Steven Shapin:

Max Weber represented what he was doing as science. He put himself in the same institutional and cultural boat as chemists and zoologists. Addressing the Munich students who were his audience, he said that people like them expected people like him to tell them what to do. But they were making a mistake. There was nothing in what he knew as a scientist that gave him any authority to define moral action, the right thing to do. If he did so, he would be abandoning the very thing that gave his calling its meaning. Putting himself professionally on the fact side of the fact-value distinction, Weber suggested that the only morality or meaning arising from the practice of science was the manly embrace of amorality and meaninglessness. Allying himself with Leo Tolstoy, he insisted that science gives no answer to the question "how to live" -- or, as the existentialists later liked to say, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

Niels Bohr:

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

Joseph Stromberg:

This finding does not disprove the existence of gravitational waves or the broader cosmic inflation theory -- any more than digging into the ground and not finding any dinosaur fossils would mean that dinosaurs never existed.

Instead, it spurs scientists to keep looking. And one positive aspect of the Planck data published in September it pointed out areas of the sky with lower levels of dust.

Savas Dimopoulos:

Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.

Maria Konnikova:

It's when [a] change contradicts something we've long held as important that problems occur.

Even when we think we've properly corrected a false belief, the original exposure often continues to influence our memory and thoughts.

"It's depressing," Brendan Nyhan said. "We were definitely depressed," he repeated, after a pause.

Alex Balk:

We're at the point in the calendar year where the pervasive hopelessness of nature sends a signal to your brain to start a steady leak from its carafe of chemicals that more than ever makes you realize just how bleak and futile life really is and that there is no amount of alcohol or television or sex or expensive noodle dishes and the photos you post thereof that can keep you from confronting just how alone you are no matter how many people you number in your life.

It is an endless cycle of suffering only occasionally interrupted by your brain's begrudgingly allowing you to pretend things might work out while the weather is warm. That said, I hear flights to L.A. are not super-exorbitant these days; if you can swing it, it might make you okay for a week or two, which is really all you can ask for.