You’re wasting your time, he said. You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.
German authorities saw the need for a statute explicitly forbidding anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine,
Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
Annoyed that although outlawed in Rome, astrology was nevertheless alive and well, Cicero noted that at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal, leading about 50,000 Carthaginian and allied troops, crushed the m...
Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.
One trader even believed that relieving himself in the wrong toilet would bring bad fortune. Actually he was a bond trader who confessed his secret to a CNN reporter in 2003.
True randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn’t random. And so the company made th...
They left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. You will never see it again, he told her.
We are inclined, that is, to see movie stars as more talented than aspiring movie stars and to think that the richest people in the world must also be the smartest.
Along with our responses to them, determine
In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be av...
If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability...
Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.
Appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.
It is dangerous to judge ability by short-term results.
The human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can...
Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different. —JAMES BORG I
Research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.
Little is known about Boyle’s mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by the...
The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel burnt out. That’s good to know when scheduling your tasks...
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