Home > Work > Bandwidth (Analog #1)
1 " There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark. "
― Eliot Peper , Bandwidth (Analog #1)
2 " How we treat people defines humanity. "
3 " Shankar Vedantam wrote that those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine, "
4 " Critical thinking without hope was cynicism, while hope without critical thinking was naïveté. "
5 " Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past. "
6 " My statistician friend says they’re harnessing the power of social validation to reinforce a certain worldview. It’s like gardening, only they’re cultivating ideology. "
7 " Politics is the gap between what is and what should be. "
8 " there’s one truism that’s worsened the impact of every human misstep, it’s that there’s profit in tragedy. "
9 " He was nothing. A short-lived speck on a meaningless rock orbiting an insignificant star in a forgotten galaxy in a universe bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics to descend into ultimate heat death. "
10 " Choosing not to care might mitigate the risk of pain, but in doing so it destroyed the capacity for joy, for finding meaning. "
11 " History was badly plotted and written by committee. "
12 " If we are the stories we tell ourselves, what happens when someone else controls the narrative? What does it take for a cynic to rediscover authenticity? How is technology changing the structure and exercise of power? "
13 " building something meaningful requires you to let go of the obsession with perfection. It requires empowering others and trusting them to do their part, even if they do it differently than you might have. But trust is a two-way street. Autonomy means you’re held accountable. "
14 " It was far easier to stop something from getting done in Washington than it was to get anything done at all. "
15 " Ends and means didn’t justify one another—they were two sides of the same coin. "
16 " But like so much else, the prize was diminished by possession. "
17 " actually hosting two hundred laughing, mischievous children on-site was extravagant prestidigitation. "
18 " optimism compounds better than cynicism. You can either complain about how some French noble predetermined your desire for a lawn, or laugh at how ridiculous life is and build yourself a rock garden. It all depends on your point of view. And at the end of the day, your point of view makes all the difference in the world. "
19 " Lawns were invented in the late Middle Ages by nobles who wanted to flaunt their wealth. Lawns are pure luxury. The bigger your lawn, the more land and peasants you needed to cultivate it. Lawns became a primary symbol of political power, so much so that upwardly mobile merchants and other nouveau riche couldn’t wait to grow their own. "
20 " But even something as inconsequential as wanting a lawn in front of our homes isn’t a true choice. It’s the product of a never-ending series of historical accidents. We take the world we’re born into for granted. "