How close are we to the brink of something? Or how close to a shore? Electrical essences in the basement! Do you realize how much things have changed in the past two centuries?
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
Venture capitalists expect some of businesses they back to fail; if that never happens, they aren’t taking enough risks. Similarly, a government program aimed at advancing technology is bound to end up with some lemons; if it doesn’t, it’s not extending the frontier.
Paul Krugman
He accepted another pint and took a pull at it. “Of course, I had my own personal alchemist too.”
“You what?”
He was getting silly and he knew it. Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it had is to stop you being wary of things, and the point at which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive. “Oh yes,” he insisted with a happy glazed smile. “It’s why I’ve lost so much weight.”
“What?” said his audience.
“Oh yes,” he said again. “The Californians have rediscovered alchemy. Oh yes.” He smiled again.
Chapter 9 – SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH by Douglas Adams (1999)
How do people suppress things? Generally, alcohol suppresses fear, nicotine suppresses anger and frustration, marijuana suppresses sadness, and caffeine suppresses the long-lasting, energy-sapping results of other forms of suppression.
Rebirthing by Leonard & Laut (1983)
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, was identified nearly 50 years ago and is among the most studied astrophysical objects.
The results released this month are the culmination of a multi-year effort and a decades-long journey by the astronomy community to approach the event horizon through high-resolution imaging, gaining new insights into accretion, outflow, and gravitational physics on scales not accessible through any other observation.
gravity, light, consciousness – the three primitives”
Something M read in an old New Yorker
