February 2012
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I want to learn something. That’s the real pleasure, when you understand an idea...
– Francis Ford Coppola on what interests him, happiness, money, and creative purpose. (via curiositycounts)
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January 2012
10 posts
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The joy of bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of the C2H5OH on...
– Walker Percy in “Bourbon, Neat,” quoted by Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Since I first read this essay, when I was perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, I have remembered that invaluable phrase precisely and used it on occasion: “hot bosky bite.”
For some time, I supposed —stupidly— that...
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“In der Mathematik versteht man die Dinge nicht; man gewöhnt sich nur mit...
– John von Neumann
December 2011
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Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei, das Ei ist eine Welt. Wer geboren werden will...
– Herman Hesse, Demian
November 2011
18 posts
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The value of stories is that they restore a rich significance to the mundane...
– C.S. Lewis
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CERN Gets Closer to Proving It Broke the Light... →
New tests at the European science facility CERN yet again confirm the results of their prior experiment which showed faster-than-light particles, reports the BBC and The Washington Post. Back in September, CERN scientists clocked neutrinos — funky, ghostly particles that pass through every square inch of Earth billions of times a second — at 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Sixty...
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There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely...
– - from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, verse 178
Lord Byron
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Embodied Cognition: Metaphors Transcend Mere... →
ur “being” and rationality is more than just cognition or the firing of neurons. We seem to physically interpret our actions and interactions into thoughts and feelings. Our metaphors are more than speech … they are part of who we are. Observe (from the SciAm article linked above):
• Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward whilethinking about the past...
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October 2011
5 posts
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i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing...
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A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns...
– Godfrey Harold Hardy, from A Mathematician’s Apology (links to PDF)
September 2011
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that...
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, opening lines from The Great Gatsby