold Spring Harbor summarizing the recently completed experiments by which he and Martha Chase established that a key feature of the infection of a bacterium by a phage was the injection of the viral DNA into the host bacterium. Most important, very little protein entered the bacterium. Their experiment was thus a powerful new proof that DNA is the primary genetic material. Nonetheless, almost no one in the audience of over four hundred microbiologists seemed interested as I read long sections of Hershey’s letter. Obvious exceptions were André Lwoff, Seymour Benzer, and Gunther Stent, all briefly over from Paris. They knew that Hershey’s experiments were not trivial and that from then on everyone was going to place more emphasis on DNA. To most of the spectators, however, Hershey’s name carried no weight. ~ James D Watson, #NFDB
1043:Our past is not sacred for being past, and there is much that is behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us, and to which, it is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience: the divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political executions, forced castration, vivisection, bearbaiting, honorable duels, chastity belts, trial by ordeal, child labor, human and animal sacrifice, the stoning of heretics, cannibalism, sodomy laws, taboos against contraception, human radiation experiments - the lists is nearly endless, and if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of abuses for which religion could be found directly responsible is likely to remain undiminished. In fact, almost every indignity just mentioned can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence, to an uncritical faith in one dogma or another. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1044:The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. We feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. And yet quantum mechanics and other branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. Physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together, so that they behave like a pair of magic coins: if you flip them, each will land on heads or tails—but always on the same side as its partner. They act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. Those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. These particles violate locality. They transcend space. ~ George Musser, #NFDB
1045:It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. ... As the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us. ~ Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861), #NFDB
1046:It is generally agreed by modern cosmologist that we have established the general framework of how the universe behaved from when it was just one second old until the present, some fifteen billion years later. This is not to claim that we understand everything that occurred. We do not understand the detailed process by which galaxies formed, but such processes actually exert a negligible influence upon the course of the overall expansion. Prior to one second after the apparent beginning, we are on all together shakier ground. We no longer have direct fossil remnants from the early Universe against which to check the accuracy of our reconstruction of its history. In order to reconstruct the history of the universe in these first instants we require knowledge of the behavior of matter at far higher energies than are accessible to us by terrestrial experiments. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
1047:Following the experiments of Davisson and Germer and Thomson, scientists showed that all subatomic particles behave like waves: beams of protons and neutrons will diffract off samples of atoms in exactly the same way that electrons do. In fact, neutron diffraction is now a standard tool for determining the structure of materials at the atomic level: scientists can deduce how atoms are arranged by looking at the interference patterns that result when a beam of neutrons bounces off their sample. Knowing the structure of materials at the atomic level allows materials scientists to design stronger and lighter materials for use in cars, planes, and space probes. Neutron diffraction can also be used to determine the structure of biological materials like proteins and enzymes, providing critical information for scientists searching for new drugs and medical treatments. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
1048:Ballade At Thirty-Five
This, no song of an ingénue,
This, no ballad of innocence;
This, the rhyme of a lady who
Followed ever her natural bents.
This, a solo of sapience,
This, a chantey of sophistry,
This, the sum of experiments, -I loved them until they loved me.
Decked in garments of sable hue,
Daubed with ashes of myriad Lents,
Wearing shower bouquets of rue,
Walk I ever in penitence.
Oft I roam, as my heart repents,
Through God's acre of memory,
Marking stones, in my reverence,
"I loved them until they loved me."
Pictures pass me in long review,-Marching columns of dead events.
I was tender, and, often, true;
Ever a prey to coincidence.
Always knew I the consequence;
Always saw what the end would be.
We're as Nature has made us -- hence
I loved them until they loved me.
~ Dorothy Parker,#NFDB
1049:Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1050:Much of the colony’s musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called “time span.” What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp—or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting compositions. But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography—much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1051:Adding variability increased the frequency of the pigeons completing the intended action. Skinner’s pigeons tell us a great deal about what helps drive our own behaviors. More recent experiments reveal that variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.[lxxiv] Researchers observed increased dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens in experiments involving monetary rewards as well as in a study of heterosexual men viewing images of attractive women’s faces.[lxxv] Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check email, browse the web, or bargain-shop. I propose that variable rewards come in three types: Tribe, hunt and self (figure 20). Habit-forming products utilize one or more of these variable reward types. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
1052:Kuhn argued that most research is “normal science”—studies that add more detail to existing knowledge and theories. Normal science, however, usually suppresses the contradictions, the observations that don’t fit the frameworks that the scientific community shares. Over time these discrepancies grow into crises until someone comes along to propose a paradigm shift, a new way to understand natural forces, a new set of questions, a new way to search and research. Kuhn described these paradigm shifts as scientific revolutions. They require paradigm destruction—the shedding of the previous paradigm. The new paradigm changes how scientists understand phenomena. It changes what scientists see and how they act in designing experiments. Paradigm shifts count as insights because the result is a shift from a mediocre frame to one that provides a better understanding of the same phenomenon. ~ Gary Klein, #NFDB
1053:Subsequent experiments conducted by Tom Danley in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and in Chambers above the King's Chamber suggest that the pyramid was constructed with a sonic purpose. Danley identifies four resident frequencies, or notes, that are enhanced by the structure of the pyramid, and by the materials used in its construction.
The notes form an F Sharp chord, which according to ancient Egyptian texts were the harmonic of our planet. Moreover, Danley's tests show that these frequencies are present in the King's Chamber even when no sounds are being produced. They are there in frequencies that range from 16 Hertz down to 1/2 Hertz, well below the range of human hearing. According to Danley, these vibrations are caused by the wind blowing across the ends of the so-called shafts—in the same way as sounds are created when one blows across the top of a bottle. ~ Christopher Dunn,#NFDB
1054:All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and
modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and
controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among
many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence. ~ John Stuart Mill,#NFDB
1055:areas, and brilliantly, too. Leonardo is known as one of the greatest painters who ever lived, and many argue he was the greatest artist ever. However, his genius went far beyond the easel and his paintbrushes. His mind could conceive of almost anything, from a beautiful representation of Heaven to graphical illustrations of the human body in a time when there were no such things as CAT scans or x-rays. Leonardo’s lifetime was spent observing and doing so in many different venues. His notebooks were filled with examples of what it means to be human. He looked at life from numerous perspectives and recorded all he saw. From light and shade to perspective and visual perception, from botany and landscape to physical sciences and astronomy, from architecture and planning to sculpture and experiments, from inventing to philosophy, there was nothing that didn’t touch Leonardo da Vinci. ~ Hourly History, #NFDB
1056:And then, Joyce's experiments with language in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. And Korzybski's Science and Sanity, which encouraged me in my Joycean tendency to suspect that language is full of traps and it's the job of the writer to find his way around the traps in language and not just fall into them. I think there are two types of writers--those who are aware of the traps in language and try to avoid them--not always successfully. We're not all geniuses, we make mistakes. And the second type is those who aren't aware of the traps and fall into them on one page after another. Tucker was aware of that too--the traps in language. So Nietzsche, Tucker, Joyce, and Korzybski have all influenced me to look at language in a peculiar way. I see language as a means of human liberation, potentially--and the main mechanism of human slavery most of the time. It depends on how you use language. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
1057:I discovered,” said Harry through gritted teeth, “that when it comes to doing truly basic research on a genuinely confusing problem where you have no clue what’s going on, my books on scientific methodology aren’t worth crap -” “Language, Mr. Potter! Some of us are innocent young girls!” “Fine. But if my books were worth a carp, that’s a kind of fish not anything bad, they would have given me the following important piece of advice: When there’s a confusing problem and you’re just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don’t worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. Just check as fast as possible whether your ideas are false before you start investing huge amounts of effort in them. How does that sound for a moral? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1058:In experiments he reported in 1982 and 1985, Libet asked volunteers to decide to flick or flex their wrist whenever they chose. These movements were to be performed, as Libet put it, “capriciously, free of any external limitations or restrictions.” Devices on the subjects’ scalps detected the readiness potential that marks neuronal events associated with preparation for movement. Libet found that this readiness potential began, on average, 550 milliseconds before the activation of the muscles moving the wrist. But not all readiness potentials were followed by movements. “The brain was evidently beginning the volitional process in this voluntary act well before the activation of the muscle that produced the movement,” Libet noted in 1999. That is, the readiness potential he was detecting appeared too long before muscle activation to correspond directly with a motor command to the muscle. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1059:As we have seen, the modern mind has a distorted image of itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush, and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings and inklings, as well as through clear, conscious thoughts. Experiments tell us that just interacting with complex situations without trying to figure them out can deliver a quality of understanding that defies reason and articulation. Other studies have shown that confusion may be a vital precursor to the discovery of a good idea. To be able to meet the uncertain challenges of the contemporary world, we need to heed the message of this research, and to expand our repertoire of ways of learning and knowing to reclaim the full gamut of cognitive possibilities. ~ Guy Claxton, #NFDB
1060:Here's a possible way forward. In introducing the holographic principle, the perspective I've taken is to imagine that everything we experience lies in the interior of spacetime, with the unexpected twist being processes, mirroring those experiences, which take place on a distant boundary. Let's reverse that perspective. Imagine that our universe-or, more precisely, the quarks and gluons in our universe-lives on the boundary, and so that's where the RHIC experiments take place. Now invoke Maldacena. His result shows that the RHIC experiments (described by quantum field theory) have an alternative mathematical description in terms of strings moving in the bulk. The details are involved but the power of rephrasing is immediate: difficult calculations in the boundary description (where the coupling is large) are translated into easier calculations in the bulk description (where the coupling is small). ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
1061:The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hundred and fifty years. Now we take it on. Our movement. The new wave of attack."
"And fill a ditch in our turn," said Irwell.
"Maybe we're over the last ditch," said Rud. "There must be a last ditch somewhere...
"All other revolutionary movements have been experiments so far, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and more or less failures. They were experiments in liberation and they did not liberate. The old things wriggled back. But ours may be the experiment that succeeds. We may get to the Common-sense World State. Yes -- we -- in this room...Why not? It has to come somehow, somewhen... If it doesn't come pretty soon, there won't be much of humanity left to liberate. ~ H G Wells,#NFDB
1062:accounting for their phenomena by their combinations, and making both eternal and obedient to eternal and immutable law. The speculations of men of science have carried them to the outermost verge of the physical universe. Behind them lie not only a thousand brilliant triumphs by which a part of Nature's secrets have been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom her deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jäger, claims to have proved that man's soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole, but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent ~ Henry Steel Olcott, #NFDB
1063:A big stash allows me to have a fluid sense of creativity - a looseness that is very much like playing. It opens me up, unlocks things. The creative bit takes all the other pieces - the possibility, the abundance, the connections, and the actual work of making yarn - bundles them, and explodes like a glitter bomb. It gets everywhere, it makes me smile, and a I can't escape it.
My stash is the spark. Even if I haven't spun for days or weeks, even when I'm feeling dull-witted or anti-craft, I still spend time with my stash. It pulls on doors that have been locked, slides under the crack and clicks them open from the inside. After an hour tossing my fibers around, I am revitalized for making yarn, yes, but for things well beyond that, too. My sash fees like an extension of me that I sometimes forget about: the part that plays, that connects things that don't seem to go, that experiments and makes things. ~ Clara Parkes,#NFDB
1064:But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to shift a person’s motivation. In the short term, in fact, it can be surprisingly easy. Let’s stay in the candy aisle for a bit longer and consider a couple of experiments done decades ago involving IQ and M&M’s. In the first test, conducted in northern California in the late 1960s, a researcher named Calvin Edlund selected seventy-nine children between the ages of five and seven, all from “low-middle class and lower-class homes.” The children were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. First, they all took a standard version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Seven weeks later, they took a similar test, but this time the kids in the experimental group were given one M&M for each correct answer. On the first test, the two groups were evenly matched on IQ. On the second test, the IQ of the M&M group went up an average of twelve points—a huge leap. ~ Paul Tough, #NFDB
1065:to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
1066:Experience constrains and checks our fancies, prejudices, and speculations. When empiricist and phenomenalist philosophers became more concerned with the character of “sensations,” “impressions,” “sense data,” etc., the brute constraining force of experience tended to get obscured and neglected. But the insight that originally led philosophers to valorize experience – its brute compulsiveness – is what Peirce underscores with Secondness. Acknowledgment of this bruteness – the way in which experience “says NO!” – is required to make sense of the self-corrective character of inquiry and experimentation. Experiments must always finally be checked by experience. Peirce would have been repelled and horrified by Rorty’s claim that the only constraints upon us are “conversational constraints.” To speak in this manner is to ignore the facticity, the surprise, shock, and brute constraint of our experiential encounters. ~ Richard J Bernstein, #NFDB
1067:Two experiments demonstrated that subvocalization is of value in reading for certain types of meaning. Blocking subvocalization by requiring subjects to count or say “cola-colacola …” aloud impaired their reading comprehension but generally not their listening comprehension. The effect of blocking subvocalization was found to be specific to tests that required integration of concepts within or across sentences, as contrasted with tests that required only memory of individual word concepts. Two hypotheses were offered: first, that subvocalization results in a more durable memory representation needed for integration of concepts; and second, that subvocalization enables a prosodic restructuring that makes information needed for sentence comprehension accessible. ~ Maria L. Slowiaczek, Charles Clifton Jr., “Subvocalization and reading for meaning”,Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Volume 19, Issue 5, October 1980, Pages 573-582, #NFDB
1068:Two experiments are reported in which subjects viewed films of automobiled accidents and then answered questions about events occurring in the films. The question, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” elicited higher estimates of speed than questions which used the verbs collided, bumped, contacted, or hit in place of smashed. On a retest one week later, those subjects who received the verb smashed were more likely to say “yes” to the question, “Did you see any broken glass?”, even though broken glass was not present in the film. These results are consistent with the view that the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one's memory of that event. ~ Loftus EF, Palmer JC (1974). "Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory". Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior. 13(5): 585–589. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(74)80011-3. p. 585, #NFDB
1069:The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions. And if any one asks, as so many are asking: 'What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior scientific plumber in Pimlico?' the answer is obvious enough. 'The use of it is that he may have some power of comparison, which will not only prevent him from supposing that Pimlico covers the whole planet, but also enable him, while doing full credit to the beauties and virtues of Pimlico, to point out that, here and there, as revealed by alternative experiments, even Pimlico may conceal somewhere a defect. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1070:In this process of guessing, computing consequences, and comparing with experiment, we can get stuck at various stages. We may get stuck in the guessing stage, when we have no ideas. Or we may get stuck in the computing stage. For example, Yukawa* guessed an idea for the nuclear forces in 1934, but nobody could compute the consequences because the mathematics was too difficult, and so they could not compare his idea with experiment. The theories remained for a long time, until we discovered all these extra particles which were not contemplated by Yukawa, and therefore it is undoubtedly not as simple as the way Yukawa did it. Another place where you can get stuck is at the experimental end. For example, the quantum theory of gravitation is going very slowly, if at all, because all the experiments that you can do never involve quantum mechanics and gravitation at the same time. The gravity force is too weak compared with the electrical force. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1071:It’s called being in love. It’s more frightening than confronting your deepest fear and opens you to being hurt beyond the physical plane.” He placed a hand over his heart. “It might seem as though it’s a weakness to you but it is proof that we are more than numbers, experiments, or whatever else Mercile intended us to be. It takes bravery and strength to feel such strong emotions for one person when we were denied from birth the chance to ever care about anything or anyone. I’m not saying it’s easy or painless. It is probably one of the most complex things I’ve experienced. Jessie is my life. My heart beats for her and I will admit to all that I wouldn’t want to go on if I lost her. The unmated ones don’t understand and are currently looking confused or horrified. I’m hopeful they’ll know the ups and downs of falling in love one day. It’s a gift and a curse at times but everyone should experience it. It’s a part of life and we are survivors. ~ Laurann Dohner, #NFDB
1072:However, the answer can be inferred from the WMAP data, by measuring the sizes of the temperature fluctuations—the hot and cold (light and dark) splotches in Figure 3 ([>]). Before WMAP was launched, theorists had already worked out how big the physical sizes of the strongest fluctuations should be. Converting that into apparent angular size in the sky depends on the geometry of space: if the universe is positively curved, it would make the angles appear larger, while negative curvature would make them smaller. If the universe is geometrically flat (that is, has Euclidean geometry), the angular size of the strongest hot and cold fluctuations should be about 1° across. The results that flowed back from the satellite were definitive.14 The fluctuations were very close to 1° in size, a result confirmed by ground-based and balloon-based experiments. Cosmologists then declared that to within observational accuracy of about 2 percent, space is flat.15 ~ Paul Davies, #NFDB
1073:But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer?
In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and his grant applications in jeopardy, Marshall performed the ultimate experiment: "On the morning of the experiment, I omitted my breakfast….Two hours later, Neil Noakes scraped a heavily inoculated 4 day culture plate of Helicobacter and dispersed the bacteria in alkaline peptone water (a kind of meat broth used to keep bacteria alive). I fasted until 10 am when Neil handed me a 200 ml beaker about one quarter full of the cloudy brown liquid. I drank it down in one gulp then fasted for the rest of the day. A few stomach gurgles occurred. Was it the bacteria or was I just hungry? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,#NFDB
1074:You can't cure people of their character,' she read.
After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you? ~ M John Harrison,#NFDB
1075:Moreover, do the experiments which are supposed to prove the constant character of the speed oflight really get beyond the earthly sphere, and do they not imply both space and time as usually imagined by us? Thus '300,000 km per second' is stated to be the speed of light, and it is held that here is a value which, if it be not necessarily everywhere expressed in this manner, does nonetheless remain constant throughout the physical universe. The astronomer who counts, by referring to the lines of the spectrum, the light-years separating us from the nebula of Andromeda, supposes without more ado that the universe is every-where 'woven' in the same manner. Now, what would happen if the constant character of the speed of light ever came to be doubted and there is every likelihood that it will be sooner or later so that the only fixed pivot of Einstein's theory would fall down? The whole modern conception of the universe would immediately dissolve like a mirage. ~ Titus Burckhardt, #NFDB
1076:One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin:—they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough? Was my will directly opposed to all deception of the senses, and courageous in its defence against fantastic notions?"—None of them ever asked these questions, nor to this day do any of the good religious people ask them. They have rather a thirst for things which are contrary to reason, and they don't want to have too much difficulty in satisfying this thirst,—so they experience "miracles" and "regenerations," and hear the voices of angels! But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences as in the case of a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We ourselves want to be our own experiments, and our own subjects of experiment. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1077:Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1078:Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience....
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real. ~ Jaron Lanier,#NFDB
1079:This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the same time it fueled the skepticism of colleagues who remained psychedelic virgins. Yet a third challenge was how to fit psychedelics into the existing structures of science and psychiatry, if indeed that was possible. How do you do a controlled experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect? When “set” and “setting” play such a big role in the patient’s experience, how can you hope to isolate a single variable or design a therapeutic application? ~ Michael Pollan, #NFDB
1080:but I think there will certainly not be perpetual novelty, say for a thousand years. This thing cannot keep on going so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other. It seems to me that what can happen in the future is either that all the laws become known – that is, if you had enough laws you could compute consequences and they would always agree with experiment, which would be the end of the line – or it may happen that the experiments get harder and harder to make, more and more expensive, so you get 99.9 per cent of the phenomena, but there is always some phenomenon which has just been discovered, which is very hard to measure, and which disagrees; and as soon as you have the explanation of that one there is always another one, and it gets slower and slower and more and more uninteresting. That is another way it may end. But I think it has to end in one way or another. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1081:As discussed in Chapter 2, data gathered from A/B tests by Ronny Kohavi, who directed Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization group before joining Microsoft as General Manager of its Experimentation Platform, reveal that 60%–90% of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to improve. Thus if we’re not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, the chances are that about 2/3 of the work we are doing is of either zero or negative value to our customers — and certainly of negative value to our organization, since this work costs us in three ways. In addition to the cost of developing the features, there is an opportunity cost associated with more valuable work we could have done instead, and the cost of the new complexity they add to our systems (which manifests itself as the cost of maintaining the code, a drag on the rate at which we can develop new functionality, and often, reduced operational stability and performance). ~ Jez Humble, #NFDB
1082:Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing. ~ Alex Gaskarth, #NFDB
1083:The common law does not proceed by legislation, or by imposing directives and decrees on a reluctant population. It proceeds by resolving conflicts, and discovering the rules that are implicit in those conflicts and in the behaviour that gives rise to them. Common law is discovered law, and its principles are not imposed from above but extracted from below, by judges whose aim is to do justice in the individual case, rather than to reform the conduct of mankind. Its rights are not stated but implied, and they encapsulate a vision of individual freedom rather than a politics of collective conformity. The rights dreamed up in the European Courts, by judges who do not pay the cost of imposing them, are experiments in social engineering, rather than recognitions of individual sovereignty, and this is in no matter more evident than in those clauses that have imposed the mores of the elite on a reluctant residue of Christian believers, and which are now ubiquitous in our statutory law. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
1084:Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. ~ Steven Hassan, #NFDB
1085:The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother Is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action? ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1086:In sum, reliance on cognitive characteristics beyond sentience to justify the use of nonhumans in experiments requires either that we assume that these characteristics are morally relevant or that we ignore the fact that we do not regard the lack of such characteristics as morally relevant where humans are concerned. We are left with one and only one reason to explain our differential treatment of animals: We are human and they are not, and species difference alone justifies differential treatment. But this criterion is entirely arbitrary and no different from maintaining that, although there is no special characteristic possessed only by whites, or no defect possessed by blacks that is not also possessed by whites, we may treat blacks as inferior to whites merely on the basis of race. It is also no different from saying that, although there is no special characteristic possessed only by men or no defect possessed only by women, we may treat women as inferior to men based merely on sex. ~ Gary L Francione, #NFDB
1087:Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.”
A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry. ~ Carol Muske Dukes,#NFDB
1088:The canonical example of this phenomenon is an experiment run by the British scientist Francis Galton. In 1906, Galton collected data from a group of people at a country fair who were trying to guess the weight of a fat ox. Of the roughly eight hundred people who wagered a guess, most were wide of the mark. However, the average of all their guesses was nearly perfect. This experiment would later be repeated many times. Oddly, researchers learned that the key to the experiment was that each person needed to judge the weight of the ox independently, without sharing their guesses with one another. In similar experiments where people were given access to one another’s answers, the collective intelligence of the group worsened. Often, the early guesses provoked a false consensus to form, a vicious circle that caused the later guesses to hurtle toward ever-greater error. “The more influence a group’s members exert on each other,” wrote Surowiecki, “the less likely it is that the group’s decisions will be wise ones. ~ Robert Moor, #NFDB
1089:I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence. ~ Freeman Dyson, in "Progress In Religion : A Talk By Freeman Dyson", his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize, Washington National Cathedral (9 May 2000), #NFDB
1090:Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we shoot a few thousand objectively harmful people, the humanitarians all over the world foam at the mouth. Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself? ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1091:This was it. This would be my final mission. An overwhelming sadness swept over me at the realization. There would be no more racing across campus to replace the missing arm of the Caesar Augustus statue with one made of pink duct tape. My mind would no longer be used as a photographic tool to unveil a terrorist’s plan. No more last-minute science experiments to help rescue a father and daughter from a terrorist organization. I wouldn’t get to rescue myself with the aid of a Millard-enhanced device. No more disguises involving wigs and glasses to save a Van Gogh painting. The Mariinsky Theatre, the Superman building, the Louvre—my stories would disappear, along with my memories. Light had vanished around me as the ocean swallowed me. I’d been unable to save a helpless girl from her evil kidnapper. In the darkness I heard Daly’s voice, clear and strong, almost like he was there. Don’t give up. Fight. Push yourself. Alexandra Stewart can make a masterpiece out of any canvas. He was right—I couldn’t give up. (page 206) ~ Robin M King, #NFDB
1092:Curious how much gas lurks among the stars in galaxies? Radio telescopes do that best. There is no knowledge of the cosmic background, and no real understanding of the big bang, without microwave telescopes. Want to peek at stellar nurseries deep inside galactic gas clouds? Pay attention to what infrared telescopes do. How about emissions from the vicinity of ordinary black holes and supermassive black holes in the center of a galaxy? Ultraviolet and X-ray telescopes do that best. Want to watch the high-energy explosion of a giant star, whose mass is as great as forty suns? Catch the drama via gamma ray telescopes.
We’ve come a long way since Herschel’s experiments with rays that were “unfit for vision,” empowering us to explore the universe for what it is, rather than for what it seems to be. Herschel would be proud. We achieved true cosmic vision only after seeing the unseeable: a dazzlingly rich collection of objects and phenomena across space and across time that we may now dream of in our philosophy. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
1093:feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can’t take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can’t Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can’t buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1094:Anger, however, does make us irrational. There are many studies showing that the extent to which we punish wrongdoers corresponds to the extent of our anger. One set of experiments got people angry by showing them certain films and then asking them to judge appropriate punishments for actions that had nothing to do with what they were watching in the films. Even here, when it made no sense, the angry subjects were more punitive. This does sound pretty bad. Many evolutionary theorists would agree that anger is a valuable adaptation, essential for our existence as a social and cooperative species. Generous and kind behavior cannot evolve unless individuals can make it costly for those predisposed to game the system and prey on others. So we have evolved emotions, including anger, that drive us to lash out at bad actors, and this makes kindness and cooperation successful. It would be a mistake, then, to see anger simply as noise in the machine, something useless and arbitrary. On the contrary, it is one of the foundations of human kindness. ~ Paul Bloom, #NFDB
1095:Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties. ~ Robert Graves, #NFDB
1096:The basic rule of the psychic universe is that “like attracts like.” Similarly, “love promotes love,” so that the person who has let go of a lot of inner negativity is surrounded by loving thoughts, loving events, loving people, and loving pets. This phenomenon explains many scriptural quotations and common sayings that have puzzled the intellect, such as, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” and “Those who have, get.” As a general rule, therefore, people who are carrying the consciousness of apathy bring poverty circumstances into their lives, and those with a prosperity consciousness bring abundance into their lives. Because all living things are connected on vibrational energy levels, our basic emotional state is picked up and reacted to by all life forms around us. It is well known that animals can instantly read a person’s basic emotional state. There are experiments demonstrating that even the growth of bacteria is affected by human emotions, and that plants register measurable reactions to our emotional state (Backster, 2003). ~ David R Hawkins, #NFDB
1097:What are you storing up there?" Virginia Dare yelled from the stairwell below. The immortal was outlined with a translucent green aura that lifted her fine black hair off her back and shoulders like a cloak.
"Just a few small alchemical experiments...," Dee began.
A thunderous explosion dropped the trio to their knees. Bits of plaster rained down from the ceiling and a heavy smell of sewage filled the stairwell.
"And one or two big ones," he added.
"We need to get out of here.The entire building is going to collapse," Dare said. She turned and continued down the stairs, Dee and Josh close on her heels.
Josh breathed deeply. "Am I smelling burning bread?" he asked, surprised.
Dare glanced back up at Dee. "I don't even want to know what that smell is coming from."
"No,you don't," the doctor agreed.
When they reachd the bottom of the stairs,Virginia flung herself against the double doors but bounced off them. They were padlocked, a thick chain woven through their handles.
"I'm sure that breaches a fire code," Dee murmured. ~ Michael Scott,#NFDB
1098:Indeed, Aristotle makes as many mistakes as possible for a man who is founding the science of biology. He thinks, for example, that the male element in reproduction merely stimulates and quickens; it does not occur to him (what we now know from experiments in parthenogenesis) that the essential function of the sperm is not so much to fertilize the ovum as to provide the embryo with the heritable qualities of the male parent, and so permit the offspring to be a vigorous variant, a new admixture of two ancestral lines. As human dissection was not practised in his time, he is particularly fertile in physiological errors: he knows nothing of muscles, not even of their existence; he does not distinguish arteries from veins; he thinks the brain is an organ for cooling the blood; he believes, forgivably, that man has more sutures in the skull than woman; he believes, less forgivably, that man has only eight ribs on each side; he believes, incredibly, and unforgivably, that woman has fewer teeth than man.25 Apparently his relations with women were of the most amicable kind. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1099:Mara, remember how you kicked sand into that neighbor child’s eyes? I yelled at you and made you apologize in your best dress, and that night I cried by myself in the bathroom because you are Bad’s child as much as you are mine. Remember when you ran into the plate glass window and cut your arms so badly we had to drive you to the nearest hospital in the pickup truck, and when it was over Bad begged me to replace the backseat because of all the blood? Or when Tristan told us that he wanted to invite a boy to prom and you put your arm around him like this? Mara, remember? Your own babies? Your husband with his Captain Ahab beard and calloused hands and the house you bought in Vermont? Mara? How you still love your little brother with the ferocity of a star; an all-consuming love that will only end when one of you collapses? The drawings you handed us as children? Your paintings of dragons, Tristan’s photographs of dolls, your stories about anger, his poems about angels? The science experiments in the yard, blackening the grass to gloss? Your lives sated and[…] ~ Carmen Maria Machado, #NFDB
1100:In the late 1960's, physicists Steven Weinberg, Abdus Salam, and Sheldon Glashow conquered the next unification frontier. In a phenomenal piece of scientific work they showed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are nothing but different aspects of the same force, subsequently dubbed the electroweak force. The predictions of the new theory were dramatic. The electromagnetic force is produced when electrically charged particles exchange between them bundles of energy called photons. The photon is therefore the messenger of electromagnetism. The electroweak theory predicted the existence of close siblings to the photon, which play the messenger role for the weak force. These never-before-seen particles were prefigured to be about ninety times more massive than the proton and to come in both an electrically charged (called W) and a neutral (called Z) variety. Experiments performed at the European consortium for nuclear research in Geneva (known as CERN for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) discovered the W and Z particles in 1983 and 1984 respectively. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
1101:Correct it may be, but at its core quantum physics departs from classical physics in a very discomfiting way. Integral to quantum physics is the fundamental role played by the observer in choosing which of a plenitude of possible realities will leave the realm of the possible and become actual. For at its core, quantum physics challenges the ontology that permeated the scientific enterprise for centuries, the premise that a real world—independent of human choice and interference—is out there, uninfluenced by our observation of it. Quantum physics makes the seemingly preposterous claim (actually, more than claim, since it has been upheld in countless experiments) that there is no “is” until an observer makes an observation. Quantum phenomena seem to be called into existence by the very questions we ask nature, existing until then in an undefined fuzzy state. This feature of the quantum world led the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler to say that the world comes into being through our knowledge of it—or, as Wheeler put it, we get “its from bits” (bits of knowledge). ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1102:She had a significant following in Paris, where a group of hashish-eating daredevils, under the leadership of Dr. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, had been experimenting with monster doses (ten times the amount typically ingested at the soirees of Le Club des Haschischins) to send the soul on an ecstatic out-of-the-body journey through intrepid spheres. It was via Parisian theosophical contacts that the great Irish poet and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats first turned on to hashish. An avid occultist, Yeats much preferred hashish to peyote (the hallucinogenic cactus), which he also sampled. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its literary affiliate, the London-based Rhymers Club, which met in the 1890s. Emulating Le Club des Haschischins, the Rhymers used hashish to seduce the muse and stimulate occult insight.6 Another member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, was a notorious dope fiend and practitioner of the occult arts. Crowley conducted magical experiments while bingeing on morphine, cocaine, peyote, ether, and ganja. ~ Martin A Lee, #NFDB
1103:The alchemist of today is not hidden in caves and cellars, studying alone, but as he goes on with his work, it is seen that walls are built around him, and while he is in the world, like the master of old, he is not of it. As he goes further in his work, the light of other people's advice and outside help grows weaker and weaker, until finally he stands alone in darkness, and then comes the time that he must use his own lamp, and the various experiments which he has carried on must be his guide. He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ~ Manly P Hall, The Initiates of the Flame, #NFDB
1104:The cosmic sculptor had felt compelled to dot pupils onto the universe, yet had a tremendous terror of granting it sight. This balance of fear and desire resulted in the tininess of the stars against the hugeness of space, a declaration of caution above all. “See how the stars are points? The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically.” “But there’s nothing concrete to study in your cosmic sociology, Dr. Ye. Surveys and experiments aren’t really possible.” “That means your ultimate result will be purely theoretical. Like Euclidean geometry, you’ll set up a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation.” “It’s all fascinating, but what would the axioms of cosmic sociology be?” “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.” The ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1105:What we have been taught is that the ancient Egyptians were in posession of only simple hand tools, and that the only metals available to the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty, when the Giza Pyramids were built, were copper, gold, and silver. What is inferred, therefore, is that absent the tools made from these materials, the simple abrasive experiments actually demonstrate the stone-working methods of ancient Egypt. We are told that the ancient Egyptians had not yet developed the knowledge to extract the raw materials necessary to produce iron and steel. It has been suggested that they may have used meteoric iron, because they found it lying on the ground, but they did not mine the ore and smelt it in a foundry. Support for this view is the lack of evidence that they used tools made of any material other than copper, stone, and wood. Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although sophisticated tools made of iron or steel may not yet have been discovered in the archaeological record, what has been found is not adequate enough to explain how the artifacts were created. ~ Christopher Dunn, #NFDB
1106:For reasons I do not entirely understand, the clerisy after 1848 turned toward nationalism and socialism, and against liberalism, and came also to delight in an ever-expanding list of pessimisms about the way we live now in our approximately liberal societies, from the lack of temperance among the poor to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Antiliberal utopias believed to offset the pessimisms have been popular among the clerisy. Its pessimistic and utopian books have sold millions. But the twentieth-century experiments of nationalism and socialism, of syndicalism in factories and central planning for investment, of proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market, did not work. And most of the pessimisms about how we live now have proven to be mistaken. It is a puzzle. Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessimism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequality. Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider. ~ Deirdre N McCloskey, #NFDB
1107:How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy. Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion, once I was not the elephant I find I am. My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments with balance, the high-wire act and cones. We elephants are images of humility, as when we undertake our melancholy migrations to die. Did you know, though, that elephants were taught to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves? Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer. That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys: it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down. —DAN CHIASSON, “The Elephant ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
1108:It was a season of grand ballooning experiments in Paris; word of the flights, including a manned one in November 1783, spread rapidly.3 Jefferson sensed the revolutionary possibilities of human control of the air.4 “What think you of these balloons? They really begin to assume a serious face,” he wrote. Reports had people flying six miles in twenty minutes at three thousand feet. He took a jocular tone, but his words were prescient. “This discovery seems to threaten the prostration of fortified works unless they can be closed above, the destruction of fleets and what not. The French may now run over their laces, wines etc. to England duty free. The whole system of British statutes made on the supposition of goods being brought into some port must be revised. Inland countries may now become maritime states unless you choose rather to call them aerial ones as their commerce is in [the] future to be carried on through that element. But jesting apart I think this discovery may lead to things useful.” Ten years later, in Philadelphia, Jefferson saw the first successful manned balloon flight in America.5 His ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
1109:Is the solar system stable?’, which means ‘Could it change dramatically as a result of some tiny disturbance?’ In 1887 King Oscar II of Sweden offered a prize of 2,500 crowns for the answer. It took about a century for the world’s mathematicians to come up with a definite answer: ‘Maybe’. (It was a good answer, but they didn’t get paid. The prize had already been awarded to someone who didn’t get the answer and whose prizewinning article had a big mistake right at the most interesting part. But when he put it right, at his own expense, he invented Chaos Theory and paved the way for the ‘maybe’. Sometimes, the best answer is a more interesting question.) The point here is that stability is not about what a system is actually doing: it is about how the system would change if you disturbed it. Stability, by definition, deals with ‘what if?’. Because a lot of science is really about this non-existent world of thought experiments, our understanding of science must concern itself with worlds of the imagination as well as with worlds of reality. Imagination, rather than mere intelligence, is the truly human quality. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1110:For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first diligently to investigate the properties of things and establish them by experiment, and then later seek hypotheses to explain them. For hypotheses ought to be fitted merely to explain the properties of things and not to predetermine them [the hypotheses] except so far as they can be an aid to experiments. If any one offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see how anything certain can be determined in any science; for it is always possible to contrive hypotheses, one after another, which are found rich in new tribulations. Wherefore I judged that one should abstain from considering hypotheses as from a fallacious argument, and that the force of their argument must be removed, that one may arrive at a maturer and more general explanation. ~ Isaac Newton, Letter to Oldenburg (June 2, 1972) Isaaci Newtoni Opera (1782) vol. 4, pp. 314-315 as quoted in Appendix, Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (1934) Tr. Andrew Motte, Explanatory Appendix by Florian Cajori, #NFDB
1111:Many of the great world religions teach that God demands a particular faith and form of worship. It should not be surprising that SOME of the people who take these teachings seriously should sincerely regard these divine commands as incomparably more important than any merely secular virtues like tolerance or compassion or reason.
Across Asia and Africa the forces of religious enthusiasm are gathering strength, and reasom and tolerance are not safe even in the secular states of the West. The historian Huge Trevor-Roper has said that it was the spread of the spirit of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ended the burning pf the witches in Europe. We may need to rely again on the influence of science to preserve a sane wolrd.It's not the certainty of the scientific knowledge that fits it for this role, but its UNCERTAINTY. Seeing scientists change their minds again and again about the matters that can be studied directly in laboratory experiments, how can one take seriously the claims of religious traditions or sacred writings to certain knowledge about matters beyond human experience ~ Steven Weinberg,#NFDB
1112:Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.
Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.
And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life. ~ Oliver Sacks,#NFDB
1113:What are the stars? Such questions are as natural as an infant’s smile. We have always asked them. What is different about our time is that at last we know some of the answers. Books and libraries provide a ready means for finding out what those answers are. In biology there is a principle of powerful if imperfect applicability called recapitulation: in our individual embryonic development we retrace the evolutionary history of the species. There is, I think, a kind of recapitulation that occurs in our individual intellectual developments as well. We unconsciously retrace the thoughts of our remote ancestors. Imagine a time before science, a time before libraries. Imagine a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. We were then just about as smart, just as curious, just as involved in things social and sexual. But the experiments had not yet been done, the inventions had not yet been made. It was the childhood of genus Homo. Imagine the time when fire was first discovered. What were human lives like then? What did our ancestors believe the stars were? Sometimes, in my fantasies, I imagine there was someone who thought like this: We ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1114:Ah no,” he said, “I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look, you see what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioral research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run round mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behavior we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own …” Arthur’s voice trailed off. “Such subtlety …” said Slartibartfast, “one has to admire it.” “What?” said Arthur. “How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis. If it’s finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous.” He paused for effect. “You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyper-intelligent pandimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research program…. Let me tell you the whole story. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1115:In cognitive science, the tendency to give different responses to problems that have surface dissimilarities but that are really formally identical is termed a framing effect. Framing effects are very basic violations of the strictures of rational choice. In the technical literature of decision theory, the stricture that is being violated is called descriptive invariance-the stricture that choices should not change as the result of trivial rewordings of a problem.2 Subjects in framing experiments, when shown differing versions of the same choice situation, overwhelmingly agree that the differences in the problem representations should not affect their choice. If choices flip-flop based on problem characteristics that the subjects themselves view as irrelevant-then the subjects can be said to have no stable, well-ordered preferences at all. If a person's preference reverses based on inconsequential aspects of how the problem is phrased, the person cannot be described as maximizing expected
utility. Thus, such failures of descriptive invariance have quite serious implications for our view of whether or not people are rational. ~ Keith E Stanovich,#NFDB
1116:There were whole habitats where people had had their higher brain functions disengaged, so that they could live like sheep under the care of machines. In others, they’d had their minds implanted into monkeys or dolphins: lost in intricate arboreal power struggles or sorrowful sonar fantasies. Elsewhere, groups of scientists who’d had their minds reshaped by Pattern Jugglers plunged deep into the metastructure of spacetime, concocting elaborate experiments which tinkered with the very fundamentals of existence. One day, it was said, they’d discover a technique for faster-than-light propulsion, passing the secret to their allies who would install the necessary gadgetry in their habitats. The first anyone else would know about it would be when half the Glitter Band suddenly winked out of existence. The Glitter Band, in short, was a place where a reasonably curious human being could easily squander half a lifetime. But I didn’t think Reivich would spend much time there before making his way down to Yellowstone’s surface. He would want to lose himself in Chasm City as quickly as possible. Either way, I wouldn’t be far behind him. Still ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
1117:It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up. ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
1118:On The Mantelpiece
A thousand years went to her making,
A thousand years of experiments in pastes and glazes.
But now she stands
In all the glory of the finest porcelain and the most delicate paint,
A Dresden china shepherdess,
Flaunted before a tall mirror
On a high mantelpiece.
' Beautiful shepherdess,
I love the little pink rosettes on your shoes,
The angle of your hat sets my heart a singing.
Drop me the purple rose you carry in your hand
That I may cherish it,
And that, at my death,
Which I feel is not far off,
It may lie upon my bier. '
So the shepherdess threw the purple rose over the mantelpiece,
But it splintered in fragments on the hearth.
Then from below there came a sound of weeping,
And the shepherdess beat her hands
And cried:
' My purple rose is broken,
It was the flower of my heart. '
And she jumped off the mantelpiece
And was instantly shattered into seven hundred and twenty pieces.
But the little brown cricket who sang so sweetly
Scuttled away into a crevice of the marble
And went on warming his toes and chirping.
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
1119:The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out. ~ Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) pp. 9-10., #NFDB
1120:There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing. ~ Morris Berman, #NFDB
1121:What a mess,” [Rubashov] said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.”
Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. . . .”
“Yes,” said Rubashov. “. . . So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death . . . .
“We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. . . . Comrade Bogrov will not come to life again.”
“And what follows?” asked Ivanov. “Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil? We vouch for every act with our heads—more cannot be expected of us. In the opposite camp they are not so scrupulous. Any old idiot of a general can experiment with thousands of living bodies; and if he makes a mistake, he will at most be retired. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
1122:People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.
We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health. ~ James W Pennebaker,#NFDB
1123:Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth. ~ Jerry A Coyne, #NFDB
1124:The communities were in fierce competition with each other. They had their rich and their poor; they had orators and conquerors; they made war either for a domain or an idea. Though the various states acknowledged various forms of government, free institutions were beginning to preponderate; popular assemblies increased in power; republics soon became general; the democracy to which the most enlightened European politicians look forward as the extreme goal of political advancement, and which still prevailed among other subterranean races, whom they despised as barbarians, the loftier family of Ana, to which belonged the tribe I was visiting, looked back to as one of the crude and ignorant experiments which belong to the infancy of political science. It was the age of envy and hate, of fierce passions, of constant social changes more or less violent, of strife between classes, of war between state and state. This phase of society lasted, however, for some ages, and was finally brought to a close, at least among the nobler and more intellectual populations, by the gradual discovery of the latent powers stored in the all-permeating fluid which they denominate Vril. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
1125:Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.*1 Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.*2 By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1126:The problem with these closed environments is that they inhibit serendipity and reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem. This is why a growing number of large organizations—businesses, nonprofits, schools, government agencies—have begun experimenting with work environments that encourage the architecture of serendipity. Traditionally, organizations that have a strong demand for innovation have created a kind of closed playpen for hunches: the research-and-development lab. Ironically, R&D labs have historically functioned as a kind of idea lockbox; the hunches evolving in those labs tended to be the most heavily guarded secrets in the entire organization. Allowing these early product ideas to circulate more widely would allow rival firms to copy or exploit them. Some organizations—including Apple—have gone to great length to keep R&D experiments sequestered from other employees inside the organization. But that secrecy, as we have seen, comes with great cost. Protecting ideas from copycats and competitors also protects them from other ideas that might improve them, might transform them from hints and hunches to true innovations. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
1127:The precise nature of the engram, the physical substrate of memory, remains uncertain. Here, it is reported that RNA extracted from the central nervous system of Aplysia given long-term sensitization training induced sensitization when injected into untrained animals; furthermore, the RNA-induced sensitization, like training-induced sensitization, required DNA methylation. In cellular experiments, treatment with RNA extracted from trained animals was found to increase excitability in sensory neurons, but not in motor neurons, dissociated from naïve animals. Thus, the behavioral, and a subset of the cellular, modifications characteristic of a form of nonassociative long-term memory in Aplysia can be transferred by RNA. These results indicate that RNA is sufficient to generate an engram for long-term sensitization in Aplysia and are consistent with the hypothesis that RNA-induced epigenetic changes underlie memory storage in Aplysia. ~ Alexis Bédécarrats, Shanping Chen, Kaycey Pearce, Diancai Cai and David L. Glanzman “RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia”, eNeuro 14 May 2018, ENEURO.0038-18.2018; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0038-18.2018, #NFDB
1128:The Self is one, the same in every creature. This is not some peculiar tenet of the Hindu scriptures; it is the testimony of everyone who has undergone these experiments in the depths of consciousness and followed them through to the end. Here is Ruysbroeck, a great mystic of medieval Europe; every word is most carefully chosen: The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life. Maya In the unitive experience, every trace of separateness disappears; life is a seamless whole. But the body cannot remain in this state for long. After a while, awareness of mind and body returns, and then the conventional world of multiplicity rushes in again with such vigor and vividness that the memory of unity, though stamped with reality, seems as distant as a dream. The unitive state has to be entered over and over until a person is established in it. But once established, even in the midst of ordinary life, one sees the One underlying the many, the Eternal beneath the ephemeral. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, #NFDB
1129:We should not be surprised that more and more people feel comfortable about consuming animal products. After all, they are being assured by the “experts” that suffering is being decreased and they can buy “happy” meat, “free-range” eggs, etc.. These products even come with labels approved of by animal organizations. The animal welfare movement is actually encouraging the “compassionate” consumption of animal products.
Animal welfare reforms do very little to increase the protection given to animal interests because of the economics involved: animals are property. They are things that have no intrinsic or moral value. This means that welfare standards, whether for animals used as foods, in experiments, or for any other purpose, will be low and linked to the level of welfare needed to exploit the animal in an economically efficient way for the particular purpose. Put simply, we generally protect animal interests only to the extent we get an economic benefit from doing so. The concept of “unnecessary” suffering is understood as that level of suffering that will frustrate the particular use. And that can be a great deal of suffering.
Killing Animals and Making Animals Suffer | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach ~ Gary L Francione,#NFDB
1130:Professor Jaenisch and his colleagues created mice carrying a genetically engineered version of the X Inactivation Centre (an X Inactivation Centre transgene). This was 450kb in size, and included the Xist gene plus other sequences on either side. They inserted this into an autosome (non-sex chromosome), created male mice carrying this transgene, and studied ES cells from these mice. The male mice only contained one normal X chromosome, because they have the XY karyotype. However, they had two X Inactivation Centres. One was on the normal X chromosome, and one was on the transgene on the autosome. When the researchers differentiated the ES cells from these mice, they found that Xist could be expressed from either of the X Inactivation Centres. When Xist was expressed, it inactivated the chromosome from which it was expressed, even if this was the autosome carrying the transgene16. These experiments showed that even cells that are normally male (XY) can count their X chromosomes. Actually, to be more specific, it showed they could count their X Inactivation Centres. The data also demonstrated that the critical features for counting, choosing and initiation were all present in the 450kb of the X Inactivation Centre around the Xist gene. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
1131:It’s about the experiment that went wrong. Project Genesis. Details of what happened.”
“And what happened?” Corey said.
I had to finish reading the first page before I could answer. Then I explained. As we’d guessed, Project Genesis was another experiment with genetically modified supernaturals. Only these ones seemed to be normal types. Well, “normal” in the sense that we’d heard about them before. Witches, sorcerers, half-demons, werewolves, and something called necromancers.
“I’ve seen them in video games,” Corey said. “They control the dead.”
“Zombies?” I said.
“Right.”
As supernatural types went, that seemed weird, and I suspected there was more to it. According to the notes, some of the kids had problems. So they locked them up in a group home. The kids figured out why they were there and escaped. And apparently came back and destroyed the laboratory, killing Dr. Davidoff and several others.
“Why can’t we do that?” Corey said.
“Because we don’t know where to find anyone,” I said. “Even if we did, we aren’t ready for that. They had help. A father and an aunt who’d been in on the experiments.”
“So what happened?” Corey asked. “And what does this have to do with us?”
I read the second page. Then I told him. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
1132:The computer scientists Jeff Clune, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, and Hod Lipson did what computer scientists do: they designed computer simulations.23 They used well-studied networks that had sensory inputs and produced outputs. What those outputs were determined how well the network performed when faced with environmental problems. They simulated twenty-five thousand generations of evolution, programming in a direct selection pressure to either maximize performance alone or maximize performance and minimize connection costs. And voilà! Once wiring-cost-minimization was added, in both changing and unchanging environments, modules immediately began to appear, whereas without the stipulation of minimizing costs, they didn’t. And when the three looked at the highest-performing networks that evolved, those networks were modular. Among that group, they found that the lower the costs were, the greater the modularity that resulted. These networks also evolved much quicker—in markedly fewer generations—whether in stable or changing environments. These simulation experiments provide strong evidence that selection pressures to maximize network performance and minimize connection costs will yield networks that are significantly more modular and more evolvable. ~ Michael S Gazzaniga, #NFDB
1133:JONES IS BOTH symptom and cause of how knee-jerk, florid conspiracism has become rampant and normalized in America, a fixture of the way people now think and talk, eclipsing simpler Occam’s razor understandings. Let me repeat once again: I’m not saying that large secret plots haven’t existed in the past and don’t exist now. For decades, people in the U.S. government, especially those whose work involves high-stakes secrecy, did a lot to make Americans start imagining conspiracies everywhere. The Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination was full of bungles and became a growth medium in the conspiracists’ petri dishes for an infinity of bacterial theories—even though its essential conclusion was almost certainly correct. The government did lie about UFO sightings over the years—in order to cover up air force surveillance aircraft experiments. The Watergate burglary and cover-up were conspiracies—and promptly exposed, investigated, and punished. Among the most significant recent conspiracies, the cover-up by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and elite of its sexually predatory clergy was finally exposed—after we’d wasted vast resources and ruined hundreds of lives exposing and prosecuting a satanic sexual abuse conspiracy that didn’t exist. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
1134:Start with very small experiments. When anger arises, stop! What is the hurry? When you feel hatred, wait! There should be some interval. Reply only when you are fully conscious – not until that. You will find that all that is sinful in life has fallen away from you; all that is wrong is banished forever. You will suddenly discover, there is no need to respond to anger. Perhaps you might feel like thanking the man who insults you. Because he has obliged you. He gave you an opportunity to awaken.
Kabir has said stay near the one who is critical of you. Look after him and serve him who is abusing you because it is he who gives you the opportunity to awaken.
All the occasions that drown you in unconsciousness can be turned into stepping stones to awareness if you wish so. Life is like a huge boulder lying in the middle of the road. Those who are foolish, see the stone as a barrier and turn back. For them the road is closed. Those who are clever, climb the stone and use it as a step. And the moment they make it a stepping stone greater heights are available to them.
A seeker should keep in mind only one factor, and that is: to utilize each moment to awaken awareness. Then be it hunger or anger or lust or greed, every state can be utilized towards awareness. ~ Osho,#NFDB
1135:I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don’t respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. “But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!” No kidding. That’s the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. That’s the trouble with “pure” philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive (like the Copernican theory--at least at first), this means that “pure” philosophy must just concede impotence and retreat into conservative conceptual anthropology until the advance of science puts it out of its misery. Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of these folk concepts are illusion-generators. The way to take that prospect seriously is to consider theories that propose revisions to those concepts. ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
1136:When left alone, quantum particles behave as multiple images of themselves (as waves, really), simultaneously moving through all possible paths in space and time. Now, again, why do we not experience this multitude around ourselves? Is it because we are probing things around us all the time? Why do all experiments that involve, say, the position of a particle make the particle suddenly be somewhere rather than everywhere? No one knows. Before you probe it, a particle is a wave of possibilities. After you've probed it, it is somewhere, and subsequently it is somewhere for ever, rather than everywhere again. Strange, that. Nothing, within the laws of quantum physics, allows for such a collapse to happen. It is an experimental mystery and a theoretical one. Quantum physics stipulates that whenever something is there, it can transform into something else, of course, but it cannot disappear. And since quantum physics allows for multiple possibilities simultaneously, these possibilities should then keep existing, even after a measurement is made. But they don't. Every possibility but one vanishes. We do not see any of the others around us. We live in a classical world, where everything is based on quantum laws but nothing resembles the quantum world. ~ Christophe Galfard, #NFDB
1137:Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, [Elizabeth] Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn’t a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks— none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance. ~ David McRaney, #NFDB
1138:It is well known that animals respond poorly to living conditions that do not stimulate them mentally or physically. Rats, mice, monkeys, and other mammals confined for long periods in laboratory cages where they have little or no opportunity to engage in such natural behaviors as foraging, hiding, nest-building, or choosing social partners develop neurotic behaviors. Termed “stereotypies,” these behaviors involve repetitive, functionless actions sometimes performed for hours on end. Rodents, for example, will dig for hours at the corners of their cages, gnaw at the bars, or perform repeated somersaults. These “behavioral stereotypies” are estimated to afflict about half of the 100 million mice currently used in laboratory tests and experiments in the United States.16 Monkeys chronically confined to the boredom, stress, and social isolation of laboratory cages perform a wide range of abnormal, disturbing behaviors such as eating or smearing their own excrement, pulling or plucking their hair, slapping themselves, and self-biting that can cause serious, even fatal injury. Severely psychotic human patients display similar behaviors. If you’ve seen the repetitive pacing of caged big cats (and many other smaller animals) at the zoo, you’ve witnessed behavioral stereotypies. ~ Jonathan Balcombe, #NFDB
1139:Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.” Clearly defining the way an organization does things matters, because blitzscaling requires aggressive, focused action, and unclear, hazy cultures get in the way of actually implementing strategy. Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings told me, “Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.” Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have done many wonderful things at Facebook, and one of them is building a unified culture that is devoted to aggressive experimentation and data-driven decision making, as summarized by Mark’s original motto “Move fast and break things.” Facebook’s culture helps employees understand that they shouldn’t be afraid to try things that might fail. This allows Facebook to move faster, and to move on from failed experiments quickly. Imagine if someone asked a random employee from your start-up the following questions: What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for? ~ Reid Hoffman, #NFDB
1140:Talking of air, Mr. Tenby, I think you are a chemist. Have you paid attention to the recent experiments on the composition and resolution of air? Not? I am surprised at it; they are well worth your most serious consideration. It is now pretty well ascertained that inhaling gases is the cure for all kinds of diseases. People are beginning to talk of the gas-cure, as they did of the water-cure. The great foreign chemist, Professor Scaramouch, has the credit of the discovery. The effects are astounding, quite astounding; and there are several remarkable coincidences. You know medicines are always unpleasant, and so these gases are always fetid. The Professor cures by stenches, and has brought his science to such perfection that he actually can classify them. There are six elementary stenches, and these spread into a variety of subdivisions? What do you say, Mr. Reding? Distinctive? Yes, there is something very distinctive in smells. But what is most gratifying of all, and is the great coincidence I spoke of, his ultimate resolution of fetid gases assigns to them the very same precise number as is given to existing complaints in the latest treatises on pathology. Each complaint has its gas. And, what is still more singular, an exhausted receiver is a specific for certain desperate disorders. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1141:Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.
Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court. ~ Mark Twain,#NFDB
1142:Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Reesearch Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer.
The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site--even before he got there or knew what he would see! ~ Stanislav Grof,#NFDB
1143:Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), which says that everything that can happen, does happen. The universe continually branches out like budding yeast into an infinitude of universes that contain every possibility, no matter how remote. You now occupy one of the universes. But there are innumerable other universes in which another “you,” who once studied photography instead of accounting, did indeed move to Paris and marry that girl you once met while hitchhiking. According to this view, embraced by such modern theorists as Stephen Hawking, our universe has no superpositions or contradictions at all, no spooky action, and no non-locality: seemingly contradictory quantum phenomena, along with all the personal choices you think you didn’t make, exist today in countless parallel universes. Which is true? All the entangled experiments of the past decades point increasingly toward confirming Copenhagen more than anything else. And this, as we’ve said, strongly supports biocentrism. Some physicists, like Einstein, have suggested that “hidden variables” (that is, things not yet discovered or understood) might ultimately explain the strange counterlogical quantum behavior. Maybe the experimental apparatus itself contaminates the behavior of the objects being observed, in ways no one has yet conceived. ~ Robert Lanza, #NFDB
1144:I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."
Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
I know how they make up my thoughts.
These thoughts. ~ Ted Chiang,#NFDB
1145:out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.
Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:
The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12
This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more:
young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a ~ Henry Jenkins,#NFDB
1146:There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, who are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense data, feeling, memories relocating - are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.
“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid. ~ Thomas Pynchon,#NFDB
1147:With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober. What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things. So ~ Johann Hari, #NFDB
1148:By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us … We may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature. What may not be therefore expected from it if thoroughly prosecuted? Talking and contention of Arguments would soon be turn’d into labours; all the fine dreams of Opinions, and universal metaphysical natures, which the luxury of subtil Brains has devis’d, would quickly vanish, and give place to solid Histories, Experiments and Works. And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden. From hence the World may be assisted with variety of Inventions, new matter for Sciences may be collected, the old improv’d, and their rust rubb’d away … ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1149:It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments, that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the ideaof trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and corner of his field, to make trial of an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artifical production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
1150:Misha’s and my mission to spend a year on ISS is unprecedented. A normal mission to the space station lasts five to six months, so scientists have a good deal of data about what happens to the human body in space for that length of time. But very little is known about what happens after month six. The symptoms might get precipitously worse in the ninth month, for instance, or they might level off. We don’t know, and there is only one way to find out. Misha and I will collect various types of data for studies on ourselves, which will take a significant amount of our time. Because Mark and I are identical twins, I’m also taking part in an extensive study comparing the two of us throughout the year, down to the genetic level. The International Space Station is a world-class orbiting laboratory, and in addition to the human studies of which I am one of the main subjects, I will also spend a lot of my time this year working on other experiments, like fluid physics, botany, combustion, and Earth observation. When I talk about the International Space Station to audiences, I always share with them the importance of the science being done there. But to me, it’s just as important that the station is serving as a foothold for our species in space. From there, we can learn more about how to push out farther into the cosmos. The costs are high, as are the risks. ~ Scott Kelly, #NFDB
1151:Codex. I have written before on the curvature of metals, and the reflections of light that may be done with such. The simplest use is a mirror, which reflects light upon the viewer. But light may also be concentrated in a series of highly polished mirrors, sending it from one surface to another to another, until the light is so bright and it becomes a solid thing, like a beam of fire. I have achieved this effect upon three occasions. With one, I used mirrors the size of shields, and was able to set alight a distant tree, which burned as if Zeus himself had cast down lightning upon it. In the second case, I used a finely polished set of jewels loaned to me by the gracious hand of Pharaoh, and the result was much stronger, and much smaller in width. Upon the third attempt, I seated these highly polished gems within an array of holders, precisely set to amplify the light, and contained it within a tube of brass. This attempt, shown before Pharaoh, melted through seven feet of thick, hardened iron, to the awe and terror of his court. It is the power of Apollo contained within mortal hands, and by the order of Pharaoh, I have been ordered not to continue these experiments, for the gods will not share such wonders without punishment. The will of Pharaoh is ever wise. CHAPTER FOUR Working with Thomas was like being a student playing next to a master pianist. ~ Rachel Caine, #NFDB
1152:Einstein described a beam of light as a stream of little particles, each with an energy equal to Planck’s constant multiplied by the frequency of the light wave (the same rule used for Planck’s “oscillators”). Each photon (the name now given to these particles of light) has a fixed amount of energy it can provide, depending on the frequency; and some minimum amount of energy is required to knock an electron loose. If the energy of a single photon is more than the minimum needed, the electron will be knocked loose, and carry the rest of the photon’s energy with it. The higher the frequency, the higher the single photon energy and the more energy the electrons have when they leave, exactly as the experiments show. If the energy of a single photon is lower than the minimum energy for knocking an electron out, nothing happens, explaining the lack of electrons at low frequencies.* Describing light as a particle was a hugely controversial idea in 1905, as it overturned a hundred years’ worth of physics and requires a very different view of light. Rather than a continuous wave, like water poured into a dog’s bowl, light has to be thought of as a stream of discrete particles, like a scoop of kibble poured into a bowl. And yet each of those particles still has a frequency associated with it, and somehow they add up to give an interference pattern, just like a wave. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
1153:And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.
And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.
~ Arthur C Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,#NFDB
1154:There is no God,' Oupensky repeated stubbornly. 'Majdanek, the communists, and science have shown us there is no God.'
'I cannot speak for the communists. Majdanek showed us only man's inhumanity to man--this is what man sometimes does with the free will God gave him. If God made all men good, it wouldn't be called free will would it? And finally it's not science's place to show us if there is a God behind the universe.'
'It absolutely is. What else is science for?'
'Experiments.'
'Yes?'
'Experiment with this-- on such and such a day I slept so many hours and felt this way afterward. I ate x amount of food and was able to work for this long. In my forties my face began to line-- science has told us this is the beginning of old age. How can the science that measures and combines and mixes and observes tell us what is behind the sleep?' Alexander laughed. 'Ouspensky, science can measure how long we sleep, but can it tell us what we dreamed about? It will observe our reactions, it can tell if we twitched or laughed, or cried, but can it tell us what was inside our head?'
'Why would it want to?'
'It can only report on the visible, on the ostensible, on the tangible. Science has no place inside my head, nor yours. How can it possible tell you if there is a God? It cannot tell me what even you are thinking about and you are as transparent as glass. ~ Paullina Simons,#NFDB
1155:She looked at me again, and the sweet and shy Nicole disappeared. Her eyes blazed.
"The others aren't here, are they?" she said. "You have no intention of rescuing me. Why would you? I'm competition for your precious Daniel. You don't want him, but you don't want anyone else to have him either. You're a selfish b*tch, Maya Delaney. A sl*t, too, fooling around with every guy in sight, right under his nose."
As Nicole raged, the hair on my neck prickled, because in her eyes, I saw madness. Obsession and madness.
"Everything comes so easy for you, doesn't it, Maya? School, boys, friends, sports. Even your precious animals. You can't just take care of them like any normal person. You have to be some kind of animal whisperer. Magical healer. So damned special. Like Serena, captain of the swim team and the best singer on the freaking island, and how much does she practice? Sings in the shower. Paddles around the lake. Do you know how hard I work? It's never enough. You two get the trophies and the solos and the As and the boys."
You're crazy, I thought. Did they do this to you with their experiments? Or is this just you?
I started inching back.
"You're just going to leave me here?" she said. "Well, you know what, Maya? I could use a little company."
She screamed, a long drawn-out shriek of feigned terror. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
1156:So steers are boy cows?”
“That’s right.”
“What makes you decide who gets to have a really good life and who gets to be a burger?”
“Various factors. I’ve been working on genetically improving the herd.”
“So a new bull with favorable characteristics would get to stay a bull.”
He nodded.
“Sounds interesting,” she said, because it really was. Who knew that ranchers worried about genetics?
“You’re probably not going for things like eye color,” she said without thinking.
Zane didn’t even roll his eyes. “Not really.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I work with several universities. We have breeding experiments. I also sell to other ranchers.”
“Your bulls?”
There was that seat squirm again. “No.”
Not bulls? “Cows?”
“Sperm.”
Phoebe blinked. “From the bulls?”
He nodded.
“You sell bull sperm?”
He nodded again.
Wow. There really were infinite ways to make a living. So how exactly did one get the sperm from the bull? She shook her head. Not something she wanted to know, she decided. Although she was intrigued by the question of what sort of marketing campaign would be most effective. Still, some subjects were better left unexplored, and this was definitely one of them.
She tried to think of something else to say. Anything, really. But how did one top bull sperm as a conversational gambit?
Maybe it was better if one didn’t try. ~ Susan Mallery,#NFDB
1157:There’s an amazing family of genes, called HOX genes. When they’re mutated in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) the results are incredible phenotypes, such as legs growing out of the head14. There’s a long ncRNA known as HOTAIR, which regulates a region of genes called the HOX-D cluster. Just like the long ncRNAs investigated by Jeannie Lee, HOTAIR binds the PRC2 complex and creates a chromatin region which is marked with repressive histone modifications. But HOTAIR is not transcribed from the HOX-D position on chromosome 12. Instead it is encoded at a different cluster of genes called HOX-C on chromosome 215. No-one knows how or why HOTAIR binds at the HOX-D position. There’s a related mystery around the best studied of all long ncRNAs, Xist. Xist ncRNA spreads out along almost the entire inactive X chromosome but we really don’t know how. Chromosomes don’t normally become smothered with RNA molecules. There’s no obvious reason why Xist RNA should be able to bind like this, but we know it’s nothing to do with the sequence of the chromosome. The experiments described in the last chapter, where Xist could inactivate an entire autosome as long as it contained an X inactivation centre, showed that Xist just keeps on travelling once it’s on a chromosome. Scientists are basically still completely baffled about these fundamental characteristics of this best-studied of all ncRNAs. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
1158:The story is told in fragmentary narratives written by a Doctor and a Lawyer, culminating in Jekyll’s own full statement of the case. As well as creating a sense of mystery as each narrator witnesses a series of inexplicable events that is only finally explained by Jekyll’s own posthumous statement of his experiments, this structure is also symbolic of the fragmentary personality that Hyde’s existence reveals. For Jekyll is careful to note that Hyde is not simply his own ‘evil’ alter ego – rather he is just one facet of Jekyll’s personality, increased to the maximum. If Hyde is completely evil, it does not necessarily follow that Jekyll is entirely good – he always had the capacity for evil within him, but has repressed it in order to live a socially respectable life. It is this capacity for evil, lying beneath the socially acceptable face of society, that Hyde represents. This has made the novel open to all kinds of intriguing readings that suggest that the Jekyll/Hyde split is symbolic of the divergent experiences of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and their less respectable ‘others’ – a commentary on the hypocrisy of a society that condones certain kinds of behaviour so long as the mask of respectability is maintained. This subtext means that the novel fits easily into the Gothic genre, which is typically concerned with the chaotic forces lying beneath the pretence of civilisation. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
1159:First up, Blackwell [1972] did a set of experiments on fifty-seven college students to determine the effect of colour—as well as the number of tablets—on the effects elicited. The subjects were sitting through a boring hour-long lecture, and were given either one or two pills, which were either pink or blue. They were told that they could expect to receive either a stimulant or a sedative. Since these were psychologists, and this was back when you could do whatever you wanted to your subjects—even lie to them—the treatment that all the students received consisted simply of sugar pills, but of different colours. Afterwards, when they measured alertness—as well as any subjective effects—the researchers found that two pills were more effective than one, as we might have expected (and two pills were better at eliciting side-effects too). They also found that colour had an effect on outcome: the pink sugar tablets were better at maintaining concentration than the blue ones. Since colours in themselves have no intrinsic pharmacological properties, the difference in effect could only be due to the cultural meanings of pink and blue: pink is alerting, blue is cool. Another study suggested that Oxazepam, a drug similar to Valium (which was once unsuccessfully prescribed by our GP for me as a hyperactive child) was more effective at treating anxiety in a green tablet, and more effective for depression when yellow. Drug ~ Ben Goldacre, #NFDB
1160:Curtis Rouanzoin waves a thin metal rod back and forth in front of my eyes as I recall memories of my mother. He then places headphones over my ears and plays tones that jump from the right earpiece to the left one as I keep remembering and feeling pain, remembering and feeling pain—until I’m just remembering. Lindsay Joy Greene ducks as I send my fist flying into the air with all my strength, releasing anger that feels like it’s been trapped in my wrist for decades. I do it over and over again with each hand, until I just don’t need to anymore. Olga Stevko spends eight hours hypnotizing me. I walk around her office, entering the minds of my parents in search of the things they didn’t get from their parents. Then I imagine flowing these qualities to each person in my family back seven generations and then forward to me in the moment I was conceived, until I feel like I actually grew up with them. Greg Cason gives me homework. Lots of it. Thought records, goal sheets, written exposures, gratitude diaries, behavioral experiments—each one chipping away at my fears and pathological accommodation until I can see them as the delusions they are. Barbara McNally tells me to close my eyes; picture myself and my mother in a room with a white light coming from me and an X over her; and then imagine yelling, “Give me the fucking keys!” as I punch her in the face repeatedly. I am at war. It is a strange fucking war. But I am winning. ~ Neil Strauss, #NFDB
1161:The fact is that the individual, though its genotypic sex is fixed at fertilisation, can be profoundly affected by the environment in which it develops. In the ants, bees, and termites the larval nutrition determines whether the genotypic female individual will become a fully developed female (‘queen’) or a sexually retarded worker. In these cases the whole organism is affected; but the gonads do not play a part in establishing the sexual differences of the body, or soma. In the vertebrates, however, the hormones secreted by the gonads are the essential regulators. Numerous experiments show that by varying the hormonal (endocrine) situation, sex can be profoundly affected. Grafting and castration experiments on adult animals and man have contributed to the modern theory of sexuality, according to which the soma is in a way identical in male and female vertebrates. It may be regarded as a kind of neutral element upon which the influence of the gonad imposes the sexual characteristics. Some of the hormones secreted by the gonad act as stimulators, others as inhibitors. Even the genital tract itself is somatic, and embryological investigations show that it develops in the male or female direction from an indifferent and in some respects hermaphroditic condition under the hormonal influence. Intersexuality may result when the hormones are abnormal and hence neither one of the two sexual potentialities is exclusively realised. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1162:Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that’s hindsight bias. Baruch Fischhoff was the first to document the phenomenon in a set of elegant experiments. One had people estimate the likelihood of major world events at the time of Fischhoff’s research—Will Nixon personally meet with Mao?—then recall their estimate after the event did or did not happen. Knowing the outcome consistently slanted the estimate, even when people tried not to let it sway their judgment. The effect can be subtle, but it can also be quite big. In 1988, when the Soviet Union was implementing major reforms that had people wondering about its future, I asked experts to estimate how likely it was that the Communist Party would lose its monopoly on power in the Soviet Union in the next five years. In 1991 the world watched in shock as the Soviet Union disintegrated. So in 1992–93 I returned to the experts, reminded them of the question in 1988, and asked them to recall their estimates. On average, the experts recalled a number 31 percentage points higher than the correct figure. So an expert who thought there was only a 10% chance might remember herself thinking there was a 40% or 50% chance. There was even a case in which an expert who pegged the probability at 20% recalled it as 70%—which illustrates why hindsight bias is sometimes known as the “I knew it all along” effect. ~ Philip E Tetlock, #NFDB
1163:It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1164:Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described. They gave the economists a demonstration of the point: ~ Michael Lewis, #NFDB
1165:Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork [...]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life [...]. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life - nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it is good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern - a shame, given his obvious talent.
In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academican, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married. ~ Elizabeth Kostova,#NFDB
1166:[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought in accordance with these principles - yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not merely ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1167:It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world's diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces.
It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhist belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as "poison," can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history- the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage- but also create a rational and ethical national culture, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies. ~ Pankaj Mishra,#NFDB
1168:I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes. ~ Paul Beatty, #NFDB
1169:Developmental changes in imitation were examined in three experiments with 6- to 24-month-old infants. In all experiments, infants in the demonstration condition observed an experimenter perform three specific actions with a puppet. Their ability to reproduce those actions was assessed for the first time during the test in the absence of prior practice. Infants in the control condition received equivalent exposure to the puppet and the experimenter but were not shown the target actions. The results of Experiment 1 showed that 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old infants exhibited clear evidence of imitation following a 24-hour delay (deferred imitation). In addition, the findings of Experiment 1 demonstrated that the 18- and 24-month-old infants reproduced more of the target actions during the test than the 12-month-olds. The results of Experiment 2 showed that 6-month-olds performed as well as 12-month-olds when they were tested in the absence of a delay (immediate imitation). Finally, the results of Experiment 3 showed that, with additional exposure to the target actions, even 6-month-old infants exhibited deferred imitation following a 24-hour delay. Taken together, these findings have important implications for current theories of the development of imitation and memory during the first 2 years of life. ~ Barr R.; Dowden A.; Hayne H. (1996). "Developmental changes in deferred imitation by 6- to 24-month-old infants". Infant Behavior and Development. 19 (2): 159–170. doi:10.1016/s0163-6383(96)90015-6., #NFDB
1170:In other cases, however-those of Copernicus, Einstein, and contemporary nuclear theory, for example-considerable time elapses between the first consciousness of breakdown and the emergence of a new paradigm. When that occurs, the historian may capture at least a few hints of what extraordinary science is like. Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist's first effort will often be to isolate it more precisely and give it structure. Though now aware that they cannot be quite right, he will push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in experiments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance. And in the latter effort, more than in any other part of the post-paradigm development of science, he will look almost like our most prevalent image of the scientist. He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess. Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
1171:Life Is an Ambiguous Stimulus
In a very real sense, life is an ambiguous stimulus. Does survival of a heart attack indicate that death is imminent or that one has been given a new lease on life? Is falling in love an assurance of a lifelong partnership or the first sign of an inevitable heartbreak? Many human situations are complex and their meanings subtle. Thus, to make sense of and gain agency over our experiences, we engage in the process of self-reflection.
Through self-reflection, people come to realize that their lives are filled with uncertainty about their own identities, their relationships with others, and their environmental circumstances. Because living involves adaptation to irregular changes and perturbations from the environment, the process of self-reflection reveals the indefinite nature of life. The uncertainty stemming from threatening stimuli whose nature is unknown or unpredictable evokes stress and a sense of loss of control. In response to uncertainty, we are driven to make meaning of our experiences and in so doing to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, a series of cunning experiments demonstrated that the sense of lacking control promotes illusory pattern perception in ambiguous situations. Hence, people consciously or unconsciously attempt to regain a sense of control by projecting patterns onto the chaos of their lives. This meaning-making process hinged on the appraisal of stressors and their meaningful integration into our autobiographical narratives. ~ Todd Kashdan,#NFDB
1172:However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time.
I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true.
Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely. ~ Lewis Thomas,#NFDB
1173:To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, "I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" Einstein declared after one discovery, "If it is correct it signifies the end of science." Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, "I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it." Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: "I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. ~ Marcus du Sautoy, #NFDB
1174:Briefly, there are two types of cells that we inherit from our parents —body cells and germ cells. These cells are composed of chromosomes containing genes—a separate gene for each mental and physical characteristic. The body cells, dividing, multiplying, changing, growing, determine the sort of individual we are to be; the germ cells, remaining practically unchanged from our conception, determine what characteristics our progeny will inherit, through us, from our progenitors and from us. "I determined that heredity could be controlled through the transference of these genes from one individual to another. I learned that the genes never die; they are absolutely indestructible—the basis of all life on earth, the promise of immortality throughout all eternity. "I was certain of all this, but I could carry on no experiments. Scientists scoffed at me, the public laughed at me, the authorities threatened to lock me up in a madhouse. The church wished to crucify me. "I hid, and carried on my research in secret. I obtained genes from living subjects—young men and women whom I enticed to my laboratory on various pretexts. I drugged them and extracted germ cells from them. I had not discovered at that time, or, I should say, I had not perfected the technique of recovering body cells. "In 1858 I managed, through bribery, to gain access to a number of tombs in Westminster Abbey; and from the corpses of former kings and queens of England and many a noble lord and lady I extracted the deathless genes. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs, #NFDB
1175:The Rules For Being Human 1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around. 2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid. 3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error: Experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.” 4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson. 5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned. 6. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.” 7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself. 8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. 9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to Life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust. 10. You will forget all this. Chérie Carter-Scott ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
1176:The history of another country, one Americans don’t much like comparing themselves with, illustrates the grave dangers of yoking political ideology to dubious science. In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the quack “scientist” Trofim Lysenko, who promoted himself through party newspapers rather than rigorous experiments, rose to prominence and took control of Soviet biological, medical, and agricultural research for several decades. Lysenko used his power to prosecute an ideologically driven crusade against the theory of genetics, which he denounced as a bourgeois affront to socialism. In short, his political presuppositions led him to embrace bogus scientific claims. In the purges that followed, many of Lysenko’s scientist critics lost their jobs and suffered imprisonment and even execution. By 1948 Lysenko had convinced Stalin to ban the study of genetics. Soviet science suffered immeasurable damage from the machinations of Lysenko and his henchmen, and the term “Lysenkoism” has since come to signify the suppression of, or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons. In a democracy like our own, Lysenkoism is unlikely to take such a menacing, totalitarian form. Nevertheless, the threat we face from conservative abuse of science—to informed policymaking, to democratic discourse, and to knowledge itself—is palpably real. And as the modern Right and the Bush administration flex their muscles and continue to battle against reliable, mainstream conclusions and sources of information, this threat is growing. ~ Chris C Mooney, #NFDB
1177:There's another promising idea about what the dark matter is, which emerges from a different proposal for improving the equations of physics. As we've discussed, QCD is in a profound and literal sense constructed as the embodiment of symmetry. There is an almost perfect match between the observed properties of quarks and gluons and the most general properties allowed by local color symmetry, in the framework of special relativity and quantum mechanics. The only exception is that the established symmetries of QCD fail to forbid one sort of behavior that is not observed to occur. The established symmetries permit a sort of interaction among gluons that would spoil the symmetry of the equations of QCD under a change in the direction of time. Experiments provide severe limits on the possible strength of that interaction. The limits are much more severe than might be expected to arise accidentally.
The Core theory does not explain this "coincidence." Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn found a way to expand the equations that would explain it. Steven Weinberg and I, independently, showed that the expanded equations predict the existence of new, very light, very weakly interacting particles called axions. Axions are also serious candidates to provide the cosmological dark matter. In principle they might be observed in a variety of ways. Though none is easy, the hunt is on.
It's also possible that both ideas are right, and both kinds of particles contribute to the total amount of dark matter. Wouldn't that be pretty? ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
1178:Those who do not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them, will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it & reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion, & faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that which it recognizes much better in itself.
Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as Berkley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life, on the same plan, the Interior & the Exterior, Spirit & Matter, with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over the second. For him the idea of progress was never anything but a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope if we place it in the future.
On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a short fragment of an old manuscript of l'Eve future: "We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all! Soon will come the senility & decrepitude of this strange polyp, & the evolution accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace of some unquestionable necessity. ~ R my de Gourmont,#NFDB
1179:A Brief Mission Intermission Let’s take a moment to pull together what we’ve learned so far about mission. In the last chapter, I used Pardis Sabeti’s story to emphasize that you need career capital before you can identify a realistic mission for your career. Just because you have a good idea for a mission, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed in its pursuit. With this in mind, in this chapter we studied the life of Kirk French to better understand how you make the leap from identifying a realistic mission to succeeding in making it a reality. Here we discovered the importance of little bets. To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback. For Chris Rock, such a bet might include telling a joke to an audience and seeing if they laugh, whereas for Kirk, it might mean producing sample footage for a documentary and seeing if it attracts funding. These bets allow you to tentatively explore the specific avenues surrounding your general mission, looking for those with the highest likelihood of leading to outstanding results. If career capital makes it possible to identify a compelling mission, then it’s a strategy of little bets that gives you a good shot of succeeding in this mission. To deploy this career tactic, you need both pieces. As you’ll learn in the next chapter, however, the story of mission is not yet complete. As I continued my study of this topic, I discovered a third and final strategy for helping to integrate this trait into your quest for work you love. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
1180:A century ago, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of space, time, energy and matter. We are still finding awesome confirmations of his predictions, like the gravitational waves observed in 2016 by the LIGO experiment. When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind. Where did his ingenious ideas come from? A blend of qualities, perhaps: intuition, originality, brilliance. Einstein had the ability to look beyond the surface to reveal the underlying structure. He was undaunted by common sense, the idea that things must be the way they seemed. He had the courage to pursue ideas that seemed absurd to others. And this set him free to be ingenious, a genius of his time and every other.
A key element for Einstein was imagination. Many of his discoveries came from his ability to reimagine the universe through thought experiments. At the age of sixteen, when he visualised riding on a beam of light, he realised that from this vantage light would appear as a frozen wave. That image ultimately led to the theory of special relativity.
One hundred years later, physicists know far more about the universe than Einstein did. Now we have greater tools for discovery, such as particle accelerators, supercomputers, space telescopes and experiments such as the LIGO lab’s work on gravitational waves. Yet imagination remains our most powerful attribute. With it, we can roam anywhere in space and time. We can witness nature’s most exotic phenomena while driving in a car, snoozing in bed or pretending to listen to someone boring at a party. ~ Stephen Hawking,#NFDB
1181:Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.
And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind--this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were? ~ C S Lewis,#NFDB
1182:It might be imagined that certain people in history—the naturally gifted, the geniuses—have either somehow bypassed the Apprenticeship Phase or have greatly shortened it because of their inherent brilliance. To support such an argument, people will bring up the classic examples of Mozart and Einstein, who seemed to have emerged as creative geniuses out of nowhere. With the case of Mozart, however, it is generally agreed among classical music critics that he did not write an original and substantial piece of music until well after ten years of composing. In fact, a study of some seventy great classical composers determined that with only three exceptions, all of the composers had needed at least ten years to produce their first great work, and the exceptions had somehow managed to create theirs in nine years. Einstein began his serious thought experiments at the age of sixteen. Ten years later he came up with his first revolutionary theory of relativity. It is impossible to quantify the time he spent honing his theoretical skills in those ten years, but is not hard to imagine him working three hours a day on this particular problem, which would yield more than 10,000 hours after a decade. What in fact separates Mozart and Einstein from others is the extreme youth with which they began their apprenticeships and the intensity with which they practiced, stemming from their total immersion in the subject. It is often the case that in our younger years we learn faster, absorb more deeply, and yet retain a kind of creative verve that tends to fade as we get older. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1183:Trust in the familiar seems to be matched by wariness of the unfamiliar. Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University has conducted experiments in which white subjects had to interact in some way with a white or a black man before taking a mental test. Those who dealt with the black man got lower scores on the test, and their brain scans showed what Prof. Richeson called “heightened activity in areas of the brain associated with regulating our thoughts and emotions.” She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the “awkwardness” or “exhaustion” of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test.
Researchers at Harvard and New York University had white and black subjects look repeatedly at a series of photographs of black and white faces, all with neutral expressions. Every time the subjects looked at one particular black face and one particular white face they got a mild electric shock. Lie detector-type devices showed that subjects would sweat—a typical stress reaction—when they saw the two faces they associated with the shocks. The researchers showed the photo series several times again, but without the shocks. White subjects quickly stopped sweating when they saw the white face formerly associated with the shock, but continued to sweat when they saw the black face. Black subjects had the opposite reaction, continuing to sweat when they saw the white but not the black face. Mahzarin Banaji, the study’s leader, concluded that this was a sign of natural human wariness of unfamiliar groups. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1184:THE study of suggestion has shown us that the thoughts of hystericals are not equilibrated; that under diverse influences one of them may develop to an extreme extent and live, so to say, isolated, its own life, to the great detriment of the mental organism. This tendency is not only manifested in artificial experiments; it continually gives place to natural phenomena, which are quite analogous to suggestions. Fixed ideas are for us phenomena of this kind; that is to say, psychological phenomena which are developed in the mind in an automatic manner, outside the will and the personal perception of the patient, but which, instead of being, like suggestions, experimentally called forth, are formed naturally under the influence of accidental causes. This difference in the artificial or natural provocation of automatic phenomena has, from a clinical and especially therapeutic point of view, quite grave consequences to justify this distinction. Ideas of this kind have been described at length in the case of patients considered as lunatics. They went under the name of obsessions, impulsions, phobias; they characterise the delirium which develops with some neurasthenics or, as they are often called in France, certain degenerates. We shall repeat here what we have already said in speaking of abulias.' ' Stigmates mentaux de I'hyst&ie, p. 122. 278 Unquestionably, this characteristic belongs to these patients; we in nowise deny it; we shall only say that it also belongs to hystericals; that with them it is very frequent, and that it is the cause of the great majority of their accidents. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1185:EXPERIMENT That our beliefs about the capability of others have a direct impact on their performance has been adequately demonstrated in a number of experiments from the field of education. In these tests teachers are told, wrongly, that a group of average pupils are either scholarship candidates or have learning difficulties. They teach a set curriculum to the group for a period of time. Subsequent academic tests show that the pupils’ results invariably reflect the false beliefs of their teachers about their ability. It is equally true that the performance of employees will reflect the beliefs of their managers. For example, Fred sees himself as having limited potential. He feels safe only when he operates well within his prescribed limit. This is like his shell. His manager will only trust him with tasks within that shell. The manager will give him task A, because he trusts Fred to do it and Fred is able to do it. The manager will not give him task B, because he sees this as beyond Fred’s capability. He sees only Fred’s performance, not his potential. If he gives the task to the more experienced Jane instead, which is expedient and understandable, the manager reinforces or validates Fred’s shell and increases its strength and thickness. He needs to do the opposite, to help Fred venture outside his shell, to support or coach him to success with task B. To use coaching successfully we have to adopt a far more optimistic view than usual of the dormant capability of all people. Pretending we are optimistic is insufficient because our genuine beliefs are conveyed in many subtle ways of which we are not aware. ~ John Whitmore, #NFDB
1186:The ship was sinking---and sinking fast. The captain told the passengers and crew, "We've got to get the lifeboats in the water right away."
But the crew said, "First we have to end capitalist oppression of the working class. Then we'll take care of the lifeboats."
Then the women said, "First we want equal pay for equal work. The lifeboats can wait."
The racial minorities said, "First we need to end racial discrimination. Then seating in the lifeboats will be allotted fairly."
The captain said, "These are all important issues, but they won't matter a damn if we don't survive. We've got to lower the lifeboats right away!"
But the religionists said, "First we need to bring prayer back into the classroom. This is more important than lifeboats."
Then the pro-life contingent said, "First we must outlaw abortion. Fetuses have just as much right to be in those lifeboats as anyone else."
The right-to-choose contingent said, "First acknowledge our right to abortion, then we'll help with the lifeboats."
The socialists said, "First we must redistribute the wealth. Once that's done everyone will work equally hard at lowering the lifeboats."
The animal-rights activists said, "First we must end the use of animals in medical experiments. We can't let this be subordinated to lowering the lifeboats."
Finally the ship sank, and because none of the lifeboats had been lowered, everyone drowned.
The last thought of more than one of them was, "I never dreamed that solving humanity's problems would take so long---or that the ship would sink so SUDDENLY. ~ Daniel Quinn,#NFDB
1187:So, to recap, we seem to have light vacillating between a parti-clelike existence and a wavelike one. As a particle, the light is emitted and detected. As a wave, it goes through both slits at once. Lest you discount this as just some weird property of light and not of matter, consider this: the identical experiment can be done with electrons. They, too, depart the source (an electron microscope, in work by a team at Hitachi research labs and Gakushuin University in Tokyo) as particles. They land on the detector—a scintillation plate, like the front of a television screen, which records each electron arrival as a minuscule dot—as particles. But in between they act as waves, producing an interference pattern almost identical to that drawn by the photons. Dark stripes alternate with bright ones. Again, the only way single electrons can produce an interference pattern is by acting as waves, passing through both slits at once just as the photons apparently did. Electrons—a form of matter—can behave as waves. A single electron can take two different paths from source to detector and interfere with itself: during its travels it can be in two places at once. The same experiments have been performed with larger particles, such as ions, with the identical results. And ions, as we saw back in Chapter 3, are the currency of the brain, the particles whose movements are the basis for the action potential by which neurons communicate. They are also, in the case of calcium ions, the key to triggering neurotransmitter release. This is a crucial point: ions are subject to all of the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1188:Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
1189:Frankly, we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act. In one experiment, research subjects were divided into several group, and each person was asked to donate $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. One group was told the money would go to Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Another group was told that the money would go to address malnutrition among 21 million Africans. The third group was told that the donations would go to Roka, as in the first group, but this time her own hunger was presented as part of a background tapestry of global hunger, with some statistics thrown in. People were much more willing to donate to Rokia than to 21 million hungry people, and even a mention of the larger problem made people less inclined to help her. In another experiment, people were asked to donate to a $300,000 fund to fight cancer. One group was told that the money would be used to save the life of one child, while another group was told it would save the lives of eight children. People contributed almost twice as much to save one child as to save eight. Social psychologists argue that all this reflects the way our consciences and ethical systems are based on individual stories and are distinct from the parts of our brain concerned with logical and rationality. Indeed, when subjects in experiments are first asked to solve math problems, thus putting in play the parts of the brain that govern logic, afterward they are less generous to the needy. ~ Nicholas D Kristof, #NFDB
1190:Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).
. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.) ~ Alan Sokal,#NFDB
1191:A series of checks and balances ensures that neither the maternal nor the paternal genome gets the upper hand. We can get a better understanding of how this works if we look once again at the experiments of Azim Surani, Davor Sobel and Bruce Cattanach. These are the scientists who created the mouse zygotes that contained only paternal DNA or only maternal DNA. After they had created these test tube zygotes, the scientists implanted them into the uterus of mice. None of the labs ever generated living mice from these zygotes. However, the zygotes did develop for a while in the womb, but very abnormally. The abnormal development was quite different, depending on whether all the chromosomes had come from the mother or the father. In both cases the few embryos that did form were small and retarded in growth. Where all the chromosomes had come from the mother, the placental tissues were very underdeveloped1. If all the chromosomes came from the father, the embryo was even more retarded but there was much better production of the placental tissues2. Scientists created embryos from a mix of these cells – cells which had only maternally inherited or paternally inherited chromosomes. These embryos still couldn’t develop all the way to birth. When examined, the researchers found that all the tissues in the embryo were from the maternal-only cells whereas the cells of the placental tissues were the paternal-only type3. All these data suggested that something in the male chromosomes pushes the developmental programme in favour of the placenta, whereas a maternally-derived genome has less of a drive towards the placenta, and more towards the embryo itself. ~ Nessa Carey, #NFDB
1192:Philosophy is different from science and from mathematics. Unlike science it doesn't rely on experiments or observation, but only on thought. And unlike mathematics it has no formal methods of proof. It is done just by asking questions, arguing, trying out ideas and thinking of possible arguments against them, and wondering how our concepts really work.
The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What is time?" A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, "What is a number?" A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes a word mean anything?" Anyone can ask whether it's wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes an action right or wrong?"
We couldn't get along in life without taking the ideas of time, number, knowledge, language, right and wrong for granted most of the time; but in philosophy we investigate those things themselves. The aim is to push our understanding of the world and ourselves a bit deeper. Obviously, it isn't easy. The more basic the ideas you are trying to investigate, the fewer tools you have to work with. There isn't much you can assume or take for granted. So philosophy is a somewhat dizzying activity, and few of its results go unchallenged for long. ~ Thomas Nagel,#NFDB
1193:I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated
introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished
experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a
boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his
unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries.
His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had
seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and
most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or
philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's
powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what
you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and
weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it
up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary
- 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any
means of proving'. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they
were not the instrument of discovery. ~ John Maynard Keynes,#NFDB
1194:It is always easy when you have made a guess, and done two or three little calculations to make sure that it is not obviously wrong, to know that it is right. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right – at least if you have any experience – because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in. Your guess is, in fact, that something is very simple. If you cannot see immediately that it is wrong, and it is simpler than it was before, then it is right. The inexperienced, and crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. What we need is imagination, but imagination in a terrible strait-jacket. We have to find a new view of the world that has to agree with everything that is known, but disagree in its predictions somewhere, otherwise it is not interesting. And in that disagreement it must agree with nature. If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery. It is very nearly impossible, but not quite, to find any theory which agrees with experiments over the entire range in which all theories have been checked, and yet gives different consequences in some other range, even a theory whose different consequences do not turn out to agree with nature. A new idea is extremely difficult to think of. It takes a fantastic imagination. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1195:Traditional economics assumes that prices of products in the market are determined by a balance between two forces: production at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). The price at which these two forces meet determines the prices in the marketplace.
This is an elegant idea, but it depends cetnrally on the assumption that the two forces are independent and that together they produce the market price. The results of all the experiments presented in this chapter (and the basic idea of arbitrary coherence itself) challenge these assumptions. First, according to the standard economic framework, consumers' willingness to pay is one of the two inputs that determine market prices (this is the demand). But as our experiments demonstrate, what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don't in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.
Second, whereas the standard economic framework assumes that the forces of supply and demand are independent, the type of anchoring manipulations we have shown here suggest that they are, in fact, dependent. In the real world, anchoring comes from manufacturer's suggested retail prices (MSRPs), advertised prices, promotions, product introductions, etc.-all of which are supply-side variables. It seems then that instead of consumers' willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay. What this means is that demand is not, in fact, a completely separate force from supply. ~ Dan Ariely,#NFDB
1196:Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control. ~ Eric Liu, #NFDB
1197:Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it...
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
1198:National Socialism nurtured racism. In reality there are only two races, namely the "race" of decent people and the "race" of people who are not decent. And "segregation" runs straight through all nations and within every single nation straight through all parties. Even in the concentration camps one came across halfway decent fellows here and there among the SS men-just as one came across the odd scoundrel or two among the prisoners. not to mention the Capos. That decent people are in the minority, that they have always been a minority and are likely to remain so is something we must come to terms with. Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top. And no nation is immune from doing this, and in this respect every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust! In support of this we have the sensational results of scientific experiments in the field of social psychology, for which we owe thanks to an American; they are known as the Milgram Experiment.
If we want to extract the political consequences from all this, we should assume that there are basically only two styles of politics, or perhaps better said, only two types of politicians: the first are those believe that the end justifies the means, and that could be any means...While the other type of politician knows very well that there are mans that could desecrate the holiest end. And it is this type of politician whom I trust, despite the clamor around the year 1988, and the demands of the day, not to mention of the anniversary, trust to hear the voice of reason and to ensure that all who are of goodwill, stretch out their hands to each other, across all the graves and across all divisions. ~ Viktor E Frankl,#NFDB
1199:In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.* Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died.* By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate. In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down. On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1200:True to its name (gelato spelled backwards), Oletag is swimming against the tide of cost-cutting convenience that dominates Italy's ice cream industry. Sixty flavors at a given time, rotating daily- most rigorously tied to the season, many inspired by a pantry of savory ingredients: mustard, Gorgonzola with white chocolate and hazelnuts, pecorino with bitter orange. He seeks out local flavors, but never at the expense of a better product: pistachios from Turkey, hazelnuts from Piedmont, and (gasp!) French-born Valrhona chocolate. Extractions, infusions, experiments- whatever it takes to get more out of the handful of ingredients he puts into each creation. In the end, what matters is what ends up in the scoop, and the stuff at Oletag will make your toes curl- creams and chocolates so pure and intense they must be genetically manipulated, fruit-based creations so expressive of the season that they actually taste different from one day to the next. And a licorice gelato that will change you- if not for life, at least for a few weeks.
Radicioni and Torcè are far from alone in their quest to lift the gelato genre. Fior di Luna has been doing it right- serious ingredients ethically sourced and minimally processed- since 1993. At Gelateria dei Gracchi, just across the Regina Margherita bridge, Alberto Monassei obsesses over every last detail, from the size of the whole hazelnuts in his decadent gianduia to the provenance of the pears that he combines with ribbons of caramel. And Maria Agnese Spagnuolo, one of Torcè's many disciples, continues to push the limits of gelato at her ever-expanding Fatamorgana empire, where a lineup of more than fifty choices- from basil-honey-walnut to dark chocolate-wasabi- attracts a steady crush of locals and savvy tourists. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1201:We told them everything--well, almost everything. I was saving the stuff I’d found out at the cabin. This was enough for now. Too much actually. Despite having seen our powers in action--my near-transformation and Daniel knocking out the pilot--Corey and Hayley couldn’t seem to process it.
Corey kept saying, “Are you sure?” tentatively, as if he didn’t want to insult our intelligence, but he couldn’t help thinking there had to be a logical explanation. Hayley just stared at me.
When I finally stopped talking, she said, “Are you crazy?”
“Hey!” Sam said.
“No, seriously. You think you’re going to change into a cougar? Maybe in thirty years you’ll start thinking college boys are kinda hot, but that’s the only sort of cougar you can turn into, Maya. Anything else is nuts.”
“Right,” Sam said. “So you weren’t here an hour ago? When her face started changing?”
“Yes, something did happen to her face. I don’t know what it was, but I’ll bet it has to go with those vitamins and drugs they were feeding us back in Salmon Creek. That’s what all this is about. They were doing medical experiments on us. It explains what Daniel did on the helicopter and what happened with Maya’s face.”
“And Rafe?” Sam said. “Does medical research explain why Rafe thought he was a skin-walker, too, when he’d never even been to the clinic?”
“I…I don’t know.” Hayley squared her shoulders. “No one ever saw Rafe do anything magical. He just thought he was one of these skin-walkers. That’s from your religion or whatever, right?”
“My religion?” I said.
“The stuff you people believe in.”
“You people?” Corey said. “Holy hell, Hayley. Did you really just say that?”
She went beet red. “I--I didn’t mean--”
“We know exactly what you meant,” Sam said. “Got a racist streak there, huh? Surprise, surprise. ~ Kelley Armstrong,#NFDB
1202:More than fifty years have passed since the flask experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey rekindled the primordial soup hypothesis for the origin of life. Scientists now realize, however, that generating miniscule amounts of a few amino acids is irrelevant to the origin of life because the chemicals in Miller and Urey’s experiment were exposed to neither oxygen nor ultraviolet light. The fact that Earth never possessed measurable quantities of prebiotics (see p. 73) and that the universe appears devoid of reservoirs for life’s fundamental chemical building blocks (see p. 74) also argues for the famed experiment’s irrelevance. As far back as 1973, a deep sense of frustration over any possible naturalistic explanation for life’s origin on Earth or anywhere else within the vast reaches of interstellar space led Francis Crick (who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix nature of DNA) and Leslie Orgel (one of the world’s preeminent origin-of-life researchers) to suggest that intelligent aliens must have salted Earth with bacteria about 3.8 billion years ago.[24] This suggestion, however intriguing or bizarre, fails to answer the question of where the aliens might have come from. It also contradicts evidence that shows intelligent life could not have arrived on the cosmic scene any sooner than about 13.7 billion years after the cosmic origin event. The implausibility of interstellar space travel also remains an intractable problem. Ruling out a visit by aliens from a planetary system far, far away narrows the reasonable options down to one: Something or Someone from beyond the physics and dimensions of the universe, who is not subject to them, placed life and humanity in the only location in the universe at the only time in cosmic history where and when such creatures could survive and thrive. ~ Hugh Ross, #NFDB
1203:Things may even be worse than that, however. There’s some reason to think that the rise in ethical consumerism could even be harmful for the world, on balance. Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they call moral licensing, which describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future. For example, in a recent experiment, participants were told to choose a product from either a selection of mostly “green” items (like an energy-efficient lightbulb) or from a selection of mostly conventional items (like a regular lightbulb). They were then told to perform a supposedly unrelated visual perception task: a square box with a diagonal line across it was displayed on a computer screen, and a pattern of twenty dots would flash up on the screen; the subjects had to press a key to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or right side of the line. It was always obvious which was the correct answer, and the experimenters emphasized the importance of being as accurate as possible, telling the subjects that the results of the test would be used in designing future experiments. However, the subjects were told that, whether or not their answers were correct, they’d be paid five cents every time they indicated there were more dots on the left-hand side of the line and five cents every time they indicated there were more dots on the right-hand side. They therefore had a financial incentive to lie, and they were alone, so they knew they wouldn’t be caught if they did so. Moreover, they were invited to pay themselves out of an envelope, so they had an opportunity to steal as well. What happened? People who had previously purchased a “green” product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their ~ William MacAskill, #NFDB
1204:Dr. Mary Atwater's story was so inspiring. Growing up, Dr. Atwater had a dream to one day be a teacher. But as a black person in the American South during the 1950s, she didn't have many great educational opportunities. It didn't help that she was also a girl, and a girl who loved science, since many believed that science was a subject only for men. Well, like me, she didn't listen to what others said. And also like me, Dr. Atwater had a father, Mr. John C. Monroe, who believed in her dreams and saved money to send her and her siblings to college. She eventually got a PhD in science education with a concentration in chemistry. She was an associate director at New Mexico State University and then taught physical science and chemistry at Fayetteville State University. She later joined the University of Georgia, where she still works as a science education researcher. Along the way, she began writing science books, never knowing that, many years down the road, one of those books would end up in Wimbe, Malawi, and change my life forever.
I'd informed Dr. Atwater that the copy of Using Energy I'd borrowed so many times had been stolen (probably by another student hoping to get the same magic), so that day in Washington, she presented me with my own copy, along with the teacher's edition and a special notebook to record my experiments.
"Your story confirms my belief in human beings and their abilities to make the world a better place by using science," she told me. "I'm happy that I lived long enough to see that something I wrote could change someone's life. I'm glad I found you."
And for sure, I'm also happy to have found Dr. Atwater. ~ William Kamkwamba,#NFDB
1205:I have no doubt that she is sincerely desirous of seeing all the evils of suffering humanity remedied, and that she thinks this might easily be done, if Government would only undertake it. But, alas! that poor unfortunate personage, like Figaro, knows not to whom to listen, nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once:-- "Organize labour and workmen. "Do away with egotism. "Repress insolence and the tyranny of capital. "Make experiments upon manure and eggs. "Cover the country with railways. "Irrigate the plains. "Plant the hills. "Make model farms. "Found social workshops. "Colonize Algeria. "Suckle children. "Instruct the youth. "Assist the aged. "Send the inhabitants of towns into the country. "Equalize the profits of all trades. "Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow." "Emancipate Italy, Poland, and Hungary." "Rear and perfect the saddle-horse." "Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and dancers." "Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy." "Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of Government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people." "Do have a little patience, gentlemen," says Government in a beseeching tone. "I will do what I can to satisfy you, but for this I must have resources. I have been preparing plans for five or six taxes, which are quite new, and not at all oppressive. You will see how willingly people will pay them." Then comes a great exclamation:--"No! indeed! where is the merit of doing a thing with resources? Why, it does not deserve the name of a Government! So far from loading us with fresh taxes, we would have you withdraw the old ones. You ought to suppress "The salt tax, "The tax on liquors, "The tax on letters, "Custom-house duties, "Patents." In ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
1206:September 1995: Mark and I had our well documented book entitled TRANCE Formation of America published, complete with irrefutable graphic details which are in themselves evidence to present to Congress, all factions of law enforcement including the FBI, CIA, DIA, DEA, TBI, NSA, etc., all major news media groups, national and international human rights advocates, both American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, the National Institute of Mental Health, and more… to no avail. TRANCE thoroughly exposes many of the perpe-TRAITORS and their agenda replete with names, which raises the question “why haven't we been sued?” The obvious answer is that the same “National Security Act” that continues to block our access to all avenues of justice and public exposure also prevents these criminals from inevitably bringing mind control to light through court procedures, an opportunity we would welcome. Meanwhile, as reported by both APAs, survivors of U.S. Government sponsored mind control began to surface all across our nation. The first to encounter the vast number of survivors were law enforcement and mental health professionals, and these professionals began to ask questions. in other countries, answers are being provided through somewhat less controlled media, reflecting the CIA's involvement in Project MK Ultra human rights atrocities. A television documentary entitled The Sleep Room aired across Canada by the Canadian Broadcast Corp. in the spring of 1998. Dr. Martin Orne, an associate boasted by Dr. William Mitchell M.D., Ph.D. who thrust Kelly into Vanderbilt's cover-up attempt (re: p.14), is named as an accomplice to Dr. Ewing Cameron's MK Ultra 'experiments' in Montreal, Quebec. Additionally, it should be known that Dr. Cameron went on to found the American Psychiatric Association, which has helped to maintain America's mental health profession in the dark ages of information control. ~ Cathy O Brien, #NFDB
1207:This view seems to us an example of the kind of egalitarianism discussed in the preceding chapter: letting parents spend money on riotous living but trying to prevent them from spending money on improving the schooling of their children. It is particularly remarkable coming from Coons and Sugarman, who elsewhere say, "A commitment to equality at the deliberate expense of the development of individual children seems to us the final corruption of whatever is good in the egalitarian instinct"18—a sentiment with which we heartily agree. In our judgment the very poor would benefit the most from the voucher plan. How can one conceivably justify objecting to a plan, "however much it improved [the] education" of the poor, in order to avoid "government finance of" what the authors call "economic segregation," even if it could be demonstrated to have that effect? And of course, it cannot be demonstrated to have that effect. On the contrary, we are persuaded on the basis of considerable study that it would have precisely the opposite effect—though we must accompany that statement with the qualification that "economic segregation" is so vague a term that it is by no means clear what it means. The egalitarian religion is so strong that some proponents of restricted vouchers are unwilling to approve even experiments with unrestricted vouchers. Yet to our knowledge, none has ever offered anything other than unsupported assertions to support the fear that an unrestricted voucher system would foster "economic segregation." This view also seems to us another example of the tendency of intellectuals to denigrate parents who are poor. Even the very poorest can—and do—scrape up a few extra dollars to improve the quality of their children's schooling, although they cannot replace the whole of the present cost of public schooling. We suspect that add-ons would be about as frequent among the poor as among the rest, though perhaps of smaller amounts. ~ Milton Friedman, #NFDB
1208:New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me.
This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants.
This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one.
I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote. ~ Bill Maher,#NFDB
1209:Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before.
In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book ,#NFDB
1210:The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size and heart rate. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1211:All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments! If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections. ~ Jennifer A Doudna, #NFDB
1212:Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.
I explored it all.
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.
Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.
All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first. ~ Peter Watts,#NFDB
1213:Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What ~ Ted Chiang, #NFDB
1214:Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past. That is underlined rather dramatically by a type of experiment thought up by physicist John Wheeler, called a delayed-choice experiment. Schematically, a delayed-choice experiment is like the double-slit experiment we just described, in which you have the option of observing the path that the particle takes, except in the delayed-choice experiment you postpone your decision about whether or not to observe the path until just before the particle hits the detection screen. Delayed-choice experiments result in data identical to those we get when we choose to observe (or not observe) the which-path information by watching the slits themselves. But in this case the path each particle takes—that is, its past—is determined long after it passed through the slits and presumably had to “decide” whether to travel through just one slit, which does not produce interference, or both slits, which does. Wheeler even considered a cosmic version of the experiment, in which the particles involved are photons emitted by powerful quasars billions of light-years away. Such light could be split into two paths and refocused toward earth by the gravitational lensing of an intervening galaxy. Though the experiment is beyond the reach of current technology, if we could collect enough photons from this light, they ought to form an interference pattern. Yet if we place a device to measure which-path information shortly before detection, that pattern should disappear. The choice whether to take one or both paths in this case would have been made billions of years ago, before the earth or perhaps even our sun was formed, and yet with our observation in the laboratory we will be affecting that choice. In ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1215:Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate sons of prosperous fathers, athletic and good-looking, never-married, and fascinated by everything from math to art. One difference is that Alberti’s illegitimacy did not prevent him from being given a classical education. His father helped him get a dispensation from the Church laws barring illegitimate children from taking holy orders or holding ecclesiastical offices, and he studied law at Bologna, was ordained as a priest, and became a writer for the pope. During his early thirties, Alberti wrote his masterpiece analyzing painting and perspective, On Painting, the Italian edition of which was dedicated to Brunelleschi. Alberti had an engineer’s instinct for collaboration and, like Leonardo, was “a lover of friendship” and “open-hearted,” according to the scholar Anthony Grafton. He also honed the skills of courtiership. Interested in every art and technology, he would grill people from all walks of life, from cobblers to university scholars, to learn their secrets. In other words, he was much like Leonardo, except in one respect: Leonardo was not strongly motivated by the goal of furthering human knowledge by openly disseminating and publishing his findings; Alberti, on the other hand, was dedicated to sharing his work, gathering a community of intellectual colleagues who could build on each other’s discoveries, and promoting open discussion and publication as a way to advance the accumulation of learning. A maestro of collaborative practices, he believed, according to Grafton, in “discourse in the public sphere.” When Leonardo was a teenager in Florence, Alberti was in his sixties and spending much of his time in Rome, so it is unlikely they spent time together. Alberti was a major influence nonetheless. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1216:John Gilbert (Bushranger)
John Gilbert was a bushranger of terrible renown,
For sticking lots of people up and shooting others down.
John Gilbert said unto his pals, "Although they make a bobbery
About our tricks we have never done a tip-top thing in robbery.
"We have all of us a fancy for experiments in pillage,
Yet never have we seized a town, or even sacked a village."
John Gilbert said unto his mates—"Though partners we have been
In all rascality, yet we no festal day have seen."
John Gilbert said he thought he saw no obstacle to hinder a
Piratical descent upon the town of Canowindra.
So into Canowindra town rode Gilbert and his men,
And all the Canowindra folk subsided there and then.
The Canowindra populace cried, "Here's a lot of strangers!!!"
But immediately recovered when they found they were bushrangers.
And Johnny Gilbert said to them, "You need not be afraid.
We are only old companions whom bushrangers you have made."
And Johnny Gilbert said, said he, "We'll never hurt a hair
Of men who bravely recognise that we are just all there."
The New South Welshmen said at once, not making any fuss,
That Johnny Gilbert, after all, was "Just but one of us."
So Johnny Gilbert took the town (including public houses),
And treated all the "cockatoos" and shouted for their spouses.
And Miss O'Flanagan performed in manner quite gintailly
Upon the grand planner for the bushranger O'Meally.
And every stranger passing by they took, and when they got him
They robbed him of his money and occasionally shot him.
And Johnny's enigmatic feat admits of this solution,
That bushranging in New South Wales is a favoured institution.
So Johnny Gilbert ne'er allows an anxious thought to fetch him,
For well he knows the Government don't really want to ketch him.
And if such practices should be to New South Welshmen dear,
With not the least demurring word ought we to interfere.
161
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
1217:Practice using these two unique human capacities: first, see yourself going to the office this afternoon, or home tonight, and finding it in a terrible situation. The house is a total disaster. No one has done his or her job; all the commitments made have been unfulfilled. And you’re tired and beat up. Now, imagine yourself responding to that reality in a mature, wise, self-controlled manner. See the effect that has on someone else. You didn’t confess their sins. You started to pitch in. You were cheerful, helpful, pleasant. And your behavior will prick the conscience of others and allow the consequences agreed upon to happen. You just used two unique human capacities: imagination and conscience. You didn’t rely on memory; if you had relied on memory or history, you might have lost your cool, made judgments of other people, and exacerbated conditions. Memory is built into your past responses to the same or similar stimuli. Memory ties you to your past. Imagination points you to your future. Your potential is unlimited, but to potentiate is to actualize your capabilities no matter what the conditions. In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany in World War II, tells how he exercised the power to choose his response to his terrible conditions. One day he was subjected to experiments on his body. And he discovered, “I have the power to choose.” And he looked for meaning. He believed that if you have a meaning (purpose or cause), if you have a why, you can live with any what. The development of his professional life came out of that one insight. He was raised in the Freudian tradition of psychic determinism. He learned it was a lie. It wasn’t based on science. It came from the study of sick people—neurotics and psychotics—not from the study of healthy, creative, effective people. He didn’t go to his memory, he went to his imagination and conscience. You, too, can progress along the continuum from futility and old habits to faith, hope, and inner security through the exercise of conscience and imagination. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
1218:went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey. Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from ~ Isabel Allende, #NFDB
1219:The Kindred were split into three distinct branches, all outcomes of their past genetic trades. There were the Tranq Kindred—a group of males with piercing blue eyes and a double set of short, sharp vestigial fangs. There were rumors that the fangs grew and they bit when they had sex with the female of their choice and other rumors that they could heal any illness with a bite. Liv wasn’t sure how much of that was true and how much was just media hype but the buzz about their sexual habits had earned this group the nickname “Blood Kindred.” Then there were the Twins, a branch of the Kindred in which the males always came in pairs and had to share a woman. No one knew exactly why and they declined to offer an explanation. Some said they were telepathic and needed sex to communicate but that hadn’t been proven—not that anyone had ever gotten a chance to study them. The Kindred as a whole kept strictly to themselves and refused to participate in any kind of scientific research or experiments. So no one really knew anything about the Twin Kindred other than they refused to make love to a woman individually. And then there were the Ragers—also known as the Beast Kindred. Working for so long in a hospital as she went through nursing school, the sight and idea of drawing blood wasn’t frightening to Liv so the Blood Kindred didn’t scare her. And being a twin herself, she wasn’t terribly afraid of the Twin Kindred either. But the Beast Kindred, well…they scared the ever-loving crap out of her. As tall and dominant as the rest of the warrior race, the Beast Kindred were said to have the most unpredictable tempers. Rumor had it that they could go into berserker-like rages when protecting their women, killing anyone that stood in their way no matter how many opposed them. But it was the other rumors, the sexual rumors, which put a lump in Liv’s throat. Besides being filled with animalistic lust, the Beast Kindred were said to have sexual stamina unequaled by anyone. Rumor had it that they could come again and again without going soft and their marathon love-making sessions put even practitioners of tantric sex to shame. Just ~ Evangeline Anderson, #NFDB
1220:Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I’ve encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restrictions and compromises. A 2012 survey sponsored by Adobe revealed that nearly 75 percent of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan felt they weren’t living up to their creative potential. (In the United States, the number was closer to 82 percent!) Obviously, there’s a gap between what many creatives actually do each day and what they feel they are capable of doing given more resources or less bureaucracy. But those limitations aren’t likely to change in the context of an organization, where there is little tolerance for risk and resources are scarcer than ever. If day-to-day project work is the only work that you are engaging in, it follows that you’re going to get frustrated. To break the cycle, keep a running list of projects you’d like to attempt in your spare time, and set aside a specific time each week (or each day) to make progress on that list. Sometimes this feels very inefficient in the moment, especially when there are so many other urgent priorities screaming for your attention, but it can be a key part of keeping your creative energy flowing for your day-to-day work. You’ll also want to get a notebook to record questions that you’d like to pursue, ideas that you have, or experiments that you’d like to try. Then you can use your pre-defined Unnecessary Creation time to play with these ideas. As Steven Johnson explains in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”18 ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
1221:To help them understand that they are not to blame for their deceptive brain messages, we taught Steve and Sarah about Free Won’t, a term popularized by the well-known neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In a series of carefully executed scientific experiments completed in the 1980s, Libet studied how people decide whether and when to move their own bodies and what generated the initial desire to move. While the meaning of what he discovered is still the subject of passionate disagreement in academic circles, the bottom line for you is this: Your brain—not your mind—generates the initial desires, impulses, thoughts, and sensations, but you can veto almost any action before it starts. This means that while you are not responsible for the emergence of thoughts, desires, impulses, urges, or sensations, you are responsible for what you do with them once they arise. Libet himself interpreted his results in this way and emphasized that you have a choice in whether or not to respond when your brain puts out the call—this is the essence of Free Won’t. As he described it in one of his landmark papers:7 The role of conscious free will [aka Free Won’t] would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action and which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing. In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t. Free Won’t turns out to be of the utmost importance because it tells us that we have, in essence, the power to veto almost any action, even though the desire to perform that action is generated by brain mechanisms entirely outside of our conscious attention and awareness. How might that Free Won’t express itself? Through Veto Power. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1222:(...) You Sophotechs are smarter than I am; why did you let me do such a foolish thing?”
“We answer every question our resources and instruction parameters allow; we are more than happy to advise you, when and if we are asked.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking of, and you know it.”
“You are thinking we should use force to defend you against yourself against your will? That is hardly a thought worth thinking, sir. Your life has exactly the value you yourself place on it. It is yours to damage or ruin as you wish.”
(...)
“Is that another hint? Are you saying I’m destroying my life? People at the party, twice now, have said or implied that I’m going to endanger the Oecumene itself. Who stopped me?”
“Not I. While life continues, it cannot be made to be without risk. The assessment of whether or not a certain risk is worth taking depends on subjective value-judgments. About such judgments even reasonable men can differ. We Sophotechs will not interfere with such decisions. (...) If we were to overrule your ownership of your own life, your life, would, in effect, become our property, and you, in effect, would become merely the custodian or trustee of that life. Do you think you would value it more in such a case, or less? And if you valued it less, would you not take greater risks and behave more self-destructively? If, on the other hand, each man’s life is his own, he may experiment freely, risking only what is his, till he find his best happiness.”
“I see the results of failed experiments all around us, in these cylinders. I see wasted lives, and people trapped in mind sets and life forms which lead nowhere.”
“While life continues, experimentation and evolution must also. The pain and risk of failure cannot be eliminated. The most we can do is maximize human freedom, so that no man is forced to pay for another man’s mistakes, so that the pain of failure falls only on he who risks it. And you do not know which ways of life lead nowhere. Even we Sophotechs do not know where all paths lead.”
“How benevolent of you! We will always be free to be stupid.”
“Cherish that freedom, young master; it is basic to all others. ~ John C Wright,#NFDB
1223:We want to build up a new state! That is why the others hate us so much today. They have often said as much. They said: “Yes, their social experiment is very dangerous! If it takes hold, and our own workers come to see this too, then this will be highly disquieting. It costs billions and does not bring any results. It cannot be expressed in terms of profit, nor of dividends. What is the point?! We are not interested in such a development. We welcome everything which serves the material progress of mankind insofar as this progress translates into economic profit. But social experiments, all they are doing there, this can only lead to the awakening of greed in the masses. Then we will have to descend from our pedestal. They cannot expect this of us.” And we were seen as setting a bad example. Any institution we conceived was rejected, as it served social purposes. They already regarded this as a concession on the way to social legislation and thereby to the type of social development these states loathe. They are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominate the masses, and this, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons.
If they do not find a reasonable solution, the states with unresolved social problems will, sooner or later, arrive at an insane solution. National Socialism has prevented this in the German Volk. They are now aware of our objectives. They know how persistently and decisively we defend and will reach this goal.
Hence the hatred of all the international plutocrats, the Jewish newspapers, the world stock markets, and hence the sympathy for these democrats in all the countries of a like cast of mind. Because we, however, know that what is at stake in this war is the entire social structure of our Volk, and that this war is being waged against the substance of our life, we must, time and time again in this war of ideals, avow these ideals. And, in this sense, the Winterhilfswerk, this greatest social relief fund there is on this earth, is a mighty demonstration of this spirit.
Adolf Hitler - speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on the opening of the Kriegswinterhilfswerk September 4, 1940 ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
1224:at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1225:I think I would make a very good astronaut.
To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent and I’m intelligent. You also have to understand how machines work and I’m good at understanding how machines work. You also have to be someone who would like being on their own in a tiny spacecraft thousands and thousands of miles away from the surface of the earth and not panic or get claustrophobia or homesick or insane. And I really like little spaces, so long as there is no one else in them with me. Sometimes when I want to be on my own I get into the airing cupboard outside the bathroom and slide in beside the boiler and pull the door closed behind me and sit there and think for hours and it makes me feel very calm.
So I would have to be an astronaut on my own, or have my own part of the space craft which no one else could come into.
And also there are no yellow things or brown things in a space craft, so that would be okay too.
And I would have to talk to other people from Mission Control, but we would do that through a radio linkup and a TV monitor, so they wouldn’t be like real people who are strangers, but it would be like playing a computer game.
Also I wouldn’t be homesick at all because I’d be surrounded by things I like, which are machines and computers and outer space. And I would be able to look out of a little window in the spacecraft and know that there was no one near me for thousands and thousands of miles, which is what I sometimes pretend at night in the summer when I go and lie on the lawn and look up at the sky and I put my hands round the sides of my face so that I can’t see the fence and the chimney and the washing line and I can pretend I’m in space.
And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which keeps you from being anemic was made in a star.
And I would like it if I could take Toby with me into space, and that might be allowed because they sometimes do take animals into space for experiments, so if I could think of a good experiment you could do with a rat that didn’t hurt the rat, I could make them let me take Toby.
But if they didn’t let me I would still go because it would be a Dream Come True. ~ Mark Haddon,#NFDB
1226:Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1227:The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments conducted by Peter Brugger and his colleague Christine Mohr at the University of Bristol in England. Exploring the neurochemistry of superstition, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal, Brugger and Mohr found that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. In one study, for example, they compared twenty self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to twenty self-professed skeptics of such claims. They showed all subjects a series of slides consisting of people’s faces, some of which were normal while others had their parts scrambled, such as swapping out eyes or ears or noses from different faces. In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed. In general, the scientists found that the believers were much more likely than the skeptics to mistakenly assess a scrambled face as real, and to read a scrambled word as normal.
In the second part of the experiment, Brugger and Mohr gave all forty subjects L-dopa, the drug used for Parkinson’s disease patients that increases the levels of dopamine in the brain. They then repeated the slide show with the scrambled or real faces and words. The boost of dopamine caused both believers and skeptics to identify scrambled faces and real and jumbled words as normal. This suggests that patternicity may be associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. Intriguingly, the effect of L-dopa was stronger on skeptics than believers. That is, increased levels of dopamine appear to be more effective in making skeptics less skeptical than in making believers more believing.8 Why? Two possibilities come to mind: (1) perhaps the dopamine levels of believers are already higher than those of skeptics and so the latter will feel the effects of the drug more; or (2) perhaps the patternicity proclivity of believers is already so high that the effects of the dopamine are lower than those of skeptics. Additional research shows that people who profess belief in the paranormal—compared to skeptics—show a greater tendency to perceive “patterns in noise,”9 and are more inclined to attribute meaning to random connections they believe exist. ~ Michael Shermer,#NFDB
1228:Caroline’s project faces extreme uncertainty: there had never been a volunteer campaign of this magnitude at HP before. How confident should she be that she knows the real reasons people aren’t volunteering? Most important, how much does she really know about how to change the behavior of hundreds of thousand people in more than 170 countries? Barlerin’s goal is to inspire her colleagues to make the world a better place. Looked at that way, her plan seems full of untested assumptions—and a lot of vision. In accordance with traditional management practices, Barlerin is spending time planning, getting buy-in from various departments and other managers, and preparing a road map of initiatives for the first eighteen months of her project. She also has a strong accountability framework with metrics for the impact her project should have on the company over the next four years. Like many entrepreneurs, she has a business plan that lays out her intentions nicely. Yet despite all that work, she is—so far—creating one-off wins and no closer to knowing if her vision will be able to scale. One assumption, for example, might be that the company’s long-standing values included a commitment to improving the community but that recent economic trouble had resulted in an increased companywide strategic focus on short-term profitability. Perhaps longtime employees would feel a desire to reaffirm their values of giving back to the community by volunteering. A second assumption could be that they would find it more satisfying and therefore more sustainable to use their actual workplace skills in a volunteer capacity, which would have a greater impact on behalf of the organizations to which they donated their time. Also lurking within Caroline’s plans are many practical assumptions about employees’ willingness to take the time to volunteer, their level of commitment and desire, and the way to best reach them with her message. The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment. ~ Eric Ries, #NFDB
1229:Must this be seen as a sign of the times? Whatever the case and without venturing the least prediction, it is quite difficult in the presence of all these things not to recall the words of the Gospel: "For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect .’ [7] Assuredly, we are not yet there; the false Messiahs we have seen until now have offered wonders of a very inferior quality, and those who have followed them were probably not very difficult to seduce, but who knows what the future holds in store? If one reflects that these false Messiahs have never been anything but more or less unconscious instruments in the hands of those who have raised them up, and if one looks at the series of attempts made by the Theosophists, one is led to think that these are no more than trials, experiments which will be renewed in various forms until success is achieved . [8] In the meantime, these efforts always have the result of troubling some minds. We do not believe moreover that the Theosophists, any more than the occultists and the spiritists, have the strength to succeed in such an enterprise by themselves. But behind all these movements is there not something more fearsome, of which their leaders perhaps do not themselves know, and of which they are in their own turn merely the instruments? We merely raise this last question without seeking to resolve it here, for to do so, we would have to raise extremely complex considerations that would lead us far beyond the limits we have set ourselves for the present study.
7 . Matt. 24:24.
8. Krishnamurti’s vain efforts to escape his role as Messiah (see P190, 023) clearly show that he is only an instrument— and we would readily say a victim— of undertakings in which his personal will counts for nothing. The present development of Theosophist messianism, which moreover does not seem to make as much noise in the ‘outer world’ as it would like, therefore does not modify what we wrote before the latest events. It must be added that even if the leaders of Theosophy now consider that there is more than a simple attempt, it might very well be that for others their movement is itself only one of multiple elements which must converge to prepare for the realization of a plan which is much more vast and complex. ~ Ren Gu non,#NFDB
1230:There are these three approaches, three dimensions, by which one reaches towards reality. Science cannot go beyond the object, because the very approach makes a limitation. Science cannot go beyond the outer, because only with the outer, experiments are possible. Philosophy, logic, cannot go beyond the subjective, because it is a mind-effort, you work it out in your mind. You cannot dissolve the mind; you cannot go beyond it. Science is objective; logic, philosophy, is subjective. Religion goes beyond, poetry goes beyond: it is a golden bridge. It bridges the object with the subject. But then everything becomes chaos – of course, very creative; in fact, there is no creativity if there is no chaos. But everything becomes indiscriminate; divisions disappear. I would like to say it in this way. Science is a day approach. In the full noon, everything is clear: distinct boundaries, and you can see the other well. Logic is a night approach: groping in the dark only with the mind, without any experimental support, just thinking. Poetry and religion are twilight approaches, just in the middle. The day is no longer there, the brightness of the noon has gone; things are not so distinct, clear. The night has not yet come; the darkness has not enveloped all. Darkness and day meet, there is a soft grayness, neither white nor black, boundaries meeting and merging, everything indiscriminate, everything is everything else. This is the metaphorical approach. That’s why poetry talks in metaphors – and religion is the ultimate poetry; religion talks in metaphors. Remember, those metaphors are not to be taken literally; otherwise you will miss the point. When I say the inner light, don’t think in terms of literal understanding, no. When I say, “The inner is like light,” it is a metaphor. Something is indicated, but not demarked, not defined, something of the nature of light, not exactly light; it is a metaphor. And this becomes a problem because religion talks in metaphors; it cannot talk otherwise, there is no other way. If I have been to another world and I have seen flowers which don’t exist on this earth, and I come to you and talk about those flowers, what will I do? I will have to be metaphorical. I will say, “Like roses,” but they are not roses; otherwise why say like roses, simply say roses. But they are not roses; they have a different quality to them. ~ Osho, #NFDB
1231:In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are making war on us and on our children. In reality, the feminist movement could be said to be trying to visualize and make way for a world in which abortion would not be necessary; a world free from poverty and rape, in which young girls would grow up with intelligent regard for and knowledge of their bodies and respect for their minds, in which the socialization of women into heterosexual romance and marriage would no longer be the primary lesson of culture; in which single women could raise children with a less crushing cost to themselves, in which female creativity might or might not choose to express itself in motherhood. Yet, when radical feminists and lesbian/feminists begin to speak of such a world, when we begin to sketch the conditions of a life we have collectively envisioned, the first charge we are likely to hear is a charge of violence: that we are “man-haters.” We hear that the women’s movement is provoking men to rape; that it has caused an increase in violent crimes by women; and when we demand the right to rear our children in circumstances where they have a chance for more than mere physical survival, we are called fetus-killers. The beating of women in homes across this country, the rape of daughters by fathers and brothers, the fear of rape that keeps old—as well as young—women off the streets, the casual male violence that can use a car to run two jogging women off a country road, the sadistic exploitation of women’s bodies to furnish a multibillion-dollar empire of pornography, the decision taken by powerful white males that one-quarter of the world’s women shall be sterilized or that certain selected women—poor and Third World—shall be used as subjects for psychosurgery and contraceptive experiments—these ordinary, everyday events inevitably must lead us to ask: who indeed hates whom, who is killing whom, whose interest is served, and whose fantasies expressed, by representing abortion as the selfish, willful, morally contagious expression of woman’s predilection for violence? ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
1232:can be horribly fallible, and is over-rated in courts of law. Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but – little does the audience know – this is not the real test! After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before (see colour page 8). He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one-third of the film – and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him. They would swear an oath in a court of law that no man in a gorilla suit was present, and they would swear that they had been watching with more than usually acute concentration for the whole 25 seconds, precisely because they were counting ball-passes. Many experiments along these lines have been performed, with similar results, and with similar reactions of stupefied disbelief when the audience is finally shown the truth. Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable. It is, of course, exactly this unreliability among observers that stage conjurors exploit with their techniques of deliberate distraction. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1233:A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than simultaneous tasks. Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task. The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include: avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
1234:Heartened up by this story, I began to draw upon his more comprehensive knowledge as to the ages of the pictures and as to certain of the stories connected with them, upon which I was not clear; and I likewise inquired into the causes of the decadence of the present age, in which the most refined arts had perished, and among them painting, which had not left even the faintest trace of itself behind. "Greed of money," he replied, "has brought about these unaccountable changes. In the good old times, when virtue was her own reward, the fine arts flourished, and there was the keenest rivalry among men for fear that anything which could be of benefit to future generations should remain long undiscovered. Then it was that Democritus expressed the juices of all plants and spent his whole life in experiments, in order that no curative property should lurk unknown in stone or shrub. That he might understand the movements of heaven and the stars, Eudoxus grew old upon the summit of a lofty mountain: three times did Chrysippus purge his brain with hellebore, that his faculties might be equal to invention. Turn to the sculptors if you will; Lysippus perished from hunger while in profound meditation upon the lines of a single statue, and Myron, who almost embodied the souls of men and beasts in bronze, could not find an heir. And we, sodden with wine and women, cannot even appreciate the arts already practiced, we only criticise the past! We learn only vice, and teach it, too. What has become of logic? of astronomy? Where is the exquisite road to wisdom? Who even goes into a temple to make a vow, that he may achieve eloquence or bathe in the fountain of wisdom? And they do not pray for good health and a sound mind; before they even set foot upon the threshold of the temple, one promises a gift if only he may bury a rich relative; another, if he can but dig up a treasure, and still another, if he is permitted to amass thirty millions of sesterces in safety! The Senate itself, the exponent of all that should be right and just, is in the habit of promising a thousand pounds of gold to the capitol, and that no one may question the propriety of praying for money, it even decorates Jupiter himself with spoils'. Do not hesitate, therefore, at expressing your surprise at the deterioration of painting, since, by all the gods and men alike, a lump of gold is held to be more beautiful than anything ever created by those crazy little Greek fellows, Apelles and Phydias! ~ Petronius, #NFDB
1235:Youth
I.
_Sunday_
Problems put by, the inevitable descent of heaven
and the visit of memories and the assembly
of rhythms occupy the house,
the head and the world of the spirit. -A horse scampers off on the suburban track,
and along the tilled fields and woodlands,
pervaded by the carbonic plague.
A miserable woman of drama, somewhere in the world,
sighs for improbable desertions.
Desperados pine for strife, drunkenness and wounds.
-- Little children stifle their maledictions along the rivers.
Let us resume our study to the noise of the consuming work
that is gathering and growing in the masses.
II.
_Sonnet_
Man of ordinary constitution,
was not the flesh a fruit hanging in the orchard;
O child days; the body, a treasure to squander;
O to love, the peril or the power of Psyche?
The earth had slopes fertile in princes and in artists,
and lineage and race incited you to crimes and mournings:
the world, your fortune and your peril.
But now, that labor crowned,
you and your calculations,-- you and your impatiences-are only your dance and your voice, not fixed and not forced,
although a reason for the double consequence
of invention and of success, -- in fraternal
and discreet humanity through an imageless universe;-might and right reflect your dance and your voice,
appreciated only at present.
III.
_Tewnty Years Old_
Instructive voices exiled... Physical candor bitterly quelled...
--Adagio.-- Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence,
242
the studious optimism: how the world was full of flowers that summer!
Airs and forms dying... --A choir to calm impotence and absence!
A choir of glasses, of nocturnal melodies...
Quickly, indeed, the nerves take up the chase.
IV.
You are still at Anthony's temptation.
The antics of abated zeal,
the grimaces of childish pride, the collapse and the terror.
But you will set yourself at this labor:
all harmonic and architectural possibilities
will surge around your seat.
Perfect beings, never dreamed of,
will present themselves for your experiments.
The curiosity of ancient crowds
and idle wealth will meditatively draw near.
Your memory and your senses
will be simply the nourishment of your creative impulse.
As for the world, when you emerge, what will it have become?
In any case, nothing of what it seems at present.
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1236:Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1237:...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.
...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it.
Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.
I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity.
{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 22 January, 1825} ~ John Adams,#NFDB
1238:One way to try to answer the question “What makes us human?” is to ask “What makes us different from great apes?” or, to be more precise, from nonhuman apes, since, of course, humans are apes. As just about every human by now knows—and as the experiments with Dokana once again confirm—nonhuman apes are extremely clever. They’re capable of making inferences, of solving complex puzzles, and of understanding what other apes are (and are not) likely to know. When researchers from Leipzig performed a battery of tests on chimpanzees, orangutans, and two-and-a-half-year-old children, they found that the chimps, the orangutans, and the kids performed comparably on a wide range of tasks that involved understanding of the physical world. For example, if an experimenter placed a reward inside one of three cups, and then moved the cups around, the apes found the goody just as often as the kids—indeed, in the case of chimps, more often. The apes seemed to grasp quantity as well as the kids did—they consistently chose the dish containing more treats, even when the choice involved using what might loosely be called math—and also seemed to have just as good a grasp of causality. (The apes, for instance, understood that a cup that rattled when shaken was more likely to contain food than one that did not.) And they were equally skillful at manipulating simple tools. Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society. “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things,” Michael Tomasello, who heads the institute’s department of developmental and comparative psychology, told me. “But the main difference we’ve seen is 'putting our heads together.' If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
1239:Not so. You have been doing that quite frequently now. Rest easy. Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity. Then, if you go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world.” “But the results are impossible!” “Not at all. There are other dimensions folded into the ones our senses perceive, as I told you.” “How can you be sure, if we can never perceive them?” “It’s a matter of tests pursued, just as you do it in your work. We have found ways to interrogate the qualities of these dimensions as they influence our sensorium. We see then that there must be other kinds of dimensions. For instance, when very small particles decay into two photons, these photons have a quantum property we call spin. The clockwise spin of one is matched by a counterclockwise spin of the same magnitude in the other one, so that when the spin values are added, they equal zero. Spin is a conserved quantity in this universe, like energy and momentum. Experiments show that before a spin is measured, there is an equal potential for it to be clockwise or counterclockwise, but as soon as the spin is measured it becomes one or the other. At that moment of measurement, the complementary photon, no matter how far away, must have the opposite spin. The act of measurement of one thus determines the spin of both, even if the other photon is many light-years away. It changes faster than news of the measurement could have reached it moving at the speed of light, which is as fast as information moves in the dimensions we see. So how does the far photon know what to become? It only happens, and faster than light. This phenomenon was demonstrated in experiments on Earth, long ago. And yet nothing moves faster than the speed of light. Einstein was the one who called this seemingly faster-than-light effect ‘spooky action at a distance,’ but it is not that; rather, the distance we perceive is irrelevant to this quality we call spin, which is a feature of the universe that is nonlocal. Nonlocality means things happening together across distance as if the distance were not there, and we have found nonlocality to be fundamental and ubiquitous. In some dimensions, nonlocal entanglement is simply everywhere and everything, the main feature of that fabric of reality. The way space has distance and time has duration, other manifolds have entanglement. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1240:A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.
The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.
Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.
Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications. ~ Edward L Glaeser,#NFDB
1241:reading :::
50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
St Augustine - Confessions (400)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)
Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)
Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)
Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)
John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)
Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)
Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)
Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)
Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)
Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)
Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)
Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)
Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)
Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)
Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)
Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)
~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),#NFDB
1242:We have seen that imagining an act engages the same motor and sensory programs that are involved in doing it. We have long viewed our imaginative life with a kind of sacred awe: as noble, pure, immaterial, and ethereal, cut off from our material brain. Now we cannot be so sure about where to draw the line between them. Everything your “immaterial” mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play the piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain. These experiments are not only delightful and intriguing, they also overturn the centuries of confusion that have grown out of the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are made of different substances and are governed by different laws. The brain, he claimed, was a physical, material thing, existing in space and obeying the laws of physics. The mind (or the soul, as Descartes called it) was immaterial, a thinking thing that did not take up space or obey physical laws. Thoughts, he argued, were governed by the rules of reasoning, judgment, and desires, not by the physical laws of cause and effect. Human beings consisted of this duality, this marriage of immaterial mind and material brain. But Descartes—whose mind/body division has dominated science for four hundred years—could never credibly explain how the immaterial mind could influence the material brain. As a result, people began to doubt that an immaterial thought, or mere imagining, might change the structure of the material brain. Descartes’s view seemed to open an unbridgeable gap between mind and brain. His noble attempt to rescue the brain from the mysticism that surrounded it in his time, by making it mechanical, failed. Instead the brain came to be seen as an inert, inanimate machine that could be moved to action only by the immaterial, ghostlike soul Descartes placed within it, which came to be called “the ghost in the machine.” By depicting a mechanistic brain, Descartes drained the life out of it and slowed the acceptance of brain plasticity more than any other thinker. Any plasticity—any ability to change that we had—existed in the mind, with its changing thoughts, not in the brain. But now we can see that our “immaterial” thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won’t someday be explained in physical terms. While we have yet to understand exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is now clear that they do, and the firm line that Descartes drew between mind and brain is increasingly a dotted line. ~ Norman Doidge, #NFDB
1243:Oh, Matthew," she whispered, moved to tears.
"I called it Grace. I hope you don't mind." For the first time, his manner held a hint of shyness, disconcerting in a man who had just made love to her without hesitation or reticence.
Gently, she curled her hand around what was inside the box and lifted it to the light. "It's your rose."
"No, it's your rose."
A heady fragrance filled the air. With one shaking finger, Grace touched a flawless pink petal. The color was unforgettable. It was the most beautiful rose she'd ever seen. Impossible to credit that those unpromising stalks in his courtyard had produced this exquisite bloom.
"It's perfect," she whispered. "It's a miracle."
He was a miracle. How could she not love the man who conjured this beauty with hands and imagination?
The faint smile broadened. Had he worried that she'd reject his gift? Foolish, darling Matthew. The question was whether the rose was a promise of a future or a token of parting.
"I worked on it whenever I could. This last year has been busy."
An understatement, she knew. The Marquess of Sheene had been a ubiquitous presence in London since his release. Everywhere he went, society feted him as a hero. She'd read of the string of honors he'd received, the friendship with the king, the invitations to join scientific boards and societies.
Echoing her gesture, he reached out to touch the petals. The sensitivity of his fingers on the flower reminded her of his hands on her skin.
"I did most of the basic experiments when I was a prisoner, but I couldn't get it right." He glanced up with an expression that combined pride and diffidence in a breathtakingly attractive mixture. "This is the first bud, Grace. It appeared almost a year to the day after I promised to wait. It seemed a sign."
"And you brought it to me," she said softly, staring at the flower. The anniversary of his release didn't occur for two more days. That date was etched on her longing heart.
Then she noticed something else.
"My glove," she said blankly. With unsteady hands, she reached in and withdrew a light green kidskin glove from a recess carved away from the damp. The buttery leather was crushed and worn from incessant handling. "Have you kept it all this time?"
"Of course." He wasn't smiling anymore and his eyes deepened to a rich, rare gold. Beautiful, unwavering, somber.
"You make me want to cry." Her voice emerged so thickly, she didn't sound like herself.
She laid the box on the bench and tightened her grip on the soft leather until her knuckles whitened. What was he trying to tell her? What did the rose mean? The glove?
Had he carried her glove into his new life like a knight wore his lady's favor into battle? The thought sent choking emotion to her throat. ~ Anna Campbell,#NFDB
1244:What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners. For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results, certain conclusions have emerged. (1) These substances do alter consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless to talk more specifically about the “effect of the drug.” Set and setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of reaction. There is no “drug reaction” but always setting-plus-drug. (3) In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about the potentialities—for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The drug is just an instrument. In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked first to the conventional models of modern psychology—psychoanalytic, behavioristic—and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects—philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals, alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported over and over by these persons. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1245:The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1246:Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy. ~ Cal Newport, #NFDB
1247:From a very early age Edison became used to doing things for himself, by necessity. His family was poor, and by the age of twelve he had to earn money to help his parents. He sold newspapers on trains, and traveling around his native Michigan for his job, he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw. He wanted to know how things worked—machines, gadgets, anything with moving parts. With no schools or teachers in his life, he turned to books, particularly anything he could find on science. He began to conduct his own experiments in the basement of his family home, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix any kind of watch. At the age of fifteen he apprenticed as a telegraph operator, then spent years traveling across the country plying his trade. He had no chance for a formal education, and nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor. And so in lieu of that, in every city he spent time in, he frequented the public library. One book that crossed his path played a decisive role in his life: Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book became for Edison what The Improvement of the Mind had been for Faraday. It gave him a systematic approach to science and a program for how to educate himself in the field that now obsessed him—electricity. He could follow the experiments laid out by the great Master of the field and absorb as well his philosophical approach to science. For the rest of his life, Faraday would remain his role model. Through books, experiments, and practical experience at various jobs, Edison gave himself a rigorous education that lasted about ten years, up until the time he became an inventor. What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline. He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was a consummate outsider and his mind had not been indoctrinated in any school of thought, he brought a fresh perspective to every problem he tackled. He turned his lack of formal direction into an advantage. If you are forced onto this path, you must follow Edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. Under these circumstances, you become your own teacher and mentor. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit. As much as possible, you try to apply your knowledge in some form of experiment or practice. You find for yourself second-degree mentors in the form of public figures who can serve as role models. Reading and reflecting on their experiences, you can gain some guidance. You try to make their ideas come to life, internalizing their voice. As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences—giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1248:At one in the morning on the 20th. November, radio hams over most of Europe suffered serious interference to their reception, as if a new and exceptionally strong broadcaster was operating. They located the interference at two hundred and three metres; it sounded something like the noise of machinery or rushing water; then the continuous, unchanging noise was suddenly interrupted by a horrible, rasping noise (everyone described it in the same way: a hollow, nasal, almost synthetic sounding voice, made all the more so by the electronic apparatus); and this frog-like voice called excitedly, "Hello, hello, hello! Chief Salamander speaking. Hello, chief Salamander speaking. Stop all broadcasting, you men! Stop your broadcasting! Hello, Chief Salamander speaking!" And then another, strangely hollow voice asked: "Ready?" "Ready." There was a click as if the broadcast were being transferred to another speaker; and then another, unnaturally staccato voice called: "Attention! Attention! Attention!" "Hello!" "Now!" A voice was heard in the quiet of the night; it was rasping and tired-sounding but still had the air of authority. "Hello you people! This is Louisiana. This is Kiangsu. This is Senegambia. We regret the loss of human life. We have no wish to cause you unnecessary harm. We wish only that you evacuate those areas of coast which we will notify you of in advance. If you do as we say you will avoid anything regrettable. In future we will give you at least fourteen days notice of the places where we wish to extend our sea. Incidents so far have been no more than technical experiments. Your explosives have proved their worth. Thank you for them. "Hello you people! Remain calm. We wish you no harm. We merely need more water, more coastline, more shallows in which to live. There are too many of us. Your coastlines are already too limited for our needs. For this reason we need to demolish your continents. We will convert them into bays and islands. In this way, the length of coastline can be increased five-fold. We will construct new shallows. We cannot live in deep ocean. We will need your continents as materials to fill in the deep waters. We wish you no harm, but there are too many of us. You will be free to migrate inland. You will not be prevented from fleeing to the hills. The hills will be the last to be demolished. "We are here because you wanted us. You have distributed us over the entire world. Now you have us. We wish that you collaborate with us. You will provide us with steel for our picks and drills. you will provide us with explosives. You will provide us with torpedoes. You will work for us. Without you we will not be able to remove the old continents. Hello you people, Chief Salamander, in the name of all newts everywhere, offers collaboration with you. You will collaborate with us in the demolition of your world. Thank you." The tired, rasping voice became silent, and all that was heard was the constant noise resembling machinery or the sea. "Hello, hello, you people," the grating voice began again, "we will now entertain you with music from your gramophone records. Here, for your pleasure, is the March of the Tritons from the film, Poseidon. ~ Karel apek, #NFDB
1249:When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing. ~ Neil Gaiman,#NFDB
1250:Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.
But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.
And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.
Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?
Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred? ~ Alan Sokal,#NFDB
1251:Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to, and if one group dissolves, they look for another. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.
When we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find "like-minded" people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissent opinion, as a member of a group.
It seems to me that this is something we have all experienced - something we take for granted, may never have thought about. But a great deal of experiment has gone on among psychologists and sociologists on this very theme. If I describe an experiment or two, then anyone listening who may be a sociologist or psychologist will groan, oh God not again - for they have heard of these classic experiments far too often. My guess is that the rest of the people will never have had these ideas presented to them. If my guess is true, then it aptly illustrates general thesis, and the general idea behind these essays, that we (the human race) are now in possession of a great deal of hard information about ourselves, but we do not use it to improve our institutions and therefore our lives.
A typical test, or experiment, on this theme goes like this. A group of people are taken into the researcher's confidence. A minority of one or two are left in the dark. Some situation demanding measurement or assessment is chosen. For instance, comparing lengths of wood that differ only a little from each other, but enough to be perceptible, or shapes that are almost the same size. The majority in the group - according to instruction- will assert stubbornly that these two shapes or lengths are the same length, or size, while the solitary individual, or the couple, who have not been so instructed will assert that the pieces of wood or whatever are different. But the majority will continue to insist - speaking metaphorically - that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.
When put as baldly, as unflatteringly, as this, reactions tend to be incredulous: "I certainly wouldn't give in, I speak my mind..." But would you?
People who have experienced a lot of groups, who perhaps have observed their own behaviour, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it.
In other words, we know that this is true of human behaviour, but how do we know it? It is one thing to admit it in a vague uncomfortable sort of way (which probably includes the hope that one will never again be in such a testing situation) but quite another to make that cool step into a kind of objectivity, where one may say, "Right, if that's what human beings are like, myself included, then let's admit it, examine and organize our attitudes accordingly. ~ Doris Lessing,#NFDB
1252:What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked.
She looked nervously down at the papers in her hand even though I knew for a fact she had memorized every word.
“When I was eleven I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when the recruiters came to see me. They showed me brochures and told me they were impressed by my test scores and asked if I was ready to be challenged. And I said yes. Because that was what a Gallagher Girl was to me then, a student at the toughest school in the world.”
She took a deep breath and talked on.
“What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked again. “When I was thirteen I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when Dr. Fibs allowed me to start doing my own experiments in the lab. I could go anywhere—make anything. Do anything my mind could dream up. Because I was a Gallagher Girl. And, to me, that meant I was the future.”
Liz took another deep breath.
“What is a Gallagher Girl?” This time, when Liz asked it, her voice cracked. “When I was seventeen I stood on a dark street in Washington, D.C., and watched one Gallagher Girl literally jump in front of a bullet to save the life of another. I saw a group of women gather around a girl whom they had never met, telling the world that if any harm was to come to their sister, it had to go through them first.”
Liz straightened. She no longer had to look down at her paper as she said, “What is a Gallagher Girl? I’m eighteen now, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I don’t really know the answer to that question. Maybe she is destined to be our first international graduate and take her rightful place among Her Majesty’s Secret Service with MI6.”
I glanced to my right and, call me crazy, but I could have sworn Rebecca Baxter was crying.
“Maybe she is someone who chooses to give back, to serve her life protecting others just as someone once protected her.”
Macey smirked but didn’t cry. I got the feeling that Macey McHenry might never cry again.
“Who knows?” Liz asked. “Maybe she’s an undercover journalist.” I glanced at Tina Walters. “An FBI agent.” Eva Alvarez beamed. “A code breaker.” Kim Lee smiled. “A queen.” I thought of little Amirah and knew somehow that she’d be okay.
“Maybe she’s even a college student.” Liz looked right at me. “Or maybe she’s so much more.”
Then Liz went quiet for a moment. She too looked up at the place where the mansion used to stand.
“You know, there was a time when I thought that the Gallagher Academy was made of stone and wood, Grand Halls and high-tech labs. When I thought it was bulletproof, hack-proof, and…yes…fireproof. And I stand before you today happy for the reminder that none of those things are true. Yes, I really am. Because I know now that a Gallagher Girl is not someone who draws her power from that building. I know now with scientific certainty that it is the other way around.”
A hushed awe descended over the already quiet crowd as she said this. Maybe it was the gravity of her words and what they meant, but for me personally, I like to think it was Gilly looking down, smiling at us all.
“What is a Gallagher Girl?” Liz asked one final time. “She’s a genius, a scientist, a heroine, a spy. And now we are at the end of our time at school, and the one thing I know for certain is this: A Gallagher Girl is whatever she wants to be.”
Thunderous, raucous applause filled the student section.
Liz smiled and wiped her eyes. She leaned close to the microphone.
“And, most of all, she is my sister. ~ Ally Carter,#NFDB
1253:Whites impose these rules on themselves because they know blacks, in particular, are so quick to take offense. Radio host Dennis Prager was surprised to learn that a firm that runs focus groups on radio talk shows excludes blacks from such groups. It had discovered that almost no whites are willing to disagree with a black. As soon as a black person voiced an opinion, whites agreed, whatever they really thought. When Mr. Prager asked his listening audience about this, whites called in from around the country to say they were afraid to disagree with a black person for fear of being thought racist.
Attempts at sensitivity can go wrong. In 2009, there were complaints from minority staff in the Delaware Department of Transportation about insensitive language, so the department head, Carolann Wicks, distributed a newsletter describing behavior and language she considered unacceptable. Minorities were so offended that the newsletter spelled out the words whites were not supposed to use that the department had to recall and destroy the newsletter.
The effort whites put into observing racial etiquette has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In experiments at Tufts University and Harvard Business School, a white subject was paired with a partner, and each was given 30 photographs of faces that varied by race, sex, and background color. They were then supposed to identify one of the 30 faces by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible. Asking about race was clearly a good way to narrow down the possibilities —whites did not hesitate to use that strategy when their partner was white—but only 10 percent could bring themselves to mention race if their partner was black. They were afraid to admit that they even noticed race.
When the same experiment was done with children, even white 10- and 11-year olds avoided mentioning race, though younger children were less inhibited. Because they were afraid to identify people by race if the partner was black, older children performed worse on the test than younger children. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts who co-authored the study.
During Barack Obama’s campaign for President, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked the white students in his class to raise their hands if they had a black friend on campus. All did so. At the time, blacks were about 10 percent of the student body, so for every white to have a black friend, every black must have had an average of eight or nine white friends. However, when Prof. Bonilla-Silva asked the blacks in the class if they had white friends none raised his hand. One hesitates to say the whites were lying, but there would be deep disapproval of any who admitted to having no black friends, whereas there was no pressure on blacks to claim they had white friends.
Nor is there the same pressure on blacks when they talk insultingly about whites. Claire Mack is a former mayor and city council member of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men.” No one asked her to apologize.
Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. She refused to apologize, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.”
During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” This caused no ripples, and a majority-black electorate returned him to office. ~ Jared Taylor,#NFDB
1254:Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God? ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
1255:The Bombardment
Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple sweep about in the sky?
Boom! The sound swings against the rain. Boom, again! After it, only water
rushing in the gutters, and the turmoil from the spout of the gargoyle.
Silence. Ripples and mutters. Boom!
The room is damp, but warm. Little flashes swarm about from the firelight.
The lustres of the chandelier are bright, and clusters of rubies
leap in the bohemian glasses on the `etagere'. Her hands are restless,
but the white masses of her hair are quite still. Boom! Will it never cease
to torture, this iteration! Boom! The vibration shatters a glass
on the `etagere'. It lies there, formless and glowing,
with all its crimson gleams shot out of pattern, spilled, flowing red,
blood-red. A thin bell-note pricks through the silence. A door creaks.
The old lady speaks: 'Victor, clear away that broken glass.' 'Alas!
Madame, the bohemian glass!' 'Yes, Victor, one hundred years ago
my father brought it -' Boom! The room shakes, the servitor quakes.
Another goblet shivers and breaks. Boom!
It rustles at the window-pane, the smooth, streaming rain, and he is shut
within its clash and murmur. Inside is his candle, his table, his ink,
his pen, and his dreams. He is thinking, and the walls are pierced with
beams of sunshine, slipping through young green. A fountain tosses itself
up at the blue sky, and through the spattered water in the basin he can see
copper carp, lazily floating among cold leaves. A wind-harp in a cedar-tree
grieves and whispers, and words blow into his brain, bubbled, iridescent,
shooting up like flowers of fire, higher and higher. Boom!
The flame-flowers snap on their slender stems. The fountain rears up
in long broken spears of dishevelled water and flattens into the earth. Boom!
And there is only the room, the table, the candle, and the sliding rain.
Again, Boom! - Boom! - Boom! He stuffs his fingers into his ears.
He sees corpses, and cries out in fright. Boom! It is night,
and they are shelling the city! Boom! Boom!
246
A child wakes and is afraid, and weeps in the darkness. What has made
the bed shake? 'Mother, where are you? I am awake.' 'Hush, my Darling,
I am here.' 'But, Mother, something so queer happened, the room shook.'
Boom! 'Oh! What is it? What is the matter?' Boom! 'Where is Father?
I am so afraid.' Boom! The child sobs and shrieks. The house
trembles and creaks. Boom!
Retorts, globes, tubes, and phials lie shattered. All his trials
oozing across the floor. The life that was his choosing, lonely, urgent,
goaded by a hope, all gone. A weary man in a ruined laboratory,
that is his story. Boom! Gloom and ignorance, and the jig of drunken brutes.
Diseases like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of slime.
Wails from people burying their dead. Through the window, he can see
the rocking steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof,
and the sky tears apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire,
behind the lacings of stone, zigzagging in and out of the carved tracings,
squirms the fire. It spouts like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round
the head of Saint John, and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night
and hisses against the rain. The Cathedral is a burning stain on the white,
wet night.
Boom! The Cathedral is a torch, and the houses next to it begin to scorch.
Boom! The bohemian glass on the `etagere' is no longer there.
Boom! A stalk of flame sways against the red damask curtains.
The old lady cannot walk. She watches the creeping stalk and counts.
Boom! - Boom! - Boom!
The poet rushes into the street, and the rain wraps him in a sheet of silver.
But it is threaded with gold and powdered with scarlet beads. The city burns.
Quivering, spearing, thrusting, lapping, streaming, run the flames.
Over roofs, and walls, and shops, and stalls. Smearing its gold on the sky,
the fire dances, lances itself through the doors, and lisps and chuckles
along the floors.
The child wakes again and screams at the yellow petalled flower
flickering at the window. The little red lips of flame creep along
the ceiling beams.
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The old man sits among his broken experiments and looks at
the burning Cathedral. Now the streets are swarming with people.
They seek shelter and crowd into the cellars. They shout and call,
and over all, slowly and without force, the rain drops into the city.
Boom! And the steeple crashes down among the people. Boom! Boom, again!
The water rushes along the gutters. The fire roars and mutters. Boom!
~ Amy Lowell,#NFDB
1256:For instance, a popular game with California occultists-I do not know its inventor-involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer.
To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game." Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer.
There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning "Do not answer my question." So, the way to use it is to start simply, with "easy" questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher-imprint vulnerability again-but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.)
When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don't want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform.
It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs.
After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them.
This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as "We are all greater artists than we realize" or "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" or "mind and its contents are functionally identical."
This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3.1 am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5.1 like people, and people like me.
Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.
This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer. "Whatever you say it is, it isn't, " Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves. "Neti, neti" (not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is. Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind 1 , and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind2 and the mind which contemplates mind2 contemplating mind 1 as mind3, you are well on your way to meta-programming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising,#NFDB
1257:The Princess (Prologue)
Sir Walter Vivian all a summer's day
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun
Up to the people: thither flocked at noon
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half
The neighbouring borough with their Institute
Of which he was the patron. I was there
From college, visiting the son,--the son
A Walter too,--with others of our set,
Five others: we were seven at Vivian-place.
And me that morning Walter showed the house,
Greek, set with busts: from vases in the hall
Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names,
Grew side by side; and on the pavement lay
Carved stones of the Abbey-ruin in the park,
Huge Ammonites, and the first bones of Time;
And on the tables every clime and age
Jumbled together; celts and calumets,
Claymore and snowshoe, toys in lava, fans
Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries,
Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere,
The cursed Malayan crease, and battle-clubs
From the isles of palm: and higher on the walls,
Betwixt the monstrous horns of elk and deer,
His own forefathers' arms and armour hung.
And 'this' he said 'was Hugh's at Agincourt;
And that was old Sir Ralph's at Ascalon:
A good knight he! we keep a chronicle
With all about him'--which he brought, and I
Dived in a hoard of tales that dealt with knights,
Half-legend, half-historic, counts and kings
Who laid about them at their wills and died;
And mixt with these, a lady, one that armed
Her own fair head, and sallying through the gate,
Had beat her foes with slaughter from her walls.
'O miracle of women,' said the book,
'O noble heart who, being strait-besieged
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By this wild king to force her to his wish,
Nor bent, nor broke, nor shunned a soldier's death,
But now when all was lost or seemed as lost-Her stature more than mortal in the burst
Of sunrise, her arm lifted, eyes on fire-Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate,
And, falling on them like a thunderbolt,
She trampled some beneath her horses' heels,
And some were whelmed with missiles of the wall,
And some were pushed with lances from the rock,
And part were drowned within the whirling brook:
O miracle of noble womanhood!'
So sang the gallant glorious chronicle;
And, I all rapt in this, 'Come out,' he said,
'To the Abbey: there is Aunt Elizabeth
And sister Lilia with the rest.' We went
(I kept the book and had my finger in it)
Down through the park: strange was the sight to me;
For all the sloping pasture murmured, sown
With happy faces and with holiday.
There moved the multitude, a thousand heads:
The patient leaders of their Institute
Taught them with facts. One reared a font of stone
And drew, from butts of water on the slope,
The fountain of the moment, playing, now
A twisted snake, and now a rain of pearls,
Or steep-up spout whereon the gilded ball
Danced like a wisp: and somewhat lower down
A man with knobs and wires and vials fired
A cannon: Echo answered in her sleep
From hollow fields: and here were telescopes
For azure views; and there a group of girls
In circle waited, whom the electric shock
Dislinked with shrieks and laughter: round the lake
A little clock-work steamer paddling plied
And shook the lilies: perched about the knolls
A dozen angry models jetted steam:
A petty railway ran: a fire-balloon
Rose gem-like up before the dusky groves
And dropt a fairy parachute and past:
And there through twenty posts of telegraph
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They flashed a saucy message to and fro
Between the mimic stations; so that sport
Went hand in hand with Science; otherwhere
Pure sport; a herd of boys with clamour bowled
And stumped the wicket; babies rolled about
Like tumbled fruit in grass; and men and maids
Arranged a country dance, and flew through light
And shadow, while the twangling violin
Struck up with Soldier-laddie, and overhead
The broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime
Made noise with bees and breeze from end to end.
Strange was the sight and smacking of the time;
And long we gazed, but satiated at length
Came to the ruins. High-arched and ivy-claspt,
Of finest Gothic lighter than a fire,
Through one wide chasm of time and frost they gave
The park, the crowd, the house; but all within
The sward was trim as any garden lawn:
And here we lit on Aunt Elizabeth,
And Lilia with the rest, and lady friends
From neighbour seats: and there was Ralph himself,
A broken statue propt against the wall,
As gay as any. Lilia, wild with sport,
Half child half woman as she was, had wound
A scarf of orange round the stony helm,
And robed the shoulders in a rosy silk,
That made the old warrior from his ivied nook
Glow like a sunbeam: near his tomb a feast
Shone, silver-set; about it lay the guests,
And there we joined them: then the maiden Aunt
Took this fair day for text, and from it preached
An universal culture for the crowd,
And all things great; but we, unworthier, told
Of college: he had climbed across the spikes,
And he had squeezed himself betwixt the bars,
And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs; and one
Discussed his tutor, rough to common men,
But honeying at the whisper of a lord;
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain
Veneered with sanctimonious theory.
But while they talked, above their heads I saw
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The feudal warrior lady-clad; which brought
My book to mind: and opening this I read
Of old Sir Ralph a page or two that rang
With tilt and tourney; then the tale of her
That drove her foes with slaughter from her walls,
And much I praised her nobleness, and 'Where,'
Asked Walter, patting Lilia's head (she lay
Beside him) 'lives there such a woman now?'
Quick answered Lilia 'There are thousands now
Such women, but convention beats them down:
It is but bringing up; no more than that:
You men have done it: how I hate you all!
Ah, were I something great! I wish I were
Some might poetess, I would shame you then,
That love to keep us children! O I wish
That I were some great princess, I would build
Far off from men a college like a man's,
And I would teach them all that men are taught;
We are twice as quick!' And here she shook aside
The hand that played the patron with her curls.
And one said smiling 'Pretty were the sight
If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.
I think they should not wear our rusty gowns,
But move as rich as Emperor-moths, or Ralph
Who shines so in the corner; yet I fear,
If there were many Lilias in the brood,
However deep you might embower the nest,
Some boy would spy it.'
At this upon the sward
She tapt her tiny silken-sandaled foot:
'That's your light way; but I would make it death
For any male thing but to peep at us.'
Petulant she spoke, and at herself she laughed;
A rosebud set with little wilful thorns,
And sweet as English air could make her, she:
But Walter hailed a score of names upon her,
And 'petty Ogress', and 'ungrateful Puss',
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And swore he longed at college, only longed,
All else was well, for she-society.
They boated and they cricketed; they talked
At wine, in clubs, of art, of politics;
They lost their weeks; they vext the souls of deans;
They rode; they betted; made a hundred friends,
And caught the blossom of the flying terms,
But missed the mignonette of Vivian-place,
The little hearth-flower Lilia. Thus he spoke,
Part banter, part affection.
'True,' she said,
'We doubt not that. O yes, you missed us much.
I'll stake my ruby ring upon it you did.'
She held it out; and as a parrot turns
Up through gilt wires a crafty loving eye,
And takes a lady's finger with all care,
And bites it for true heart and not for harm,
So he with Lilia's. Daintily she shrieked
And wrung it. 'Doubt my word again!' he said.
'Come, listen! here is proof that you were missed:
We seven stayed at Christmas up to read;
And there we took one tutor as to read:
The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square
Were out of season: never man, I think,
So mouldered in a sinecure as he:
For while our cloisters echoed frosty feet,
And our long walks were stript as bare as brooms,
We did but talk you over, pledge you all
In wassail; often, like as many girls-Sick for the hollies and the yews of home-As many little trifling Lilias--played
Charades and riddles as at Christmas here,
And ~what's my thought~ and ~when~ and ~where~ and ~how~,
As here at Christmas.'
She remembered that:
A pleasant game, she thought: she liked it more
Than magic music, forfeits, all the rest.
But these--what kind of tales did men tell men,
She wondered, by themselves?
A half-disdain
Perched on the pouted blossom of her lips:
802
And Walter nodded at me; '~He~ began,
The rest would follow, each in turn; and so
We forged a sevenfold story. Kind? what kind?
Chimeras, crotchets, Christmas solecisms,
Seven-headed monsters only made to kill
Time by the fire in winter.'
'Kill him now,
The tyrant! kill him in the summer too,'
Said Lilia; 'Why not now?' the maiden Aunt.
'Why not a summer's as a winter's tale?
A tale for summer as befits the time,
And something it should be to suit the place,
Heroic, for a hero lies beneath,
Grave, solemn!'
Walter warped his mouth at this
To something so mock-solemn, that I laughed
And Lilia woke with sudden-thrilling mirth
An echo like a ghostly woodpecker,
Hid in the ruins; till the maiden Aunt
(A little sense of wrong had touched her face
With colour) turned to me with 'As you will;
Heroic if you will, or what you will,
Or be yourself you hero if you will.'
'Take Lilia, then, for heroine' clamoured he,
'And make her some great Princess, six feet high,
Grand, epic, homicidal; and be you
The Prince to win her!'
'Then follow me, the Prince,'
I answered, 'each be hero in his turn!
Seven and yet one, like shadows in a dream.-Heroic seems our Princess as required-But something made to suit with Time and place,
A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house,
A talk of college and of ladies' rights,
A feudal knight in silken masquerade,
And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments
For which the good Sir Ralph had burnt them all-This ~were~ a medley! we should have him back
Who told the "Winter's tale" to do it for us.
No matter: we will say whatever comes.
And let the ladies sing us, if they will,
803
From time to time, some ballad or a song
To give us breathing-space.'
So I began,
And the rest followed: and the women sang
Between the rougher voices of the men,
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind:
And here I give the story and the songs.
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson,#NFDB
1258: ON THE GIFT-GIVING VIRTUE
1
When Zarathustra had said farewell to the town to
which his heart was attached, and which was named
The Motley Cow, many who called themselves his disciples followed him and escorted him. Thus they came
to a crossroads; then Zarathustra told them that he now
wanted to walk alone, for he liked to walk alone. His
disciples gave him as a farewell present a staff with a
golden handle on which a serpent coiled around the
sun. Zarathustra was delighted with the staff and leaned
on it; then he spoke thus to his disciples:
Tell me: how did gold attain the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and
gentle in its splendor; it always gives itself. Only as the
image of the highest virtue did gold attain the highest
value. Goldlike gleam the eyes of the giver. Golden
splendor makes peace between moon and sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless; it is gleaming and
gentle in its splendor: a gift-giving virtue is the highest
virtue.
Verily, I have found you out, my disciples: you strive,
as I do, for the gift-giving virtue. What would you have
in common with cats and wolves? This is your thirst: to
75
become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why
you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and gems, because
your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force
all things to and into yourself that they may flow back
out of your well as the gifts of your love. Verily, such
a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber;
but whole and holy I call this selfishness.
There is also another selfishness, an all-too-poor and
hungry one that always wants to steal-the selfishness
of the sick: sick selfishness. With the eyes of a thief it
looks at everything splendid; with the greed of hunger
it sizes up those who have much to eat; and always it
sneaks around the table of those who give. Sickness
speaks out of such craving and invisible degeneration;
the thievish greed of this selfishness speaks of a diseased
body.
Tell me, my brothers: what do we consider bad and
worst of all? Is it not degeneration?And it is degeneration that we always infer where the gift-giving soul is
lacking. Upward goes our way, from genus to overgenus. But we shudder at the degenerate sense which
says, "Everything for me." Upward flies our sense: thus
it is a parable of our body, a parable of elevation.
Parables of such elevations are the names of the virtues.
Thus the body goes through history, becoming and
fighting. And the spirit-what is that to the body? The
herald of its fights and victories, companion and echo.
All names of good and evil are parables: they do not
define, they merely hint. A fool is he who wants knowledge of them!
Watch for every hour, my brothers, in which your
spirit wants to speak in parables: there lies the origin
of your virtue. There your body is elevated and resurrected; with its rapture it delights the spirit so that it
76
turns creator and esteemer and lover and benefactor of
all things.
When your heart flows broad and full like a river, a
blessing and a danger to those living near: there is the
origin of your virtue.
When you are above praise and blame, and your will
wants to comm and all things, like a lover's will: there is
the origin of your virtue.
When you despise the agreeable and the soft bed and
cannot bed yourself far enough from the soft: there is
the origin of your virtue.
When you will with a single will and you call this
cessation of all need "necessity": there is the origin of
your virtue.
Verily, a new good and evil is she. Verily, a new deep
murmur and the voice of a new well
Power is she, this new virtue; a dominant thought is
she, and around her a wise soul: a golden sun, and
around it the serpent of knowledge.
2
Here Zarathustra fell silent for a while and looked
lovingly at his disciples. Then he continued to speak
thus, and the tone of his voice had changed:
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the
power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your
knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg
and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly
things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.
Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has
flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew
away, as I do-back to the body, back to life, that it
may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.
In a hundred ways, thus far, have spirit as well as
virtue flown away and made mistakes. Alas, all this de-
77
lusion and all these mistakes still dwell in our body:
they have there become body and will.
In a hundred ways, thus far, spirit as well as virtue
has tried and erred. Indeed, an experiment was man.
Alas, much ignorance and error have become body
within us.
Not only the reason of millennia, but their madness
too, breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir. Still
we fight step by step with the giant, accident; and over
the whole of humanity there has ruled so far only nonsense-no sense.
Let your spirit and your virtue serve the sense of the
earth, my brothers; and let the value of all things be
posited newly by you. For that shall you be fighters! For
that shall you be creators!
With knowledge, the body purifies itself; making experiments with knowledge, it elevates itself; in the
lover of knowledge all instincts become holy; in the
elevated, the soul becomes gay.
Physician, help yourself: thus you help your patient
too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with
his eyes the man who heals himself.
There are a thousand paths that have never yet been
trodden-a thousand health and hidden isles of life.
Even now, man and man's earth are unexhausted and
undiscovered.
Wake and listen, you that are lonely! From the future
come winds with secret wing-beats; and good tidings
are proclaimed to delicate ears. You that are lonely today, you that are withdrawing, you shall one day be
the people: out of you, who have chosen yourselves,
there shall grow a chosen people-and out of them, the
overman. Verily, the earth shall yet become a site of
recovery. And even now a new fragrance surrounds it,
bringing salvation-and a new hope.
3
When Zarathustra had said these words he became
silent, like one who has not yet said his last word; long
he weighed his staff in his hand, doubtfully. At last he
spoke thus, and the tone of his voice had changed.
Now I go alone, my disciples. You too go now, alone.
Thus I want it. Verily, I counsel you: go away from me
and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of
him! Perhaps he deceived you.
The man of knowledge must not only love his
enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains
nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck
at my wreath?
You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles
one day? Beware lest a statue slay you.
You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters
Zarathustra? You are my believers-but what matter all
believers? You had not yet sought yourselves: and you
found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith
amounts to so little.
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only
when you have all denied me will I return to you.
Verily, my brothers, with different eyes shall I then
seek my lost ones; with a different love shall I then love
you.
And once again you shall become my friends and the
children of a single hope-and then shall I be with you
the third time, that I may celebrate the great noon with
you.
And that is the great noon when man stands in the
middle of his way between beast and overman and
celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope:
for it is the way to a new morning.
79
Then will he who goes under bless himself for being
one who goes over and beyond; and the sun of his
knowledge will stand at high noon for him.
"Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to
live"-on that great noon, let this be our last will.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Second Part
. . . and only when you have all denied me will
I return to you.
Verily, my brothers, with different eyes shall I
then seek my lost ones; with a different love shall
I then love you. (Zarathustra, "On the Gift-Giving Virtue." 1, p. 78)
TRANSLATOR S NOTES
1. The Child with the Mirror: Transition to Part Two with
its partly new style: "A new speech comes to me.
My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles."
2. Upon the Blessed Isles: The creative life versus belief
in God: "God is a conjecture." The polemic against the
opening lines of the final chorus in Goethe's Faust is taken
up again in the chapter "On Poets" (see comments, p. 81 ).
But the lines immediately following in praise of impermanence and creation are thoroughly in the spirit of Goethe.
3. On the Pitying: A return to the style of Part One and
a major statement of Nietzsche's ideas on pity, ressentiment,
and repression.
4. On Priests: Relatively mild, compared to the portrait
of the priest in The Antichrist five years later.
5. On the Virtuous: A typology of different conceptions of
virtue, with vivisectional intent. Nietzsche denounces "the
filth of the words: revenge, punishment, reward, retri bution," which he associates with Christianity; but also
that rigorism for which "virtue is the spasm under
the scourge" and those who "call it virtue when their
vices grow lazy." The pun on "I am just" is, in German:
wenn sie sagen: "ich bin gerecht," so klingt es immer
gleich wie: "ich bin gerdcht!"
6. On the Rabble: The theme of Zarathustra's nausea is
developed ad nauseam in later chapters. La Nausge-to
speak in Sartre's terms-is one of his chief trials, and its
eventual conquest is his greatest triumph. "I often grew
weary of the spirit when I found that even the rabble had
esprit" may help to account for some of Nietzsche's remarks
elsewhere. Generally he celebrates the spirit-not in opposition to the body but as mens sana in corpore sano.
7. On the Tarantulas: One of the central motifs of Nietzsche's philosophy is stated in italics: "that man be delivered
from revenge." In this chapter, the claim of human equality
is criticized as an expression of the ressentiment of the subequal.
8. On the Famous Wise Men: One cannot serve two
masters: the people and the truth. The philosophers of
the past have too often rationalized popular prejudices. But
the service of truth is a passion and martyrdom, for "spirit
is the life that itself cuts into life: with its agony it
increases its own knowledge." The song of songs on the
spirit in this chapter may seem to contradict Nietzsche's
insistence, in the chapter "On the Despisers of the Body,"
that the spirit is a mere instrument. Both themes are
central in Nietzsche's thought, and their apparent contradiction is partly due to the fact that both are stated metaphorically. For, in truth, Nietzsche denies any crude dualism of body and spirit as a popular prejudice. The life of
the spirit and the life of the body are aspects of a single
life. But up to a point the contradiction can also be resolved
metaphorically: life uses the spirit against its present form
to attain a higher perfection. Man's enhancement is
inseparable from the spirit; but Nietzsche denounces the
occasional efforts of the spirit to destroy life instead of
pruning it.
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9. The Night Song: "Light am I; ah, that I were nightly"
io. The Dancing Song: Life and wisdom as jealous women.
ii.
The Tomb Song: "Invulnerable am I only in the heel."
12. On Self-Overcoming: The first long discussion of the
will to power marks, together with the chapters "On the
Pitying" and "On the Tarantulas," one of the high points
of Part Two. Philosophically, however, it raises many difficulties. (See my Nietzsche, 6, III.)
13.
On Those Who Are Sublime: The doctrine of self-
overcoming is here guarded against misunderstandings: far
from favoring austere heroics, Nietzsche praises humor (and
practices it: witness the whole of Zarathustra, especially
Part Four) and, no less, gracefulness and graciousness.
The three sentences near the end, beginning "And there
is nobody . . .
,"
represent a wonderfully concise statement
of much of his philosophy.
14. On the Land of Education: Against modern eclecticism
and lack of style. "Rather would I be a day laborer in
Hades . . :": in the Odyssey, the shade of Achilles would
rather be a day laborer on the smallest field than king of
all the dead in Hades. Zarathustra abounds in similar
allusions. "Everything deserves to perish," for example, is
an abbreviation of a dictum of Goethe's Mephistopheles.
15. On Immaculate Perception: Labored sexual imagery,
already notable in "The Dancing Song," keeps this critique
of detachment from becoming incisive. Not arid but,
judged by high standards, a mismatch of message and
metaphor. Or put positively: something of a personal document. Therefore the German references to the sun as
feminine have been retained in translation. "Loving and
perishing (Lieben und Untergehn)" do not rhyme in
German either.
16. On Scholars: Nietzsche's, not Zarathustra's, autobiography.
17. On Poets: This chapter is full of allusions to the final
chorus in Goethe's Faust, which might be translated thus:
What is destructible
Is but a parable;
82
What fails ineluctably
The undeclarable,
Here it was seen,
Here it was action;
The Eternal-Feminine
Lures to perfection.
i8. On Great Events: How successful Nietzsche's attempts
at narrative are is at least debatable. Here the story
distracts from his statement of his anti-political attitude.
But the curious mixture of the solemn and frivolous, myth,
epigram, and "bow-wow," is of course entirely intentional.
Even the similarity between the ghost's cry and the words
of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderl and probably would
not have dismayed Nietzsche in the least.
1g. The Soothsayer: In the chapter "On the Adder's Bite"
a brief parable introduces some of Zarathustra's finest sayings; but here the parable is offered for its own sake, and
we feel closer to Rimbaud than to Proverbs. The soothsayer
reappears in Part Four.
20. On Redemption: In the conception of inverse cripples
and the remarks on revenge and punishment Zarathustra's
moral pathos reappears to some extent; but the mood of
the preceding chapter figures in his subsequent reflections,
which lead up to, but stop short of, Nietzsche's notion of
the eternal recurrence of the same events.
21. On Human Prudence: First: better to be deceived
occasionally than always to watch out for deceivers. Second:
vanity versus pride. Third: men today (1883) are too
concerned about petty evil, but great things are possible
only where great evil is harnessed.
22. The Stillest Hour: Zarathustra cannot yet get himself
to proclaim the eternal recurrence and hence he must
leave in order to "ripen."
83
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, ON THE GIFT-GIVING VIRTUE
,#NFDB
1259: THE
(on:
THE SEVEN SEALS
YES AND AMEN SONG)
1
If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit
which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an
enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can
neither die nor live-in its dark bosom prepared for
lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying
lightning bolts-blessed is he who is thus pregnant!
And verily, long must he hang on the mountains like a
dark cloud who shall one day kindle the light of the
future: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and
after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
2
If ever my wrath burst tombs, moved boundary
stones, and rolled old tablets, broken, into steep depths;
if ever my mockery blew moldy words into the wind,
and I came as a broom to the cross-marked spiders and
as a sweeping gust to old musty tomb chambers; if ever
I sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old worldslanders-for I love even churches and tombs of gods,
once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with its
229
pure eyes, and like grass and red poppies, I love to sit
on broken churches: Oh, how should I not lust after
eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of
recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
3
If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath
and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents
to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of
creative lightning which is followed obediently but
grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever
played dice with gods at the gods' table, the earth, till
the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of
fire-for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with
creative new words and gods' throws: Oh, how should
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
4
If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice and blend-mug in which all things are well blended; if
my hand ever poured the farthest to the nearest, and
fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and the most wicked to
the most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which makes all things blend well in the
blend-mug-for there is a salt that unites good with
evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of being used
230
as spice for the last foaming over: Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring or recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
5
If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's
kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that
delight in searching which drives the sails toward the
undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer's delight is in my
delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has
vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the
boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and
time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
6
If my virtue is a dancer's virtue and I have often
jumped with both feet into golden-emerald delight; if
my sarcasm is a laughing sarcasm, at home under rose
slopes and hedges of lilies-for in laughter all that is
evil comes together, but is pronounced -holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and
omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become
light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit, bird and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh, how should
231
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the fing of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you,