#mati

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. ↗

— Pauline Kael

#arts #critic #independent #information #only

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. ↗

— Pauline Kael

#critic #independent #information #only #rest

When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public. ↗

— Elena Kagan

#appropriately #becomes #ceases #confirmation #discussion

David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation. The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences. ↗

— Geoffrey Miller

#sexual-selection #family

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form. ↗

— Anish Kapoor

#form #geometric #i #kind #logic

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

#case #different #emotions #first #first world

The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. ↗

— Elia Kazan

#automatically #communists #daily #democracy #i

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children. ↗

— G. Stanley Hall

#automatic #children #considerable #degree #desirable

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics. ↗

— G. H. Hardy

#applied #distinctly #mainly #mathematical #mathematics

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ↗

— G. H. Hardy

#because #die #forgotten #ideas #languages