Fire and Knowledge

Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course, but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is therefore at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

–Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), p. 290

Science can function as religion only by making two unscientific claims: that it will eventually know everything, and that it will eventually solve all human problems.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 99

When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time. We jump from one of these chunks to another, pausing – or fixating – on them long enough to make sense of each letter. The reason we can focus clearly on only that much text is that most of the sensors in our eyes – the receptors that process what we see – are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea. That’s why we move our eyes when we read: we can’t pick up much information about the shape, or the color, or the structure of words unless we focus our fovea directly on them.

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 108

Do you want to live on $12,000 a year? Here are some tips on how to pull it off.

When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Glow, Big Glowworm” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 264

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 667

I finally got around to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan a few days ago. I’m about half way through and it’s excellent. Pollan says we have a “national eating disorder” and highlights the irony that our stereotyped unhealthy country is so obsessed with “health food” and diets. He walks through his personal journey with industrial agriculture, organic agriculture, and hunting/gathering. The first 1/3 of the book is devoted to corn, because we eat more corn than anything else, though we don’t know it. It’s in everything, quite literally.

This is a great book to read if you’re interested in the food you eat, which I suppose should be everyone. Actually, if you’re not interested in the food you eat, this might be exactly what you need to read. You’ll never look at industrial (or industrial organic) food quite the same way again.

There are many interesting quotes I’ve marked, which are sure to find their way onto the site in the next few months.

If rascals knew the advantages of virtue, they would become honest men out of rascality.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 611