Rivka Galchen:

Repress a childish hope long enough and it returns in disguise.

The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Galchen:

I recalled hearing tell from my father of a time not so long ago when the term "technological fix" didn't sound dirty and delusional. When my dad was young, Buckminster Fuller and scientists like him were crusaders of the left, heroically engaged in ushering in an utter transformation of society. The humbly engineered new world order would be one of less waste, more justice, less suffering, domed town halls built out of Venetian blinds, and, just maybe, plastic living rooms that happier housewives could simply wash down with a hose. The technological aspirations were well-diagrammed, beautiful, and ludicrous.

Charles C. Mann:

Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

Freeman Dyson:

The truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass.

Galchen:

The main way you move forward in science is by finding out you were wrong about what you thought you already knew.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Dyson:

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Galchen:

Our fear of what we'll do with scientific knowledge should be dwarfed by the prospect of that knowledge being pursued outside the public's annoying, normalizing, sobering gaze.

Have you seen Sunshine?

Disaster Aversion

Sandra Steingraber:

If Darwin didn't rock your world, this should.

According to the Pew Research Center, polls conducted over twenty years reveal little movement in the percentage of the public who accept evolution. In a one-to-one ratio that echoes my own classroom findings, about 40 to 50 percent of Americans say they believe in it, and a slightly smaller percentage say they do not. Those who believe that natural selection is the driver of evolution (Darwin's keynote point) are firmly in the minority at 14 to 26 percent.

With numbers like these, I am unsurprised that the findings emerging from an obscure field of study called epigenetics have not yet rocked the world. They are rocking my world, though, and they are also mounting a profound challenge to the traditional systems of environmental regulation.

David Dobbs:

Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.

Ecological Inheritance

Geoffrey Miller:

About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for "genome-wide association studies" (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them.

GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. They will reassure Big Pharma and the grant agencies that GWAS will identify the genes that explain most of the variation in heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and ageing itself. Those genes will illuminate the biochemical pathways underlying disease, which will yield new genetic tests and blockbuster drugs. Keep holding your breath for a golden age of health, happiness and longevity.

In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

The looming crisis in human genetics

David Dobbs:

Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications.

Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.

Jay Belsky:

They don't see the upside, because they don't look for it.

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Malcolm Gladwell:

The Cezannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Seth Stevenson:

Fascinating anecdotes can, just by themselves, make you feel like you've really learned something.

Ker Than:

History suggests that the line between creativity and madness is a fine one, but a small group of people known as schizotypes are able to walk it with few problems and even benefit from it.

Bradley Folley:

Creativity at its base is associative. It's taking things that you might see and pass by every day and using them in a novel way to solve a new problem.

The Science of Success

How can an X chromosome be nearly as big as the head of the sperm cell?

No, this isn't a mistake. First, there's less DNA in a sperm cell than there is in a non-reproductive cell such as a skin cell. Second, the DNA in a sperm cell is super-condensed and compacted into a highly dense form. Third, the head of a sperm cell is almost all nucleus. Most of the cytoplasm has been squeezed out in order to make the sperm an efficient torpedo-like swimming machine.

From the archive:

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across.

See also, The Zoom Quilt (now here):

What M.C. Escher would do with Flash.

Barrett Sheridan:

Zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details.

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Cell Size and Scale

Kurt Kleiner:

Time for a pop quiz.

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George.

Jack is married but George is not.

Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

* Yes
* No
* Cannot be determined

Christopher J. Ferguson:

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Kleiner:

How a question is asked dramatically affects the answer, and can even lead to a contradictory answer.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Kleiner:

Your algorithmic mind can be ready to fire on all cylinders, but it can't help you if you never engage it.

Brian Ulrich:

Over the past 7 years I have been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.

Kleiner:

We are all "cognitive misers" who try to avoid thinking too much.

Walter Russell Mead:

The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is not that fundamentalists are more emotional in their beliefs; it is that fundamentalists insist more fully on following their ideas to their logical conclusion.

Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

Robert Lee Hotz:

The flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

Carolyn Johnson:

Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

David Lynch:

Trillions and Zillions of Ideas.

Consciousness is a Ball.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Freeman Dyson:

It's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive.

Kevin Kelly:

Upcreation is my term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe.

A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?

From TED:

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

A Wandering Mind Heads Toward Insight

Arthur L. Costa:

This chapter contains descriptions for 16 of the attributes that human beings display when they behave intelligently. They are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions to which are not immediately apparent.

When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they never quit.

Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act.

The ability to listen to another person -- to empathize with and to understand that person's point of view -- is one of the highest forms of intelligent behavior. We often say we are listening, but actually we are rehearsing in our head what we are going to say when our partner is finished.

Some students have difficulty considering alternative points of view or dealing with more than one classification system simultaneously. Their way to solve a problem seems to be the only way. They perceive situations from an egocentric point of view: "My way or the highway!" Their minds are made up: "Don't confuse me with facts. That's it!"

Intelligent people plan for, reflect on, and evaluate the quality of their own thinking skills and strategies. Interestingly, not all humans achieve the level of formal operations.

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.

The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating.

Responsible risk takers do not behave impulsively. They know that all risks are not worth taking.

Working in groups requires the ability to justify ideas and to test the feasibility of solution strategies on others. It also requires developing a willingness and an openness to accept feedback from a critical friend.

George Cochrane:

It might be painful, especially at first. It might be frustrating. You might throw out the first 20 things you make, hate them, hate yourself, and curse the day anybody encouraged you to try.

But at least you’re starting.

Decius:

It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Describing the Habits of Mind

First Law:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Second Law:

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Third Law:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Fourth Law:

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Susan Hill:

Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Decius:

Stupid people like stupid black and white choices. They are blinded by their convictions.

Q&A with Slavoj Zizek:

What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Dr. Nanochick on the Geek Test:

I feel truly geeky because I can think of something that should have gotten me geek points that wasn't on the list -- owning the "Real Genius" DVD and reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

Jello:

I own the Real Genius DVD. I love it. I just bought Godel, Escher, Bach and... I can't fucking understand it and I feel stupid. It's not that it's totally above me and I could never approach it. It's just that ... for the same reason I've never finished Gravity's Rainbow: it's full time work understanding it.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Nassim Taleb on Umberto Eco's library:

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

John Lanchester:

A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough.

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Roger Ebert:

I did not much connect with the film [Antonioni's "L'Avventura"] when I saw it first -- how could I, at 18? These people were bored by a lifestyle beyond my wildest dreams. When I taught the film in a class 15 years later, it seemed affected and contrived, a feature-length idea but not a movie. Only recently, seeing it again, did I realize how much clarity and passion Antonioni brought to the film's silent cry of despair.

Milton Glaser:

If you have a choice never have a job.

Michael Lewis:

Just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

Peter Trachtenberg:

Everybody suffers, but Americans have the ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Undertaking a Brutal Mental Space Odyssey