Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.
— Stuart Firestein: Ignorance: How It Drives Science (via kateoplis)
What yesterday took a million dollars and a machine the size of a school bus to achieve, will just as likely be done tomorrow in a millisecond, for a few pennies, in the palm of your hand.
Science and art are both trying to do the same thing: figure out the world around us. They use slightly different toolkits, but fundamentally they’re ways of trying to tap the mysteries around us.
— David Eagleman (PopTech 2010)
People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
— Wendell Berry (via azspot)
Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don’t know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn’t read or write 200 years ago.
The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.
— Charles Malik, Lebanese philosopher and diplomat (via halftheskymovement)
The old is so often our bridge to the new, the familiar our escort to the unknown.
— Anand Giridharadas (PopTech 2011) on Narratives With No Need for Translation
In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions
—
What Science Wants to Know by Stuart Firestein
By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. […] for all we have come to know, there is far more we don’t know. More important, everyday there is far more we know we don’t know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant: not the kind of ignorance that is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivated, high-quality ignorance. […]
Science is about questions.
(via scipsy)
Innovation happens best when people of different backgrounds come together to solve the world’s toughest challenges.
— Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, talking about his visit to the White House and the State of the Union. (via bridif)
Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free. I have been very slow to appreciate these developments, and yet it is clear even to me that there are reasons to fear for the life of the printed book. Needless to say, many of the changes occurring in publishing are changes that neither publishers nor authors want. The market for books is continually shifting beneath our feet, and nobody knows what the business of publishing will look like a decade from now.
— Prolific author Sam Harris, who released his latest as a $1.99 Kindle Single, on the future of the book. Related, 7 platforms changing the future of publishing. (via curiositycounts)
