Fire and Knowledge

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 37

Blessed are the peace makers is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 598

I really hate ads — I use an ad-blocker for the web and refuse to buy from any company I get spam from. So of course this caught my eye:

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist’s dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

São Paulo: The City That Said No To Advertising

The elephant, though larger, is not a greater miracle than a mite; nor a mountain a greater miracle than an atom. To an almighty power, it is no more difficult to make the one than the other, and no more difficult to make a million of worlds than to make one. Everything therefore is a miracle in one sense; whilst, in the other sense, there is no such thing as a miracle.

–Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), p. 288

[Mutations in DNA] are estimated to occur at a rate of about one error every 100 million base per generation. (That means, by the way, that since we all have two genomes of 3 billion base pairs each, one from our mother and one from our father, we all have roughly sixty new mutations that were not present in either of our parents.)

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 131

“Experiment” is a word that seems displaced and uncomfortable outside of science; in science, I suppose, a failed experiment is still science, but in art a failed experiment, whatever else it may be, is not art.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 77-8

The world of USA Today is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that the average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.

The oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Bully for Brontosaurs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 91

The Amish are the most technologically sophisticated people on this continent, the best at picking and choosing among innovations, deciding which ones make sense and which ones don’t….

The larger society at the moment has a primitive and superstitious belief that we must accept new technologies, that they are somehow more powerful than we are. Which makes the Amish in some ways the most modern American subculture—far more modern than some fellow with a cell phone who doesn’t really like how it changes his life, but has one just because it seems “normal.”

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 166-168