"It's rather like saying that you know there are particular numbers of blue, white and silver cars in a car park -- but it is meaningless even to imagine saying which ones are which."
"Your attentional system ... must deal not only with a torrent of irrelevant noise in your external environment but also with all the noise within your own head."
"A broad range of solar systems, from hot F-class stars to the relatively dim M-class red dwarfs, should able to host planets with plant life in a range of colours"
"Unless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter."
"People use inhibitory control when they decide to take different routes to their jobs, because they have to make a conscious effort to override the regular route they otherwise would almost automatically follow. Although the researchers found a correlati
"In July 1945, two months after VE Day, the German submarine U-530 appeared at the Argentine naval base of Mar del Plata. The next month, U-977 did the same."
clip: "The NYPD acted as the law enforcement arm of the Republican Party. That's not how this country is supposed to work." ~ "The NYPD acted as the law enforcement arm of the Republican Party. That's not how this country is supposed to work."
""Science is an intrinsically optimistic project. You can't be curious and depressed. Curiosity is itself a sure stake in life. And science is often quite conscious of intellectual pleasure, in a way that the humanities are not."
How three nations almost came to blows over the disappearing and reappearing Graham Island, aka Ferdinandea, aka Giulia. Britain has just given up its claim