A > A's Quotes

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Dr. Noah Smith, economics columnist for Bloomberg View, tells us, “The real danger of the ‘rise of the robots’ is not that they’ll take all our jobs, but that they’ll cause continually increasing inequality.”
― Kelly Weinersmith, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

“This was Beethoven’s great significance, not through form or musical language, but in recalibrating what music was for. Single-handedly he turned it from genteel, ignorable after-dinner entertainment into an all-encompassing emotional experience, a way of perceiving life as a mighty struggle, the cry of the soul, the voice of conscience”
― Howard Goodall, The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

“Marx’s first point is one still made by critics of the modern consumer society: A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut… however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls. (WLC 259)”
― Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

“Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control our own society. Economic relations between human beings determine not only our wages and our prospects of finding work, but also our politics, our religion, and our ideas. These economic relations force us into a situation in which we compete with each other instead of co-operating for the good of all. These conditions nullify technical advances in the use of our resources.”
― Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“The general tendency, in explaining form in music, has been to oversimplify. The usual method is to seize upon certain well-known formal molds and demonstrate how composers write works within these molds, to a greater or lesser extent. Close examination of most masterworks, however, will show that they seldom fit so neatly as they are supposed to into the exteriorized forms of the textbooks. The conclusion is inescapable that it is insufficient to assume that structure in music is simply a matter of choosing a formal mold and then filling it with inspired tones. Rightly understood, form can only be the gradual growth of a living organism from whatever premise the composer starts. It follows, then, that “the form of every genuine piece of music is unique.” It is musical content that determines form.”
― Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music

“They use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be used as a soporific. Contemporary music, especially, is created to wake you up, not put you to sleep. It is meant to stir and excite you, to move you—it may even exhaust you.”
― Aaron Copland, What to Listen For in Music

“that synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex continues well into the third decade of life before the total number of synapses in the brain stabilizes to adult levels.9 Thus, while the human brain reaches its full size by about 16 years of age, the prefrontal cortex does not reach full maturity until this pruning is complete, and these gradual brain changes are associated with changes in behavior. The frontal cortex is associated with complex functions such as decision-making and evaluation of rewards and, because it takes so long to reach full maturity, adolescents tend to place great emphasis on gaining approval from their peers, and often engage in risky behavior to do so. As synaptic pruning refines the prefrontal circuitry during the second and third decades of life, the executive functions improve, and adults behave more responsibly.10”
― Moheb Costandi, Neuroplasticity

“In the past few years, however, it has become clear that synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex continues well into the third decade of life before the total number of synapses in the brain stabilizes to adult levels.9 Thus, while the human brain reaches its full size by about 16 years of age, the prefrontal cortex does not reach full maturity until this pruning is complete, and these gradual brain changes are associated with changes in behavior. The frontal cortex is associated with complex functions such as decision-making and evaluation of rewards and, because it takes so long to reach full maturity, adolescents tend to place great emphasis on gaining approval from their peers, and often engage in risky behavior to do so. As synaptic pruning refines the prefrontal circuitry during the second and third decades of life, the executive functions improve, and adults behave more responsibly.10”
― Moheb Costandi, Neuroplasticity

“We’ve known for many years that poorer people tend to be unhealthier, to have less access to healthcare, and to die younger that those who are better off, and the picture emerging now is that growing up in poverty has severe and persistent effects on brain development that can affect both mental and physical health in adulthood.”
― Moheb Costandi, Neuroplasticity

“The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds;”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

“Now came the great, improbable impetus to the book: a road trip to southeastern Oregon, our first visit to Harney County, a high and lonesome land of mountains and great sagebrush plains, of pure skies, far distances, and silence. Coming back from there, after a two-day, weary, dusty drive with our three kids, I knew my novel would be set in that desert. In the car, when we weren’t playing Signs Alphabet or singing “Forty-Nine Bottles,” I began to dream my story. That land had given it to me. I am forever grateful.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“But for a society buit on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“It becomes the responsibility of every man, upon realizing he lacks the truth, to seek it out.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Statistical mechanics interprets an increase of entropy as a decrease in order or, if we wish, as a decrease in our knowledge.”
― John Robinson Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise

“It would be a mistake to see the restrictions that the 1277 condemnations placed on natural philosophers as evidence that the Church was anti-science. True, there was no such thing as completely free inquiry, but placing limits around a subject is not the same thing as being against it. The limits imposed on natural philosophy served a dual purpose. While they did prevent it from impinging on theology, they also protected natural philosophers from those who wanted to see their activities further curtailed.”
― James Hannam, God's Philosophers

“In traditional histories, the rise of humanism is usually portrayed as ‘a good thing’, but the truth is that the humanists almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy.”
― James Hannam, God's Philosophers

“According to the traditional history of science, Galileo was a man of unparalleled originality. He was, supposedly, the first person to show that objects of different weights fall at the same speed, the first to claim that vacuums could really exist and the first to realise projectiles move in curves. He rejected Aristotle when everyone else followed him slavishly. It is said that he proved Copernicus was right and that the Inquisition cast him into prison as a result. As it turns out, none of these things is exactly true. Galileo never proved heliocentricism (as we have already seen, it was Kepler who effectively did that) and his trial before the Inquisition was based more on politics than science. Galileo’s scientific achievement was solidly based on the natural philosophy that came before him. Appreciating that fact should not diminish our admiration of his genius. While almost all his theories can be traced back to earlier sources, he was the first to mould them into a coherent whole and the first to show how they could be experimentally demonstrated. In that sense, the long road to modern science really does start with him.”
― James Hannam, God's Philosophers

“Consider a commercial claim of a product killing “ninety nine percent of all bacteria in your sink.” That would mean that, of the ten thousand bacteria typically living on a square inch of the wet sink surface, one hundred would survive. These have only to multiply for eight generations to be back to the numbers they were before the detergent was used, which would usually take them a couple of hours, provided there was enough food for them. To remove their food by cleansing with a detergent lacking antibacterials would have been just as efficient.”
― Trudy M. Wassenaar, Bacteria: The Benign, the Bad, and the Beautiful

“Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself … because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“Bloody politicians and their bloody stupid rhetoric, speeches, ideologies. You ever hear anyone say words don’t matter after this, you tell them about this day, when Malay idiots and Chinese idiots decided to kill one another because they believed what the bloody politicians told them.”
― Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky

“I’VE LOST FAITH in the saying “You’re only as old as you think you are,” ever since I got old. It is a saying with a fine heritage. It goes right back to the idea of the Power of Positive Thinking, which is so strong in America because it fits in so well with the Power of Commercial Advertising and with the Power of Wishful Thinking, aka the American Dream. It is the bright side of Puritanism: What you deserve is what you get. (Never mind just now about the dark side.) Good things come to good people and youth will last forever for the young in heart.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

“The battle for a fast system can be won or lost in specifying the problem it is to solve.”
― Jon L. Bentley, Programming Pearls

“The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.”
― Jon L. Bentley, Programming Pearls

“We need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economic theory. Otherwise, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change, as well as a crucial element for economic forecasting. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we do not fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.”
― Robert J Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

“Five thick-necked men in riot gear were waving people on. Two of them were pointing guns at the crowd. Miller was more than half tempted to go up and slap the little idiots. Pointing guns at people was a lousy way to avoid panic.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Perhaps the rivers of ink that have been expended discussing the nature of the “continuous” over the centuries, from Aristotle to Heidegger, have been wasted. Continuity is only a mathematical technique for approximating very finely grained things. The world is subtly discrete, not continuous. The good Lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like the painter Georges Seurat.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

“The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time