Quote of the Day

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?

- Richard Hamming

Quote of the Day

Work hard. And have patience. Because no matter who you are, you’re going to get hurt in your career and you have to be patient to get through the injuries.

- Randy Johnson

Quote of the Day

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

- Richard Feynman

Quote of the Day

The joke was that President Bush only declared war when Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone has to pay.

- Chris Kyle, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Quote of the Day

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.

- Saint Basil

Wisdom Of The Week

The best thing about Brooks Brothers apart from their essential catholicity is their conservatism. There are very few items for sale in their stores or online that would have turned an eyeball in 1960. (They have been serious about doing women's clothes for about as long as Donald Trump has been a Republican politician.) Despite the upheaval of the garment industry at the hands of free trade, they have tried to hold fast to ethical manufacturing standards. To this day they have factories in Queens, New York (ties); Garland, North Carolina (shirts); and Haverill, Massachusetts (suits). Even the eight pairs of coral-colored wool socks I bought 50 percent off a few months ago were made in Italy by people paid a just wage rather than by wage slaves. There is virtually no other men's outfitter in the United States of whom this could be said.

[---]

I reflect upon these things with quiet satisfaction when I open my closet and see outnumbering the Tyrwhitts and the casual western shirts, the lone Versace of unknown provenance, in a row of stolid whites and blues, with the occasional pink or orange gingham popping up like an embarrassed spring flower, all the sensible items I have acquired from Brooks Brothers. No matter where I am going — to Mass, to my uncle's for a few drinks, to my office downstairs for the morning's work — I know that I will look and feel all right.

- In Praise of Brooks Brothers

Quote of the Day

It’s a metropolis.  Home to millions of ants ... A single colony harvests half a ton of grass a year, more than any other animal on these plains.  But since they themselves can’t eat it why do they do so?  The answer lies underground ... This is a fungus that is found nowhere else on Earth.  And the ants cultivate it assiduously ... They construct their nest so that it has an automatic air conditioning system.

- David Attenborough

Quote of the Day

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves…. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

- Lewis Thomas

Quote of the Day

Why then be concerned about the conservation of wildlife when for all practical purposes we would be much better off if humans and their domestic animals and pets were the only living creatures on the face of the earth? There is no obvious and demolishing answer to this rather doubtful logic although in practice the destruction of all wild animals would certainly bring devastating changes to our existence on this planet as we know it today...The trouble is that everything in nature is completely interdependent. Tinker with one part of it and the repercussions ripple out in all directions...Wildlife - and that includes everything from microbes to blue whales and from a fungus to a redwood tree - has been so much part of life on the earth that we are inclined to take its continued existence for granted...Yet the wildlife of the world is disappearing, not because of a malicious and deliberate policy of slaughter and extermination, but simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect.

- Prince Philip Mountbatten

Quote of the Day

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. ... Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.

- Edward O. Wilson

Quote of the Day

A good upbringing is necessary for a long life, but sometimes the patience of the young trees is sorely tested. As I mentioned in chapter 5, "Tree Lottery," acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large "mother trees." Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fungal-root connections. These trees pass their legacy on to the next generation and exert their influence in the upbringing of the youngsters. "My" small beech trees, which have by now been waiting for at least eighty years, are standing under mother trees that are about two hundred years old -- the equivalent of forty-year-olds in human terms. The stunted trees can probably expect another two hundred years of twiddling their thumbs before it is finally their turn. The wait time is, however, made bearable. Their mothers are in contact with them through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients. You might even say they are nursing their babies.

- Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World

Quote of the Day

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.

- Michael Specter

Quote of the Day

Don't postpone joy until you have learned all of your lessons. Joy is your lesson.

- Alan Cohen

Wisdom Of The Week

Feynman was also a renowned educator. Those lucky enough to have attended his lectures have the best sense of how his agile mind operated. He taught a first-year course at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena: ‘Physics X’, in which students would ask him anything and he’d think on his feet. Feynman loved to astound, and often refused to provide solutions, to spur students on intellectually. The careful notes of attendees have been published as books and articles, bolstering his reputation as a master lecturer. One such from Caltech was the three-volume The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964). Another, 1959’s The Theory of Fundamental Processes, is based on notes taken by Peter Carruthers and Michael Nauenberg, two students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, when Feynman was a visiting lecturer there in 1958. Nauenberg told me how, during the first lecture, Feynman walked in, glanced at the blackboard, wildly erased the equations on it and declared that they would all learn the whole of physics from scratch. Within a few weeks, the course proceeded from elementary quantum mechanics to Feynman’s rules for particle-physics calculations. The Character of Physical Law (1967), another of Feynman’s works, emerged from lectures he delivered at Cornell six years later.

Feynman’s books urge us to explore the world with open-minded inquisitiveness, as if encountering it for the first time. He worked from the idea that all of us could aspire to take the same mental leaps as him. But, of course, not every ambitious young magician can be a Harry Houdini. Whereas other educators might try to coddle those who couldn’t keep up, Feynman never relented. The essence of his philosophy was to find something that you can do well, and put your heart and soul into it. If not physics, then another passion — bongos, perhaps.

- Richard Feynman at 100

Quote of the Day

When a problem occurs, a good leader will accept the news with patience and understanding, listen carefully, discuss the cause with the managers and team members directly affected by the problem, and work toward a solution.

- William C. Oakes, Christlike Leadership: Leadership that Starts with an Attitude

Quote of the Day

Things that are worth doing or having are not usually easy. You will experience a lot of resistance when you start living a simple life. The benefits of living a simple life are not immediate so be sure to have the patience to wait for the fruits of your efforts.

- Ryan Cooper, Simplicity: The Art Of Simplicity Guide!

Quote of the Day

One of the paradoxes of life is that being impatient often makes it harder to achieve something. As with any skill, you get better at manifesting the more you practice.

- Simon Foster, Manifesting Change: How to Manifest Change, Love, Abundance and Prosperity

Quote of the Day

Stressors are everywhere. Each and every day, we run into situations that constantly test us, rob us of our patience, strip us of our sanity, impact our focus, and cause us to lose control of our days.

- Colleen Archer

Quote of the Day

By staying on top of your reactions you will be able to develop patience and tolerance; two distinct traits required for achieving long-term success.

- Annabelle Higgins, Self Discipline

Quote of the Day

Doing interesting work when nobody notices takes patience and belief.

- Brian Knapp, Creative Pursuit

Quote of the Day

Patience has been defined as "the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset." Just from the definition itself, we can turn to some soul-searching questions about our behavior and everyday repertoire of reacting to the vicissitudes and altering circumstances around us.

- Christian Olsen

Wisdom Of The Week

It is often asked, not unreasonably, why feelings should feel like anything at all, pleasant or unpleasant, tolerably quiet or like an uncontainable storm. The reason should now be clear: When the full constellation of physiological events that constitutes feelings began to appear in evolution and provided mental experiences, it made a difference. Feelings made lives better. They prolonged and saved lives. Feelings conformed to the goals of the homeostatic imperative and helped implement them by making them matter mentally to their owner as, for example, the phenomenon of conditioned place aversion appears to demonstrate. The presence of feelings is closely related to another development: consciousness and, more specifically, subjectivity.

The value of the knowledge provided by feelings to the organism in which they occur is the likely reason why evolution contrived to hold on to them. Feelings influence the mental process from within and are compelling because of their obligate positivity or negativity, their origin in actions that are conducive to health or death, and their ability to grip and jolt the owner of the feeling and force attention on the situation.

This distinctive account of feelings illustrates the fact that mental experiences do not arise from plain mapping of an object or event in neural tissue. Instead, they arise from the multidimensional mapping of body-proper phenomena woven interactively with neural phenomena. Mental experiences are not “instant pictures” but processes in time, narratives of several micro events in the body proper and the brain.

It is conceivable, of course, that nature could have evolved in another way and not stumbled upon feelings. But it didn’t. The fundamentals behind feelings are so integral a part of the maintenance of life that they were already in place. All that was needed in addition was the presence of mind-making nervous systems.

Ultimately, feelings can annoy us or delight us, but that is not what they are for. Feelings are for life regulation, providers of information concerning basic homeostasis or the social conditions of our lives. Feelings tell us about risks, dangers, and ongoing crises that need to be averted. On the nice side of the coin, they can inform us about opportunities. They can guide us toward behaviors that will improve our overall homeostasis and, in the process, make us better human beings, more responsible for our own future and the future of others.

- Anthony Damasio, Why Your Biology Runs on Feelings

Quote of the Day

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

- Charles Bukowski

Quote of the Day

Now that we have the pissing contest out of the way, we need information.

- M.R. Merrick, Exiled

Quote of the Day

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves to the ordinary.

- Cecil Beaton

Quote of the Day

Aging is not ‘lost youth,’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength. It’s a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it’s youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are no role models, no guideposts, and no signs.

- Betty Friedan

Quote of the Day

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

- Confucius

Quote of the Day

Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.

- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Wisdom Of The Week

In November, you told Maureen Dowd that it’s scary and awful how out of touch Silicon Valley people have become. It’s a pretty forward remark. I’m kind of curious what you mean by that.

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world. Like, oh, I don’t know, I could give you many examples. But let’s say like Russia’s still acting as if it’s being destroyed when it isn’t, and it’s creating great damage in the world. And Silicon Valley’s kind of like that.

We used to be kind of rebels, like, if you go back to the origins of Silicon Valley culture, there were these big traditional companies like IBM that seemed to be impenetrable fortresses. And we had to create our own world. To us, we were the underdogs and we had to struggle. And we’ve won. I mean, we have just totally won. We run everything. We are the conduit of everything else happening in the world. We’ve disrupted absolutely everything. Politics, finance, education, media, relationships — family relationships, romantic relationships — we’ve put ourselves in the middle of everything, we’ve absolutely won. But we don’t act like it.

We have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness having won. We’re still acting as if we’re in trouble and we have to defend ourselves, which is preposterous. And so in doing that we really kind of turn into assholes, you know?

There’s still this rhetoric of being the underdog in the tech industry. The attitude within the Valley is “Are you kidding? You think we’re resting on our laurels? No! We have to fight for every yard.” 

There’s this question of whether what you’re fighting for is something that’s really new and a benefit for humanity, or if you’re only engaged in a sort of contest with other people that’s fundamentally not meaningful to anyone else. The theory of markets and capitalism is that when we compete, what we’re competing for is to get better at something that’s actually a benefit to people, so that everybody wins. So if you’re building a better mousetrap, or a better machine-learning algorithm, then that competition should generate improvement for everybody.

But if it’s a purely abstract competition set up between insiders to the exclusion of outsiders, it might feel like a competition, it might feel very challenging and stressful and hard to the people doing it, but it doesn’t actually do anything for anybody else. It’s no longer genuinely productive for anybody, it’s a fake. And I’m a little concerned that a lot of what we’ve been doing in Silicon Valley has started to take on that quality. I think that’s been a problem in Wall Street for a while, but the way it’s been a problem in Wall Street has been aided by Silicon Valley. Everything becomes a little more abstract and a little more computer-based. You have this very complex style of competition that might not actually have much substance to it.

You look at the big platforms, and it’s not like there’s this bountiful ecosystem of start-ups. The rate of small-business creation is at its lowest in decades, and instead you have a certain number of start-ups competing to be acquired by a handful of companies. There are not that many varying powers, there’s just a few. 

[--]

’m kind of curious what you think needs to happen to prevent future platforms, like VR, from going the way of social media and reaching this really profitable crisis state.
A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopian ring about creating meaningful communities where everybody’s creative and people collaborate and all this stuff — I don’t wanna make too much of my own contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused. Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having contributed to something that’s gone very wrong.

So I guess the overall way I think of it is, first, we might remember ourselves as having been lucky that some of these problems started to come to a head during the social-media era, before tools like virtual reality become more prominent, because the technology is still not as intense as it probably will be in the future. So as bad as it’s been, as bad as the election interference and the fomenting of ethnic warfare, and the empowering of neo-Nazis, and the bullying — as bad as all of that has been, we might remember ourselves as having been fortunate that it happened when the technology was really just little slabs we carried around in our pockets that we could look at and that could talk to us, or little speakers we could talk to. It wasn’t yet a whole simulated reality that we could inhabit.

Because that will be so much more intense, and that has so much more potential for behavior modification, and fooling people, and controlling people. So things potentially could get a lot worse, and hopefully they’ll get better as a result of our experiences during this era.

As far as what to do differently, I’ve had a particular take on this for a long time that not everybody agrees with. I think the fundamental mistake we made is that we set up the wrong financial incentives, and that’s caused us to turn into jerks and screw around with people too much. Way back in the ’80s, we wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd. But that’s the kind of absurdity that Silicon Valley culture has to grapple with.

- Interview with Jaron Lanier

Quote of the Day

There is a meaning of trees, a meaning to the hugely interconnected living world that cares little for human meaning. If we don’t understand & accommodate that meaning, ours will come to very little. Awe & wonder are the first tools in turning to that meaning.

- Richard Powers

Quote of the Day

Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued…Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

- Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Quote of the Day

There is no austerity equal to a balanced mind, and there is no happiness equal to contentment; there is no disease like covetousness, and no virtue like mercy.

- Chanakya

Quote of the Day

And I like to ask Warren what he wants to be remembered as, and he says a teacher. Who else in America who is a CEO says he wants to be remembered as a teacher? I like it.

- Charlie Munger

Quote of the Day

The best of us are cursed with caring, with a bungling and undying determination to protect whatever looks like beauty, even if our vision is blurry. People keep warning me that Isla's generation will blame us for loosing so much of that precious beauty. But whatever: It's inevitable, and I'm trying to make my peace with it. It's comforting that they'll still imagine better, and it will occur to them to be angry.

- Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America