Quote of the Day

Modern man’s confidence in his power over historical destiny prompted the rejection of every older conception of an overruling providence in history. Modern man’s confidence in his virtue caused an equally unequivocal rejection of the Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue. In the liberal world the evils in human nature and history were ascribed to social institutions or to ignorance or to some other manageable defect in human nature or environment. Again the communist doctrine is more explicit and therefore more dangerous. It ascribes the origin of evil to the institution of property. The abolition of this institution by communism therefore prompts the ridiculous claim of innocency for one of the vastest concentrations of power in human history. This distillation of evil from the claims of innocency is ironic enough. But the irony is increased by the fact that the so-called free world must cover itself with guilt in order to ward off the peril of communism. The final height of irony is reached by the fact that the most powerful nation in the alliance of free peoples is the United States. For every illusion of a liberal culture has achieved a special emphasis in the United States, even while its power grew to phenomenal proportions.

We were not only innocent a half century ago with the innocency of irresponsibility; but we had a religious version of our national destiny which interpreted the meaning of our nationhood as God’s effort to make a new beginning in the history of mankind. Now we are immersed in world-wide responsibilities; and our weakness has grown into strength. Our culture knows little of the use and the abuse of power; but we have to use power in global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized. Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends.

The ironic nature of our conflict with communism sometimes centers in the relation of power to justice and virtue. The communists use power without scruple because they are under the illusion that their conception of an unambiguously ideal end justifies such use. Our own culture is schizophrenic upon the subject of power. Sometimes it pretends that a liberal society is a purely rational harmony of interests. Sometimes it achieves a tolerable form of justice by a careful equilibration of the powers and vitalities of society, though it is without a conscious philosophy to justify these policies of statesmanship. Sometimes it verges on that curious combination of cynicism and idealism which characterizes communism, and is prepared to use any means without scruple to achieve its desired end.

- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

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The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you don’t, life controls you.

- Anthony Robbins

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Wisdom Of The Week

Formal training programs, which can be called education, enhance cognition in human and nonhuman animals alike. However, even informal exposure to human contact in human environments can enhance cognition. We review selected literature to compare animals’ behavior with objects among keas and great apes, the taxa that best allow systematic comparison of the behavior of wild animals with that of those in human environments such as homes, zoos, and rehabilitation centers. In all cases, we find that animals in human environments do much more with objects. Following and expanding on the explanations of several previous authors, we propose that living in human environments and the opportunities to observe and manipulate human-made objects help to develop motor skills, embodied cognition, and the use of objects to extend cognition in the animals. Living in a human world also furnishes the animals with more time for such activities, in that the time needed for foraging for food is reduced, and furnishes opportunities for social learning, including emulation, an attempt to achieve the goals of a model, and program-level imitation, in which the imitator reproduces the organizational structure of goal-directed actions without necessarily copying all the details. All these factors let these animals learn about the affordances of many objects and make them better able to come up with solutions to physical problems.

- Full paper here (Why human environments enhance animal capacities to use objects)

Quote of the Day

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

- Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Quote of the Day

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

- Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

Quote of the Day

A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power.

- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

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My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor

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You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

- Albert Camus

Quote of the Day

Do Not Design for Speculators

Designing for efficiency vs speculation

Crypto projects–token networks, digital asset registries, maybe even pure cryptocurrencies–could benefit from understanding this prior art. Just as we seek to maximize the network value of property, we seek to maximize the network value of token networks and digital assets. We face the same problem with speculators that make suboptimal contributions to the network.

• Poor allocative efficiency means that users that would otherwise contribute value to the network are unable to.
• Poor investment efficiency means that users are not properly incentivized to add value to the network
• Poor diversity efficiency means that concentration of ownership (and sometimes control, in the case of networks with governance mechanics) impedes efficient use of the network.

- More Here

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There is much evidence that high-capacity reasoners perform better on a variety of reasoning tasks (Stanovich, 1999), a phenomenon that is normally attributed to differences in either the efficacy or the probability of deliberate (Type II) engagement (Evans, 2007). In contrast, we hypothesized that intuitive (Type I) processes may differentiate high- and low-capacity reasoners. To test this hypothesis, reasoners were given a reasoning task modeled on the logic of the Stroop Task, in which they had to ignore one dimension of a problem when instructed to give an answer based on the other dimension (Handley, Newstead, & Trippas, 2011). Specifically, in Experiment 1, 112 reasoners were asked to give judgments consistent with beliefs or validity for 2 different types of deductive reasoning problems. In Experiment 2, 224 reasoners gave judgments consistent with beliefs (i.e., stereotypes) or statistics (i.e., base-rates) on a base rate task; half responded under a strict deadline. For all 3 problem types and regardless of the deadline, high-capacity reasoners performed better for logic/statistics than did belief judgments when the 2 conflicted, whereas the reverse was true for low-capacity reasoners. In other words, for high-capacity reasoners, statistical information interfered with their ability to make belief-based judgments, suggesting that, for them, probabilities may be more intuitive than stereotypes. Thus, at least part of the accuracy-capacity relationship observed in reasoning may be because of intuitive (Type I) processes. (PsycINFO Database Record.

- Do smart people have better intuitions?

Wisdom Of The Week

The cultured-meat companies also point to existing definitions on the books for meat that don’t preclude their products in any way. The Federal Meat Inspection Act defines meat this way: “the part of the muscle of any cattle, sheep, swine, or goats which is skeletal or which is found in the tongue, diaphragm, heart, or esophagus, with or without the accompanying and overlying fat, and the portions of bone (in bone-in product such as T-bone or porterhouse steak), skin, sinew, nerve, and blood vessels which normally accompany the muscle tissue and that are not separated from it in the process of dressing.” Under this admittedly unwieldy (and unappetizing) definition, meat grown in a lab from animal cells counts as meat.

Of course, not everybody agrees that it should be called meat. Warren Love, one of the representatives in Missouri behind the state bill that would ban companies like Just and Memphis Meats from using the term meat, says, “We have no problem with them producing it, manufacturing it, whatever, we just don’t want it to be labeled as, and kind of hijack the name of meat. Meat is from a harvested animal.” Love, who’s a cattle rancher himself, says that without protecting the term meat, these new entrants into the market might dilute the goodwill that the beef industry has built up among consumers. “I guess you would call it protecting your brand,” he says. “I’m an old cowboy and I ride for the brand.”

The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association’s petition to the USDA homes in on this argument, asking the department to create a new rule that specifically defines meat as “the tissue or flesh of animals that have been harvested in the traditional manner.” But that itself, specifically the “harvested traditional manner” part, isn’t defined in the petition. When I spoke with Lia Biondo, the director of policy and outreach for the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, she clarified for me: “Harvested in the traditional manner means slaughtered at a slaughterhouse.” But the term slaughterhouse doesn’t appear at all in the USCA petition, and some have raised concerns that this “traditional manner” definition might come back to bite the industry. Without a clear definition, detractors worry that defining meat this way might preclude the use of advanced technologies in the future. “That could prevent us from utilizing innovative breeding technologies or gene editing,” says Beck.

If your eyes are glazing over at this point, you’re not alone. Amid all these long and unwieldy definitions and mental gymnastics, it’s easy to lose sight of the point of all of these labels in the first place. The reason the FDA or the USDA has these standards and definitions is to make sure that consumers aren’t confused. When they reach for a container that says it’s milk or butter or eggs or mayo, they should get what they think they’re getting.

[---]

But the question at hand here is more complicated. Artificial crab is made from an entirely different animal. Cultured meat is made from the same animal, simply in a different way. Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Just, says that in any other situation, we wouldn’t be even having this debate. Think of electric cars, he says. The engine in an electric car is completely different from a traditional combustion machine. But we still call them cars. “Can you call an electric car a car? Of course you can! It’s a fucking car! It has tires and it takes you from place to place! It’s made up of the components we think of as a car.”

The FDA hasn’t said what it will do about the meat terminology, but if its past history is any indication, it’s not unreasonable to guess that these cultured-meat companies will be allowed to use the terms meat and beef. And if they do, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association won’t be happy. “I have to say that this would be considered a loss,” Biondo told me.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Believe it or not, bananas do contain a small quantity of Musa Sapientum bananadine, which is a mild, short-lasting psychedelic.

- William Powell

Quote of the Day

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

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The voice that navigated was definitely that of a machine, and yet you could tell that the machine was a woman, which hurt my mind a little. How can machines have genders? The machine also had an American accent. How can machines have nationalities? This can't be a good idea, making machines talk like real people, can it? Giving machines humanoid identities?

- Matthew Quick, The Good Luck of Right Now

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With limited training data, a more constrained model tends to perform better.

- Christopher D. Manning, Introduction to Information Retrieval

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If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.

- Hermann Hesse

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Does idle chat and unhappiness go together? Eight years ago, a study was published (Mehl et al. 2010) suggesting that they do. The authors reported that “Well-Being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations”, triggering many alarming headlines.

Now, however, the same researchers have carried out a much larger study and have failed to confirm the chat-unhappiness association. The new paper is published in Psychological Science, the same journal where the original appeared. What I like about this new article is that it’s a good example of researchers revisiting their own work and openly changing their minds.

- More Here

Should a Modern Stoic be Vegetarian?

I think vegetarianism is, in fact, one of those cases where the ancient road is not the best one, and we need to revise it. Full disclosure here: I am not a complete vegetarian, though I heavily lean that way. My eating habits can best be described as vegetarianism with the addition of occasional wild caught fish thrown into the mix (paying attention to whether the species in question is being overfished). I have never considered veganism seriously, even though the ethical argument there is at least as strong as the one for vegetarianism (though it’s not easy to be a healthy vegan, an issue I don’t want to get into here because it would distract from the main point). You could accuse me of hypocrisy, and I will respond that I’m trying to do my best, and that at any rate I’m doing more than a lot of other people. Never claimed to be a sage, never will.

[---]

Just to give you an idea, these are the USDA statistics of slaughtered animals for the year 2008, obviously limited to the USA only:

Cattle: 35,507,500
Pigs: 116,558,900
Chickens: 9,075,261,000
Layer hens: 69,683,000
Turkeys: 271,245,000

I strongly suggest these numbers ought to disturb you, especially if you know anything about how all of this is actually done. And that’s without bringing into consideration additional factors that the ancient Stoics were not concerned with, like labor practices (generally speaking, horrible) and environmental impact (not at all good, to put it very mildly).

Given all this, I strongly suggest that modern Stoics should lean heavily toward vegetarianism, or at the very least endorse only humane practices of raising and killing animals, as it is done in a number of small, independently owned farms. The problem is that that model simply does not scale up to feeding billions of human beings, which means that, for practical purposes, Stoics should indeed be vegetarian.

But what about the idea – which the ancient Stoics surely did have – that animals and plants are here to satisfy human needs? That idea stemmed from the Stoic concept of a providential universe, understood as a living organism itself, endowed with the Logos, the capacity for rationality.

The problem is that modern science very clearly tells us that that’s not the kind of universe we exist in. Plants and other animals are the product of billions of years of evolution, just like ourselves, and so in no rational way can they be said to be here “for” us. Seneca, above, said that the truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over, as much is left for those yet to come. Well, two thousand years later we are still searching for a lot of truths, but we have found out a few more than in Seneca’s time. It is our ethical duty, therefore, to update our practices accordingly. Remember that one of the pillars of Stoic philosophy is precisely that the “physics” (i.e., all of natural science) should inform our ethics, so better knowledge of biology in particular should redirect the way we think about what is right and what is wrong when it comes to eating habits.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

So Gaia has nothing to do with any New Age idea of the Earth in a millennial balance, but rather emerges, as Lenton emphasizes over dinner, from a very specific industrial and technological situation: a violent technological rupture, blending the conquest of space, plus the nuclear and cold wars, that we were later to summarize under the label of the “Anthropocene” and that is accompanied by a cultural rupture symbolized by California in the 1960s. Drugs, sex, cybernetics, the conquest of space, the Vietnam War, computers, and the nuclear threat: this is the matrix from which Gaia was born, in violence, artifice, and war.

But Dutreuil is keen to point out that the most surprising aspect of this hypothesis is that it depends on the coupling of two diametrically opposed analyses. Lovelock’s analysis imagines the Earth seen from Mars as a cybernetic system, while that of Lynn Margulis looks at the planet through the other end of the binoculars, starting with the smallest and oldest living organisms. At the time, in the 1970s, Margulis was a typical example of a maverick, a dissident stirring up the neo-Darwinians who were in full flight at the time. In their minds, evolution presupposed the existence of organisms sufficiently separable from the others so that one could say that they had a modicum of superior or inferior fitness.

But Margulis challenged the very existence of separate individuals: one cell, one bacterium, one human, for the very good and simple reason that they are “all interlinked,” as the title of a recent book by Eric Bapteste indicates, Tous entrelacés or All Interlaced (2018). A cell is independent entities superimposed on each other, in the same way that our organism depends not only on our genes, but on those of the infinitely more numerous critters that are in residence in our gut or crawling over our skin. Evolution certainly exists, but which direction is it coming from, and which interlinked participants are going to profit from it? That is what is not calculable. Genes may well be “selfish,” as Richard Dawkins said at one point, the problem is that they don’t know the exact limits of their self! It is interesting to note that as time goes by, Margulis’s discoveries are gaining in importance, to the point where today they seem to be orthodox, thanks to the holobiont concept catching on with lightning speed. In that one concept, we get the whole idea of the superimposition of living beings folded into each other.

[---]

Now I understand the mistakes made in the interpretation of Gaia both by those who rejected it too quickly, and those who embraced it too enthusiastically. Both were working with an image of the Earth, the globe, nature, the natural order, without taking into account the fact that they were dealing with a unique object requiring a general revision of scientific conceptions.

Ah! So I was right after all to make the comparison with Galileo. As I was stuck under my duvet waiting for it to rain enough for the English to dare to venture out of doors, I understood this striking sentence in Lovelock: “The Gaia hypothesis implies that the stable state of our planet includes man as a part of, or partner in, a very democratic entity.” I had never understood this allusion to democracy in an author who was not particularly defensive of it. That was because he wasn’t talking about democracy among humans, but was overturning our perspectives in a hugely consequential way.

Before Gaia, the inhabitants of modern industrial societies saw nature as a domain of necessity, and when they looked toward their own society they saw it as the domain of freedom, as philosophers might say. But after Gaia these two distinct domains literally don’t exist anymore. There is no living or animated thing that obeys an order superior to itself, and that dominates it, or that it just has to adapt itself to, and this is true for bacteria as much as lions or human societies. This doesn’t mean that all living things are free in the rather simple sense of being individuals, since they are interlinked, folded, and entangled in each other. This means that the issue of freedom and dependence is equally valid for humans as it is for the partners of the above natural world.

Galileo invented a world of objects placed beside each other, without affecting each other, and entirely obeying the laws of physics. Lovelock and Margulis sketched a world of agents constantly interacting with each other. When I came back from this amazing day in Dorset, I said to myself that taking on board such a world had nothing to do with ecology, but quite simply with a politics of living things. And as I was going down the coast, I had the thought that another Brecht was needed to write a “Life of Lovelock.”

- Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent.

- Billy Graham

Quote of the Day

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

- Paulo Coelho

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Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

- Harriet Tubman

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A weed is a plant we've found no use for yet.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quote of the Day

I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.

- George Carlin

Quote of the Day

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

- Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

Wisdom Of The Week

But once seafloor scavengers swim and scurry away, the story isn’t over. Scientists aboard deep-sea submersibles have set out in search of whalefall skeletons and even experimentally sunk whale carcasses to predetermined locations to learn more. With enough replications and time, they found that whalefalls undergo successive phases, not unlike a forest ecosystem that changes in composition and size as it matures over decades.

Once defleshed, whalefalls undergo a second phase of colonization by snails, clams, and polychaete worms—some feeding off cartilage and the surfaces of the bone, others burrowing into the apron of sediment around the skeleton, enriched by the organic material leaching off the whale’s blubber and oil. The snails, clams, and polychaetes take months to a few years to consume all that they can, and afterward a third phase begins, which can last decades or more (no one knows because whalefalls have been studied for only 40 years). This presumably final climax stage involves two sets of bacteria living in or on whale bones: anaerobic bacteria that use sulfate in the seawater to digest oil locked in the whale’s bones; and then sulfur-loving bacteria that use the sulfide by-product of the anerobic bacteria to generate energy by combining it with dissolved oxygen.

Sulfophilic bacteria support a variety of true whalefall specialists at this stage, including some mussels, clams, and tube worms that have the bacteria living symbiotically within them, giving them the opportunity to generate their own energy in a world devoid of sunlight. At these depths, whale carcasses give a second life to an otherwise barren, abyssal world.

While the precise duration of these skeletons on the seafloor remains unknown, the upper bounds of some estimates suggest that a single whale carcass can provide up to one hundred years of sustenance. So little is known about the breadth and variation in whalefalls that new discoveries are being made all the time: one is an organism called Osedax—literally, Latin for “bone devouring”—a species of deep-sea worm whose entire life cycle depends on whalefall skeletons. Appearing as pinkish filaments only a few millimeters long covering the surfaces of bone, Osedax does not have a mouth or a gut, just wavy tendrils called palps facing outward. Instead of harboring symbiotic bacteria that use a sulfur-based pathway for decomposing bone lipids, its symbionts are a type of bacteria that mobilize proteins directly from the bone itself by dissolving it, using a tangled mat of bacteria-filled roots burrowed into the bones.

Not all whalefall colonizers are specialists; some are generalists that also make appearances on hot vents and methane cold seeps deep on the ocean floor. The range of the temperatures and environmental settings across these deep-sea habitats has led some scientists to argue that whalefalls, over millions of years, have served as evolutionary stepping-stones for invertebrates living in one habitat to leap to another. This idea remains hotly debated, with little known about all of the species that feast on fallen whales, or how often and where these skeletons are likely to appear on the seafloor.

- Abstract from the book  Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson

Quote of the Day

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

- Spiders Can Fly

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It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.

- Vincent van Gogh

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Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it's how we behave while we're waiting. 

- Joyce Meyer

Quote of the Day

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.

- Robert H. Schuller

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These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

- Anthony de Mello

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Gravity's weakness makes it very difficult to measure its quantum effects; as a result, we have no experimental data to guide theoretical physicists in the development of the missing theory. Detecting a “graviton" – the hypothetical particle making up part of a gravitational field – would require a particle collider the size of the Milky Way or a detector with a mass of the planet Jupiter. These experiments are so detached from our technological capabilities that physicists have focused on trying to remove the mathematical contradictions first, developing approaches like string theory, loop quantum gravity, and asymptotically safe gravity. But to know which theory describes physical reality, experimental tests must eventually be developed.

- Sabine Hossenfelder, One Hundred Years of Relativity

Quote of the Day

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

- Eric Reis