A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.
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In every part of the world with which I am familiar, young people are completely immersed in the digital world - so much so, that it is inconceivable to them that they can, for long, be separated from their devices. Indeed, many of us who are not young, who are 'digital immigrants' rather than 'digital natives,' are also wedded to, if not dependent on, our digital devices.
Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.
I have odd thumbs that are extremely flexible. I can bend them quite far down the back side of my hand, basically the opposite side you'd even try to attempt bending your thumb. Because of that, I'm a very good thumb wrestler.
The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges.
To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.
There are more clocks than ever - clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second - but they all seem to matter less.
We went from a world where almost nobody knew anything about computers to a world where almost all of us are computer geeks for a huge fraction of our day. And I'd like to see that happen with the digital world of biological molecules, too.
The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich vareity of the world.
Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically. A good example is digital technology where today's cell phones are far more powerful than the computers on the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module that we used to navigate to the moon and operate all the spacecraft control systems.
There's something really admirable about French culture and an attraction in how independent it is from our own. So, it's odd that in other countries that are very American-influenced - who seem to care more about the Oscars than anyone here does - there's both anti-Americanism and also too much America.
When I woke up from that dream, brother, I was like, "Okay, I've got to know what that was, what happened." That was not an average dream. I've had some dreams in my days, but not like that. It was way too vivid. Looking back, the reason that dream makes more sense today than it did then is, we are in a digital world. Back then, it was an analog world. Everything was digital in the dream.
Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else s list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.
There's always a question when you invest. Are you too early, are you too late, or are you just right? And there was a lot of hype about life sciences, around the sequencing of the human genome and a lot of people concluded that's not really there. But by the way, there was a lot of hype around the digital revolution just about the time of 2000 and the human genome, and it turns out that some of the world's biggest, most powerful companies are the survivors post that crash.
The more we can be in a relationship with those who might seem strange to us, the more we can feel like we're neighbors and all members of the human family.
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