Monday, September 2, 2013

None of those things are observable

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An interesting article, The STEM Crisis Is a Myth by Robert N. Charette. For years I have been hearing about the STEM shortage but every ...

Code of Hammurabi, crime, economics and imagining the past

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The Code of Hammurabi translated by L. W. King. I haven't looked at the Code in a couple of decades. 282 laws and a level of binary ...
Sunday, September 1, 2013

Logical descriptions of complex worlds contain within themselves the seeds of their own limitation

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From Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow, page 3. Logical descriptions of complex worlds cont...
Saturday, August 31, 2013

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

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From Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell. I had gone looking for a particular quotation but found the whole essay an intriguing time caps...
Friday, August 30, 2013

I ought to have eaten a pretzel in the first place!

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From Fables and Fairy Tales by Leo Tolstoy, page 37. Three Rolls a Pretzel Feeling hungry one day, a peasant bought himself a large roll ...

To be, or not to be - that is the question

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From William Shakespeare's Hamlet , Act 3 scene 1, the famous soliloquy, To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis n...

Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement

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PERMA , a concept of life outcomes, developed by Martin Seligman of University of Pennsylvania. Positive emotion — tunable by writing down,...
Thursday, August 29, 2013

Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

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From The Shape of History: Ian Morris, historian on a grand scale by Marc Parry. Social behavior boils down to the "Morris Theorem...

Without mathematical language one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth

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The Assayer (1623), by Galileo Galilei, as translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in The Metaphysical Foundations of Moder...

The greater part of progress is the desire to progress

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On the Supreme Good, Letter LXXI by Seneca That which is short of perfection must necessarily be unsteady, at one time progressing, at ano...