Geek Quotes

[wordpainting-deactivated2023071]

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again…

Italo Calvino; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (via wordpainting)

[myserendipities]

The Entanglement is the trend towards more interconnected and less comprehensible technological surroundings. Hillis argues that our machines, while subject to rational rules, are now too complicated to understand. Whether it’s the entirety of the internet or other large pieces of our infrastructure, understanding the whole — keeping it in your head — is no longer even close to possible. This evolutionary technique yielded a novel technological system, one that we have difficulty understanding, because we would never have come up with something like this on our own. In chess, a realm where computers are more powerful than humans and have the ability to win in ways that the human mind can’t always understand, these types of solutions are known as ‘computer moves’ — the moves that no human would ever do, the ones that are ugly but still get results. As the American economist Tyler Cowen noted in his book Average Is Over (2013), these types of moves often seem wrong, but they are very effective. Computers have exposed the fact that chess, at least when played at the highest levels, is too complicated, with too many moving parts for a person — even a grandmaster — to understand.

Is our tech making the world too complex? – Samuel Arbesman – Aeon (via myserendipities)

[amiquote]

” “A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.” “

Michio Kaku, an American theoretical physicist, a futurist, and popularizer of science, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, Doubleday, 2004. 

[arpeggia]

If you’ve ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.

Tim Burton

[wildcat2030]

Philosophy is the discipline that does most to investigate and improve patterns and standards of argument and practically put them to the test. Work on validity and proof, on evidence and standards of knowledge, is relevant throughout cultural, social and political life, and therefore has indubitable public value. Philosophy is also one of very few disciplines that investigates normative reasoning, our reasoning about what should be done (political theory and jurisprudence are others). Normative reasoning is a matter not of seeking to establish what is the case, but of identifying which standards we have the best reasons to enact. Debates by which the world is changed happen in many contexts, but reasoning about why certain changes matter and should be made, and also reasoning about standards of reasoning, are both anchored in philosophy.

Interpreting The World, Changing The World | Issue 95 | Philosophy Now (via wildcat2030)

[wildcat2030]

Today, by contrast, technology and philosophy are moving ever closer together: the power of technology is extending over the fundamental properties of the world as philosophy continues to define these properties. Virtual worlds become more and more intrinsically philosophical as information technologies become more advanced and broaden the scope of their application from material details to the nature of the world. Humans are becoming increasingly skillful and successful in the art of world-making; as a result, technology is now moving towards, not away from, metaphysics.

The Art of World-Making | Issue 95 | Philosophy Now (via wildcat2030)

[freakoutgirl]

When you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all… grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.

Doctor Who (Love and Monsters)

[writerswritecompany]

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Haruki Murakami

[seabois]

Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.”

Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians series

[kari-shma]

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

[excessivebookshelf]

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives 

[runa-b]

It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.

—Lemony Snicket

[artpartner]

The Most Astounding Fact.

[theeconomist]

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Information technology has changed daily life. So why does it seem to have had a less explosive impact on economic growth than inventions of decades past? (via theeconomist)

[thebeginningwriter]

[geekquotes-blog]

Reading is Everything

[explore-blog]

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. … Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Carl Sagan, who passed away 16 years ago today, on the power and magic of books

[pjrbcb]

Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.

– Brandon Sanderson, Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians series