A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
Niccolo Machiavelli
From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
Rewriting History
Error sparks concerns over textbook selection process
By Elisabeth Hulette
The Virginian-Pilot
© October 22, 2010
Virginia schools have policies for choosing textbooks meant to ensure that accurate, high-quality books make it to children's backpacks.
So how did a history book containing an error about the Civil War land in local elementary schools this year?
School officials say it was a stroke of bad luck in an otherwise solid process. Meanwhile, some academics with an eye on textbooks say the problem goes deeper.
"The most popular history that the general public reads isn't written by historians," said Bruce Levine, a professor at the University of Illinois. "It's a really sad disjunction."
The error was caught by Carol Sheriff, a professor at the College of William and Mary. While reading her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia: Past and Present," Sheriff noticed a statement claiming that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War.
That isn't true, according to Sheriff and other professional historians. Confederate leaders refused to allow blacks to serve until the war was nearly over.
"Jefferson Davis barked this would 'revolt and disgust the whole South,' " Levine said. "All of this stuff is easily documentable. The facts of the matter aren't really murky."
State education officials said that errors occasionally slip through, but usually aren't this controversial. One time, for example, a NASA engineer from Suffolk caught some outdated information in the state science standards. The state later sought his input on reviewing them.
"I'm told that occasionally something is seen and brought to our attention," state schools spokesman Charles Pyle said. "We've never had this happen, where a statement is discovered that is clearly not part of the accepted scholarship in a subject."
In Virginia, the textbook selection process starts at the state level. State officials ask local divisions to recommend teachers for a review committee. For "Our Virginia," the committee was three teachers, from Fairfax, Chesterfield and Henrico counties. No historians served on the committee. The Fairfax and Henrico teachers declined to comment. The Chesterfield teacher could not be reached Thursday.
Teachers are paid $200 stipends to serve. Last year, they received the books at home in June, then met in Richmond in July to make their decisions, Pyle said. Primarily they check whether the books match state learning standards.
"They are required to review the books, to identify any bias and information, and we assume they review the textbooks carefully," Pyle said. "Typically that process works very well."
Divisions then can use the list to select their own textbooks, although they are allowed to choose books not on the list. Most draft committees of teachers then solicit input from the public before putting the books before school boards for a vote.
In Virginia Beach, for example, the process takes about a year. First, a committee of teachers reviews books both on and off the state list. They look for whether the books meet standards set by both the state and the division, said Beach schools spokeswoman Kathleen O'Hara.
At the same time, a request for bids is sent out to publishers. Price and quality are factored in by the committee, which chooses two finalist texts.
"The committee is primarily interested in the quality of the book, but cost does figure in there," O'Hara said. "Obviously, the expense could be a tipping point."
Those books then are sent to teachers across the division and put in libraries, where parents and other community members can review them in order to give feedback. The School Board makes the final decision.
"Our Virginia" is being regularly used by fourth-graders in Norfolk and fourth- and fifth-graders in Chesapeake, and was approved as an optional resource in Suffolk and Virginia Beach. Portsmouth doesn't use the text.
James Loewen, the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," said one problem is that textbooks average 1,152 pages - far longer than committee members have time to read.
"That's absurd," he said, " the possibility that these people are going to read six of them."
Levine said there's an even bigger problem in the disconnect between the history field and K-12 education. Historians and professional academics rarely contribute to elementary school textbooks - and there's a reason, he said.
"A lot of academia has gotten more obscure in its subject matter. A lot of us write for each other," he said. "I think it's pretty clear that the general level of conversation has gotten dumbed down over the past decade."
Elisabeth Hulette, The Pilotonline.com
By Elisabeth Hulette
The Virginian-Pilot
© October 22, 2010
Virginia schools have policies for choosing textbooks meant to ensure that accurate, high-quality books make it to children's backpacks.
So how did a history book containing an error about the Civil War land in local elementary schools this year?
School officials say it was a stroke of bad luck in an otherwise solid process. Meanwhile, some academics with an eye on textbooks say the problem goes deeper.
"The most popular history that the general public reads isn't written by historians," said Bruce Levine, a professor at the University of Illinois. "It's a really sad disjunction."
The error was caught by Carol Sheriff, a professor at the College of William and Mary. While reading her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia: Past and Present," Sheriff noticed a statement claiming that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War.
That isn't true, according to Sheriff and other professional historians. Confederate leaders refused to allow blacks to serve until the war was nearly over.
"Jefferson Davis barked this would 'revolt and disgust the whole South,' " Levine said. "All of this stuff is easily documentable. The facts of the matter aren't really murky."
State education officials said that errors occasionally slip through, but usually aren't this controversial. One time, for example, a NASA engineer from Suffolk caught some outdated information in the state science standards. The state later sought his input on reviewing them.
"I'm told that occasionally something is seen and brought to our attention," state schools spokesman Charles Pyle said. "We've never had this happen, where a statement is discovered that is clearly not part of the accepted scholarship in a subject."
In Virginia, the textbook selection process starts at the state level. State officials ask local divisions to recommend teachers for a review committee. For "Our Virginia," the committee was three teachers, from Fairfax, Chesterfield and Henrico counties. No historians served on the committee. The Fairfax and Henrico teachers declined to comment. The Chesterfield teacher could not be reached Thursday.
Teachers are paid $200 stipends to serve. Last year, they received the books at home in June, then met in Richmond in July to make their decisions, Pyle said. Primarily they check whether the books match state learning standards.
"They are required to review the books, to identify any bias and information, and we assume they review the textbooks carefully," Pyle said. "Typically that process works very well."
Divisions then can use the list to select their own textbooks, although they are allowed to choose books not on the list. Most draft committees of teachers then solicit input from the public before putting the books before school boards for a vote.
In Virginia Beach, for example, the process takes about a year. First, a committee of teachers reviews books both on and off the state list. They look for whether the books meet standards set by both the state and the division, said Beach schools spokeswoman Kathleen O'Hara.
At the same time, a request for bids is sent out to publishers. Price and quality are factored in by the committee, which chooses two finalist texts.
"The committee is primarily interested in the quality of the book, but cost does figure in there," O'Hara said. "Obviously, the expense could be a tipping point."
Those books then are sent to teachers across the division and put in libraries, where parents and other community members can review them in order to give feedback. The School Board makes the final decision.
"Our Virginia" is being regularly used by fourth-graders in Norfolk and fourth- and fifth-graders in Chesapeake, and was approved as an optional resource in Suffolk and Virginia Beach. Portsmouth doesn't use the text.
James Loewen, the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," said one problem is that textbooks average 1,152 pages - far longer than committee members have time to read.
"That's absurd," he said, " the possibility that these people are going to read six of them."
Levine said there's an even bigger problem in the disconnect between the history field and K-12 education. Historians and professional academics rarely contribute to elementary school textbooks - and there's a reason, he said.
"A lot of academia has gotten more obscure in its subject matter. A lot of us write for each other," he said. "I think it's pretty clear that the general level of conversation has gotten dumbed down over the past decade."
Elisabeth Hulette, The Pilotonline.com
Scientists and animal lovers
"Scientists and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts of birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue whales. But the relationship between size and speed didn't seem to be a linear one. A horse might be five hundred times heavier than a rabbit, yet its pulse certainly wasn't five hundred times slower than the rabbit's. After a formidable series of measurements in his Davis lab, [Swiss scientist Max] Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called 'negative quarter-power scaling.' If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami. ...
"The more species Kleiber and his peers analyzed, the clearer the equation
became: metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is (approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again, approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck's. As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of Kleiber's law is that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species.
Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota. ...
"Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber's law applied to one of life's largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities. Did the 'metabolism' of urban life slow down as cities grew in size? Was there an underlying pattern to the growth and pace of life of metropolitan systems? Working out of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president until 2009, West assembled an international team of researchers and advisers to collect data on dozens of
cities around the world, measuring everything from crime to household electrical consumption, from new patents to gasoline sales.
"When they finally crunched the numbers, West and his team were delighted to discover that Kleiber's negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of city living. The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms. If an elephant was just a scaled-up mouse, then, from an energy perspective, a city was just a scaled-up elephant.
"But the most fascinating discovery in West's research came from the data that didn't turn out to obey Kleiber's law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation - patents, R&D budgets, 'supercreative' professions, inventors - also followed a quarter-power law, in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber's law. But there was one fundamental difference: the quarter-power law governing innovation was
positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn't ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.
"Kleiber's law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West's model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call 'superlinear scaling': if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be
stable. West's power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand."
Steve Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
More practice
"For those on their way to greatness [in intellectual or physical endeavors], several themes regarding practice consistently come to light:
1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight.
1. Practice changes your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time.
4. Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve.
5. Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically, it's impossible to become great overnight.
The art of practice
"Across the board, these last two variables - practice style and practice time - emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.' First introduced in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond the simple idea of hard work. It conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. 'Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs from mere experience and mindless drill,' explains Ericsson. 'Unlike playful engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable. It ...does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts to reach beyond one's current level which is associated with frequent failures.' ...
"In other words, it is practice that doesn't take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice where the individual keeps raising the
bar of what he or she considers success. ..."[Take] Eleanor Maguire's 1999 brain scans of London cabbies, which revealed greatly enlarged representation in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. The same holds for any specific task being honed; the relevant brain regions adapt accordingly. ...
"[This type of practice] requires a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again and again. ...
"The physiology of this process also requires extraordinary amounts of elapsed time - not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day,
Ericsson found, but also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same common
number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark."
David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us, Doubleday
Pages: 53-57
The gem
There are two ways of exerting one's strength
Nobody grows old
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