Fire and Knowledge

The central observation of those who study suicide is that, in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking his or her own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides…. [For instance,] immediately after [front page] stories about suicides appeared [in a local newspaper], suicides in the area served by the newspaper jumped….

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 222

“Science” means knowing and “art” means doing, and one is meaningless without the other.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 124

If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans, right to the moment of your reading this book—and beyond. In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 205

Mr. Milton had an Adam’s apple the size of a champagne cork and bore as uncanny a resemblance to the Disney character Goofy as was possible without actually being a cartoon dog. His wife was just like him but hairier.

–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 89

Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravitation justifies the shooing of a bird.

–Vernon Kellogg, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “William Jennings Brian’s Last Campaign” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 430

“Having saddled yourselves with laws that you assume will be broken, you’ve never found anything to do that makes better sense than punishing people for doing exactly what you expected them to do in the first place. For ten thousand years you’ve been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken, until now I suppose you must have literally millions of them, many of them broken millions of times a day.”

–Ishmael in Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael (1997), p. 109

We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago. 10 years ago we owned supercomputers of 20 years ago… and so on. So why on earth is everything so slow? If they’re exponentially faster why does it take longer than ever for our computers to start, for the applications to start and so on? Sure, when they get down to the pure number crunching they’re amazing (just encode a video and be amazed). But in everything else they must be unbelievably slower than ever.

Computers of today may be 1,000 times faster than they were a decade ago, yet the things that matter are slower.

The standard argument people give me in response is ‘but they do such more these days it isn’t a fair comparison’. Well, they’re 10 times slower despite being 1,000 times faster, so they must be doing 10,000 times as many things. Clearly the 10,000 times more things they’re doing are all in the wrong place.

–Interview with Con Kolivas, a former Linux kernel developer: “Computing is boring“

The anti-smoking movement has never been louder or more prominent. Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22.3% to 28.5%. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32%. Since 1988, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73%. There are few public health programs in recent years that have fallen as short of their mission as the war on smoking.

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 221