302
Mon Apr 18 17:23:35 2022
We would have made one fatal mistake: our molecule would have been perfect. Given enough time, we would have figured out how to do this, nucleotides, enzymes, and all, to make flawless, exact copies, but it would never have occurred to us, thinking as we do, that the thing had to be able to make errors.
417
Mon Apr 18 17:36:45 2022
Give the computers their heads, I say; let them go their way. If we can learn to do this, turning our heads to one side and wincing while the work proceeds, the possibilities for the future of mankind, and computerkind, are limitless.
493
Wed Apr 20 10:24:08 2022
We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.
517
Wed Apr 20 10:26:14 2022
On balance, we ought to be more pleased with ourselves than we are, and more optimistic for the future.
518
Wed Apr 20 10:27:00 2022
The trouble is, we are being taken in by the propaganda, and it is bad not only for the spirit of society; it will make any health-care system, no matter how large and efficient, unworkable. If people are educated to believe that they are fundamentally fragile, always on the verge of mortal disease, perpetually in
520
Wed Apr 20 10:27:16 2022
need of support by health-care professionals at every side, always dependent on an imagined discipline of “preventive” medicine, there can be no limit to the numbers of doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals required to meet the demand. In the end, we would all become doctors, spending our days screening each 69 other for disease. We are, in real life, a reasonably healthy people. Far from being ineptly put together, we are amazingly tough, durable organisms, full of health, ready for most contingencies. The new danger to our well being, if we continue to listen to all the talk, is in becoming a nation of healthy hypochondriacs, living gingerly, worrying ourselves half to death.
526
Wed Apr 20 10:27:55 2022
And we do not have time for this sort of thing anymore, nor can we afford such a distraction from our other, considerably more urgent problems. Indeed, we should be worrying that our preoccupation with personal health may be a symptom of copping out, an excuse for running upstairs to recline on a couch, sniffing the air for contaminants, spraying the room with deodorants, while just outside, the whole of society is coming undone.
599
Thu Apr 21 23:40:12 2022
Sen meant old, spreg meant speak, swem was swim, nomen was name, a porko was a young pig, dent was a tooth. Eg was I and my ego, tu was thou, yu were you, and me was me. Nek was death. A mormor was a murmur. Mater, pater, bhrater, and swesor were the immediate family, and nepots were the nephews and nieces. A yero was a year. A wopsa was a wasp and an apsa was an aspen. A deru was a tree, and also something durable and true. To gno was to know. Akwa was water, and to bhreu was to boil.
606
Thu Apr 21 23:41:57 2022
Dheye meant to look and see, and moved from dhyana in Sanskrit, meaning to meditate, to jhana in Pali, to ch ‘an in Chinese, to zen in Japanese.
615
Thu Apr 21 23:44:39 2022
A nucleic acid (from ken, later knu, plus ak) is a sort of nut coupled to something sharp.
628
Thu Apr 21 23:47:19 2022
Nobody can explain why “poison” and “venom” come from love potions.
945
Mon Aug 29 12:38:00 2022
The observer, and his apparatus, create the reality to be observed. Without him, there are all sorts of possibilities for single particles, in all sorts of wave 124 patterns. The reality to be studied by his instruments is not simply there; it is brought into existence by the laboratory.
947
Mon Aug 29 12:37:59 2022
In modern physics
960
Mon Aug 29 12:48:56 2022
On occasion, I place my pencil point (this is best done with a well-sharpened pencil) in the middle of my paper (I write on a yellow lined pad) in the center of my desk, keeping an eye on the Seventy- second and Third apartment, and then I hold the point there. What I do, at these times, is to change the way the system works. Instead of having the earth rotate around itself every twenty-four hours, I hold the pencil point 126 firmly and make the sun revolve slowly around East Sixty-ninth Street. Anyone can do this. It takes a bit of heaving to get it started, but after a few minutes of hard thought you can hold East Sixty-ninth as the still, central point, and then you can feel the sun rolling U behind you from the right side, making the great circle around. Once you’ve got the sun started, it is not too difficult to organize the rest of the solar system, so that the whole apparatus is circling around an immobile, still earth and, more specifically, Spinning around a central point on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There are some eccentricities and asymmetries to cope with, to be sure, and it is not a tidy event, but it works nonetheless.
1069
Mon Aug 29 13:00:37 2022
If it is a generality that bacteria will make exotoxins only when they are supplied with specifications by a virus, this is an extraordinary puzzle.
1154
Mon Aug 29 16:05:36 2022
We must rely on our scientists to help us find the way through the near distance, but for the longer stretch of the future we are dependent on the poets. We should learn to question them more closely, and listen more carefully. A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. He lives with data that cannot be numbered, and his experiments can be done only once. The information in a poem is, by definition, not reproducible. His pilot runs involve a recognition of things that pop into his head. The skill consists in his capacity to decide quickly which things to retain, which to eject. He becomes an equivalent of scientist, in the act of examining and sorting the things 152 popping in, finding the marks of remote similarity, points of distant relationship, tiny irregularities that indicate that this one is really the same as that one over there only more important. Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals,
1156
Mon Aug 29 16:06:03 2022
A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable.
1189
Mon Aug 29 16:47:40 2022
On Meddling When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you’re dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century. Jay Forrester has demonstrated it mathematically, with his computer models of cities in which he makes clear that whatever you propose to do, based on common sense, will almost inevitably make matters worse rather than better.
1256
Mon Aug 29 16:55:29 2022
Overindividuals are called peculiar, strange, eccentric. The worst sort are idiots, from idios, originally meaning personal and private.
1266
Mon Aug 29 16:59:53 2022
Delphi technique. This was an invention of the 1960s, worked out by some RAND Corporation people dissatisfied with the way committees laid plans for the future. The method has a 167 simple, almost silly sound. Instead of having meetings, questionnaires are circulated to the members of a group, and each person writes his answers out and sends them back, in silence. Then the answers are circulated to all members and they are asked to reconsider and fill out the questionnaires again, after paying attention to the other views. And so forth. Three cycles are usually enough. By that time as much of a consensus has been reached as can be reached, and the final answers are said to be substantially more reliable, and often more interesting, than first time around. In some versions, new questions can be introduced by the participants at the same time that they are providing answers.
1300
Mon Aug 29 17:02:49 2022
in real life, this is the way we’ve always arrived at decisions, even though it has always been done in a disorganized way. We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
1585
Tue Aug 30 13:28:48 2022
Montaigne: what is there on all those unturned pages that I have read but forgotten, still there to be discovered? He is resolved from the first page to tell you absolutely everything about himself, and so he does. At the greatest length, throughout all 876 pages of the Frame translation, he tells you and tells you about himself.
1594
Tue Aug 30 13:30:59 2022
Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of Nature. Bees are better at organizing societies. Elephants are more concerned for the welfare of other elephants, and clever at figuring things out; they will fill up the man-dug elephant trap with timber and earth in order to bring the trapped elephant to the surface. He is not even sure that language is any more complex or subtle than the exchanges of gestures and fragrances among the beasts.
1597
Tue Aug 30 13:30:58 2022
Montaigne
1638
Thu Sep 1 16:11:08 2022
On Thinking
1638
Thu Sep 1 16:11:07 2022
Poetic essay about the nature of the mind
1676
Thu Sep 1 16:10:36 2022
Music is 223 the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
1696
Thu Sep 1 16:14:51 2022
You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of 226 a sperm and an egg, this divides into two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which will have as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. It is an unbelievable thing, and yet there it is, Popping neatly into its place amid the jumbled cells of every one of the several billion human embryos around the planet, just as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. If
1722
Thu Sep 1 16:17:45 2022
about medicine
1722
Thu Sep 1 16:17:46 2022
Like a good many revolutions, this one began with the destruction of dogma.
1896
Thu Sep 1 16:43:06 2022
It seems to me that the safest and most prudent of bets to lay money on is surprise.