@habits

I try to save interesting quotes, anecdotes, snippets, that I want to review or reference later.

Here is a dump of them without sources, but exact copy-paste — for 99% you should be able to google exact search and find the source.

Don’t worry I didn’t make them up. But I could have.

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ALL OF THE BELOW ARE FROM OTHER WRITERS, NOT MY WORDS (unless you find them really interesting, in which case I’m fine with mistaken attribution)

And despite all of this, we’re still in the dial-up era of blockchain. The real opportunities won’t start until we move into broadband.

The relationship between hero and Mentor is one of the most common themes in mythology, and one of the richest in its symbolic value. It stands for the bond between parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, god  and man.

The tragedy of luxury beliefs is that, since they’re free, and since the non-elites aspire to eliteness, the beliefs themselves trickle down to the masses who can’t “afford” them. It’d be as if the masses bought a ton of expensive luxury products they didn’t need and became saddled with credit card debt. And since being high status means avoiding what the masses are doing, as soon as the masses adopt the luxury beliefs, the elites drop them. So elites accrue the short-term status benefit while the masses get hit with the long-term debt.

Bet you weren’t expecting corn to be one of the many culprits behind super humid summers! Corn sweat, or water vapor released from its leaves, can make humidity levels increase by up to 15%

Yet even in those rich countries in which the consumption of meat has reached new heights, such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States, it has led to no demonstrable ill effects on health. Spain is the best example: Since 1975, its average meat supply has more than doubled, peaking at 120 kg in 2002 before dropping back to today’s 100 kg. This rise in meat demand was accompanied by a decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease.

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

Rap = Rhythm and Poetry

Argentines have developed a highly unusual relationship with their money.
They spend their pesos as quickly as they get them. They buy everything from TVs to potato peelers in installments. They don’t trust banks. They hardly use credit. And after years of constant price hikes, they are left with little idea of how much things should cost

Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.

A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.

To judge from the Google numbers, a Chicago-to-Honolulu move would be at least twice as effective as medication for your winter blues

Tocqueville Paradox (sociology): People’s expectations rise faster than living standards, so a society that becomes exponentially wealthier can see a decline in net happiness and satisfaction. There is virtually nothing people can’t get accustomed to, which also helps explain why there is so much desire for innovation and improvement

People like Picasso, whose work is conceptual, solidify their ideas before they start creating and tend to peak early. Meanwhile, people like Cézanne, whose work is experimental tend to discover things in the act of creation and peak later in their careers. When I visited Cézanne’s hometown of Aix-en-Provence in Southern France, I was struck by how terrible his early paintings were and how many times he painted Mount Sainte Victoire. He’d sit on a little cliff and paint the thing over and over and over again, each time discovering something new

Experts combing through the leaked user data determined that fewer than one percent of the female profiles on Ashley Madison had been used on a regular basis, and the rest were used just once — on the day they were created. On top of that, researchers found 84 percent of the profiles were male.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
This medieval proverb comes from the sport of falconry, where the ‘bird in the hand’ (the preying falcon) was worth more than ‘two in the bush’ – the prey.

All true morality, inward and outward, is comprehended in love, for love is the foundation of all the commandments

Rhimes’ most popular heartthrobs all have something in common: Fitzwilliam Darcy, the romantic hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is baked into their characters. If there’s one thing for which Rhimes has an eye, it’s a Darcy — an eligible, rich, handsome, unattainable man who seems like a jerk but is actually an awkward mensch just waiting for the right woman to turn his head

China has indeed made impressive science gains in recent years, it continues to suffer from multiple structural problems that hamper its goal of becoming a self-reliant innovation powerhouse. These include an imbalance between basic science research and technology development; a top-down approach that prioritizes Party control over effective S&T policy; and an inordinate, and often self-defeating, focus on quantitative indicators to measure performance

Award-winning painter, Georgia O’Keefe, suggests optimizing for your interests rather than your happiness:
“I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary. I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.”