#scienc

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again. ↗

— Rudy Rucker

#humor #science-fiction #humor

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#imagination

Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky... ↗

— John Noble Wilford

#force #imagination #mars #red #science

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne. ↗

— China Miéville

#practical-applications #practice #problem-solving #procrastination #theory

The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. ↗

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#egyptology #science #western-civilization #science

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science. ↗

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#science #seismology #western-civilization #science

That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. ↗

— Walter M. Miller Jr.

#conscience #apocalypse

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#science #words #love

I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#paranoia #reason #rules-of-evidence #science #ufos