TXTNG IS KILLING LANGUAGE. JK!!!

"What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense."

"And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire."

The Debt to Pleasure

A Nobel prizewinner argues for an overhaul of the theory of consumer choice

"To take one example, the “people” in economic models have fixed preferences, which are taken as given. Yet a large body of research from cognitive psychology shows that preferences are in fact rather fluid."

"Biologists have a much clearer understanding of altruism and kindness, whether to kin or strangers, than economists, who typically emphasise the dogged pursuit of self-interest."

"Economists tend to think that more choice is good. Yet people with many options sometimes fail to make any choice at all."

"Explicitly modelling the process of making a choice might prompt economists to take a more ambiguous view of an abundance of choices. It might also make them more sceptical of “revealed preference”, the idea that a person’s valuation of different options can be deduced from his actions. This is undoubtedly messier than standard economics. So is real life."

Joshua Prager and the man who broke his neck

"And it was then I understood that no matter how stark the reality, the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. The goat becomes the hero. The perpetrator becomes the victim."

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"....people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp. People don't know that they have lived through worse, that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck, that problems of the mind are greater still, more injurious, than a hundred broken necks. I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us." 

"This," wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, "is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." 

"I wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve, reconcile to reality, but we all must -- the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone. I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good. One can say that a bad thing sucks, but that this natural world still has many glories."

"I wished to tell him that, in the end, our mandate is clear: We have to rise above bad fortune. We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship -- oh, friendship -- and community and love."

"But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast." 

"Yes, contrast. If you are mindful of what you do not have, you may be truly mindful of what you do have, and if the gods are kind, you may truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way. You know death, and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life. Some part of you is cold, and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm, or even to be cold. When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow."

"But I didn't say these things to Abed. I told him only that he had killed one man, not two. I told him the name of that man. And then I said, "Goodbye."

Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...

"Boil things down to their fundamental truths, and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.   Through most of our life – we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means kind of copying what other people do with slight variations.  And you have to do that – otherwise it’s mentally—you wouldn’t be able to get through the day.  When you want to do something new – you have to apply the physics approach.  Physics is really about how to discover new things that are counter-intuitive like quantum mechanics – it’s really counter-intuitive.  So I think that’s a really important thing to do and then also, to really pay attention to negative feedback – and solicit it – especially from friends.  This may seem like rather simply advice – but hardly anyone does that!  And it’s incredibly helpful."