To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
jsbennett86
Karma: 437
A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
— Tim Urban (I think) of Wait But Why on How To Beat Procrastination
Thanks. I just read the article, so I guess I was assuming it was new and wouldn’t have been quoted.
snip
Sometimes I think that I’m surrounded by idiots everywhere. Then I remind myself that that’s exactly what an idiot would think.
Him: We can’t go back. We don’t understand everything yet.
Her: “Everything” is a little ambitious. We barely understand anything.
Him: Yeah. But that’s what the first part of understanding everything looks like.
Randall Munroe—Time
A term that means almost anything means almost nothing. Such a term is a convenient device for those who have almost nothing to say.
Richard Mitchell—Less Than Words Can Say
Reality is one honey badger. It don’t care. About you, about your thoughts, about your needs, about your beliefs. You can reject reality and substitute your own, but reality will roll on, eventually crushing you even as you refuse to dodge it. The best you can hope for is to play by reality’s rules and use them to your benefit.
Mark Crislip—Science-Based Medicine
If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
Richard Mitchell—Less Than Words Can Say
There’s something here that doesn’t make sense… Let’s go and poke it with a stick.
The Doctor—Doctor Who
On the presentation of science in the news:
It’s not that clean energy will never happen—it totally will. It’s just that it won’t come from a wild-haired scientist running out of his basement screaming, “Eureka! I’ve discovered how to get limitless clean energy from common seawater!” Instead, it will come from thousands of scientists publishing unreadable studies with titles like “Assessing Effectiveness and Costs of Asymmetrical Methods of Beryllium Containment in Gen 4 Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors When Factoring for Cromulence Decay.” The world will be saved by a series of boring, incremental advances that chip away at those technical challenges one tedious step at a time.
But nobody wants to read about that in their morning Web browsing. We want to read that while we were sleeping, some unlikely hero saved the world. Or at least cured cancer.
David Wong — 5 Easy Ways to Spot a BS News Story on the Internet
From the alt-text in the above-linked comic:
Corollary: The most prolific people in the world suck 99% of the time.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
From the alt-text in the above-linked comic:
Corollary: The most prolific people in the world suck 99% of the time.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Edit: another one captured by an old thread!
Every time you read something that mentions brain chemicals or brain scans, rewrite the sentence without the sciencey portions. “Hate makes people happy.” “Women feel closer to people after sex.” “Music makes people happy.” If the argument suddenly seems way less persuasive, or the news story way less ground-breaking… well. Someone’s doing something shady.
Also from the review:
A pacemaker malfunction isn’t automatically fatal. In most cases the patient’s heart will still beat, although with an abnormal rhythm. The severity of a pacemaker problem depends on the type of malfunction as well as the severity of the patient’s condition. EM interference can cause problems, but major problems are rare considering the amount of EM interference pacemaker patients are exposed to. Pacemakers are designed to minimize these problems. It’s hard to believe that dozens of pacemaker patients with various heart conditions and different makes and models of pacemakers would simultaneously die from microwave exposure.
On scientists trying to photograph an atom’s shadow:
...the idea sounds stupid. But scientists don’t care about sounding stupid, which is what makes them not stupid, and they did it anyway.
Luke McKinney − 6 Microscopic Images That Will Blow Your Mind
The remark included the following as a footnote:
Even top-notch engineers and scientists will speculate wildly when they’re off-the-record. We define on-the-record as those times when their written or oral communications are likely to be taken seriously and directly attributed to the scientist or engineer making them. Surely answering a direct question posed by a general would fall into this category.
Joel Spolsky