If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys.
Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.
He was the only person to sign all four of its founding papers: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace accord with Britain, and the Constitution.
The bitter irony was that Franklin had become a fervent advocate of smallpox vaccinations after they had been ridiculed in the New England Courant when Franklin worked there for his brother. In the years preceding Franky’s birth, he had editorialized in the Pennsylvania Gazette in support of inoculations and published statistics showing how effective they were. In 1730, for example, he wrote an account of a Boston epidemic in which most people who had been vaccinated were spared.
Reality is unforgiving.
The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man.
From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled, with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.
In-person interactions are especially important in the initial brainstorming of new ideas and the forging of personal bonds.
Math was nature’s playbook.
These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.
So if you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you’ll never survive.
Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.
The governor of Pennsylvania was among the enthusiastic, and he offered Franklin what could have been a lucrative patent. “But I declined it,” Franklin noted in his autobiography. “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” It was a noble and sincere sentiment.
The gene-editing tool that Doudna and others developed in 2012 is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for more than a billion years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as CRISPRs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them.
The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one.
A democracy,” Kennan wrote in a note to himself, “is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy.
He knew how to be impolite without being rude.
The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination.
His life was a constant quest for unifying theories.
The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.