Saturday, August 1, 2020
His lectures tended to be regarded as disorganized until his celebrity ensured that every stumble he made was transformed into a charming anecdote.
— Walter Isaacson, Einstein
Friday, July 31, 2020
By the way, in passing, it is interesting to note that all results essentially dependent on the fusion of subject and object have been limitative results.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Thursday, July 30, 2020
The amazing thing about language is how imprecisely we use it and still manage to get away with it.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
"At a very early age, I made an assumption that a successful physicist only needs to know elementary mathematics," he said. "At a later time, with great regret, I realized that the assumption of mine was completely wrong"
— Walter Isaacson, Einstein
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Even if a brain is, in a technical and abstract sense, some sort of formal system, it remains true that mathematicians only work with simple and elegant systems, systems in which everythign is extremely cearly defined—and the brain is a far cry from that, with its ten billion or more semi-independent neurons, quasi-randomly connected up to each other. So mathematicians would never study a real brain's networks. And if you define "mathematics" as what mathematicians enjoy doing, then the properties of brains are not mathematical.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Monday, July 27, 2020
A stamp that made it recognizably his, the way a Picasso is recognizably a Picasso.
— Walter Isaacson, Einstein
Sunday, July 26, 2020
For, Maxwell, this novel use of analogy - building models - was the way forward to better understand the physical principles of the natural world. While still a student at Cambridge, he had written: "Whenever [men] see a relation between two things they know well, and think they see there must be a similar relation between things less known, they reason from one to the other. This supposes that, although pairs of things may differ wildly from each other, the realtion in the one pair may be the same as that in the other."
— Brian Clegg, Professor Maxwell's Duplicitous Demon: The Life and Science of James Clerk Maxwell
Saturday, July 25, 2020
"YIELDS FALSEHOOD WHEN PRECEDED BY ITS QUOTATION"
YIELDS FALSEHOOD WHEN PRECEDED BY ITS QUOTATION.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Friday, July 24, 2020
You should ask mom for some new shorts... Mom would be happy to buy you shorts.
— Kathleen
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Human brains have not evolved to understand large numbers. As a result, we tend to vastly underestimate how large "one billion" is. This may help:
One million seconds = 11 days
One billion seconds = 32 years
— @emilyisliving, "Billionaires Shouldn't Exist"
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Tortoise: You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories—but a reader who is holding the book in his hands can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advanced warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Where does the information reside?... Somehow, it must be spread about in the colony, in the caste distribution, the age distribution—and probably largely in the physical properties of the ant-body itself. That is, the interaction between ants is determined just as much by their six-leggedness and their size and so on, as by the information stored in their brain.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Monday, July 20, 2020
Achilles: It is interesting to me to compare the merits of the descriptions at various levels. The highest-level description seems to carry the most explanatory power, in that it gives you the most intuitive picture of the ant colony, although strangely enough, it leaves out seemingly the most important feature—the ants.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Sunday, July 19, 2020
As for the white oppressors, their greatest crime is their "innocence"; they "have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it." Ida had told Vivaldo in Another Country that he had no right not to "know."
— David Leeming, James Baldwin
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Between his longing for a life based on love and his sense that power was necessary in a world that valued only power.
— David Leeming, James Baldwin
Friday, July 17, 2020
And finally, it had to do with the fact that what one can and cannot see "says something about you."
— David Leeming, James Baldwin
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Just like stand up, you wanted the joke to easily enter into a person's mind.
— Joe Rogan, "Joe Rogan Experience #1498 - Jon Stewart"
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Really, the more porches the better.
— David
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Nearly everyone is surprised to find out that in actual play, a master rarely looks ahead any further than a novice does... The trick is that his mode of percieving the board is like a filter: he literally does not see bad moves when he looks at a chess situation—no more than chess amateurs see illegal moves when they look at a chess situation. Anyone who has played even a little chess has organized his perception so that the diagonal rook-moves, forward capture by pawns, and so forth, are never brought to mind. Similarly, master-level players have built up higher leves of organization in the way they see the board.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
Monday, July 13, 2020
He found himself in a position, a decade and a half after emancipation, not unlike many leaders of the modern civil rights movement. They have to fight to protect political and constitutional triumphs, as well as a new national historical memory, while they also face a deepening crisis of structural oppression and inequality.
— David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass
