Categories: education | spirituality | justice | life | science | other | ALL
|
"If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part."; "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."; "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."; "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb." (Richard P. Feynman) "[T]he only uncertainty is how long we’ll last" (edited extract from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres) [Guardian] "The beauty of mathematics is that there is a precise way of recognizing its own limitations." "The way flu vaccines are being developed each year is like buying lottery tickets carrying past winning numbers." "Each day ... some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet." (Jim Robbins) [NY Times] "Our DNA contains roughly 100,000 pieces of viral DNA. Altogether, they make up about 8 percent of the human genome. ... Some of our ancient viruses may be protecting us from disease; others may be raising our risks for cancer, among other conditions. “It’s not an either-or — are these things good or bad? It’s a lot more complicated than that,”" (Carl Zimmer of NY Times, partly quoting Aris Katzourakis) "Law of Sustenance: If a system perceives that any of its components is a threat to the well-being of the system itself, it may attempt to eradicate the component at any cost. For example, if the planet earth perceives that the human species is a threat to its existence, it may try to eliminate the species even if the process involves substantial damages to the planet. Such a process might involve self-destructive actions of the human species. That is, if we think that we are in the position of saving or destroying the planet earth, we are mistaken. Rather, it must be that we are totally at the mercy of the planet earth." "Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them" (Antonio Damasio) "[I]f we watch how people's brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look distubingly similar." (Daniel Pink) "We can make as much food as we need and build shelters to protect ourselves from the elements. We've outsmarted most of our predators, from lions to bacteria. Today our most formidable natural enemy is ourselves. Nearly all of our biggest problems are caused by, or at least preventable by, human choice." (Joshua Greene) "The musculoskeletal system was designed to maintain itself in a motion-rich environment, and does not readily take to management by drugs, surgery, or other forms of outside therapeutic intervention. All that's required is motion in keeping with design requirements and an adherence to the integrity of that design. The experts, no matter how well trained and well-meaning, can't do that." (Pete Egoscue) "Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess." (XKCD) * End of List * |