The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics.
The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits – known as bits – and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches.
We had to determine structures, because structures, the folds and shapes, are conserved over a longer evolutionary period than the nucleic acid sequences.
We all see nature’s wonders every day, whether it be a plant that moves or a sunset that reaches with pink fingers into a sky of deep blue. The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes. What makes a sky blue or a sunset pink or a leaf of sleeping grass curl?
Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.
With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime.
Nature is beautiful.
The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.
It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done.
He does not hesitate at our boldest measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute.
Orwell conjures up an Orwellian world.
Franklin had been serving his country, as it headed toward revolution, in roles befitting a man of his age: diplomat, elder statesman, sage, and dozing delegate.
Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.
Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way. I had visited a lot of just-in-time factories in Japan, and I’d built one for the Mac and at NeXT. I knew what I wanted, and I met Tim, and he wanted the same.
In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs told Fortune shortly after retaking the reins at Apple. “But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.
Embora eu achasse que estivesse aprendendo a viver, eu estava aprendendo a morrer.”48.
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer.
As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.
He named these “CRISPR-associated,” or Cas, enzymes.