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...
The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. —RUTH BENEDICT
The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a...
The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinar...
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing w...
Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I
Newton was not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.
Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.
Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns, a thing as we know it. For
It all began when the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn’t kill him, died of gangrene.
In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second...
In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn’t invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an hour mi...
If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives, you’d probably get a pretty strange look;
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.
George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11
Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.
A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.
While a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.
There remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are