#stems

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#enigma #goals #knowledge #mirages #science

Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits. ↗

— Scott Belsky

#self-motivation #motivational

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ↗

— Howard Pattee

#philosophy #science #systems #nature

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. ↗

— Erica Jong

#religions #systems #religion

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity. ↗

— Lewis Fry Richardson

#science #systems #science

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#science #systems #science

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems. ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#africa #cheap #doing #favor #get

Even the best data security systems can't protect private taxpayer information from entrepreneurial foreign businesses than can make huge profits selling U.S. taxpayer information. ↗

— Melissa Bean

#businesses #data #entrepreneurial #even #foreign

I'd like to help repair the earth's ecosystems, and to fully live until I'm fully dead. ↗

— Martha Beck

#earth #ecosystems #fully #help #i