#analogy

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. ↗

— John Searle

#adding #analogy #attribute #cars #cognitive

If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane. ↗

— John Green

#rain

She stared down into her coffee, as if she had more to say, but the words had fallen into the mug and were now too soggy to use. ↗

— Rachel Vincent

#funny #funny

Penny: But, he turned out to be really sweet. Sometimes people are layered like that. There’s something totally different underneath than what’s on the surface. Dr Horrible: And sometimes there’s a third even deeper level and that’s the same as the top surface one. Penny: Huh? Dr Horrible: Like with pie. ↗

— 'Dr Horrible' writers

#human-nature #humor #snark #humor

Prediction by analogy -creativity - is so pervasive we normally don't notice it. ↗

— Jeff Hawkins

#normally #notice #pervasive #prediction

Without inspiration, we’re all like a box of matches that will never be lit. ↗

— David Archuleta

#inspiration #inspirational #simile #thoughts #inspirational

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BC, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#evolution #human-history #science #age

We got half the doggone MIT college of engineering here, and nobody who can fix a doggone /television/?" Dr. Joseph Abernathy glared accusingly at the clusters of young people scattered around his living room. That's /electrical/ engineering, Pop," his son told him loftily. "We're all mechanical engineers. Ask a mechanical engineer to fix your color TV, that's like asking an Ob-Gyn to look at the sore on your di-ow!" Oh, sorry," said his father, peering blandly over gold-rimmed glasses. "That your foot, Lenny? ↗

— Diana Gabaldon

#humor #humor

Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who perseveres to the end. ↗

— Plato

#inspirational #motivational #perseverance #philosophy #running

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#obfuscation #science