Here is my collection of interesting, thought provoking and amusing quotes for March.
Chivalry and the chivalric code has fuck all to do with women at all. It’s a bunch of rules about how to conduct yourself if you are a rich dude, with a horse, a lot of weapons, and time on your hands. Saying that you treat women well because of chivalry makes about as much sense as saying you treat them well because of the highway code.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]
Anything slightly about women in concepts of chivalry is the same old creepy-ass courtly love stuff, and mostly is just about keeping your boner in your pants while your boss is looking.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]
I do advocate that men keep their boners in their pants unless otherwise requested, however, and it will probably save you grief with HR if you commit to this at work at the very least.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]
I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we have gone, our voices will linger in these walls.
Lies are noisy and the truth is very quiet. Listen carefully.
[Brad Warner; https://twitter.com/BradWarner/status/1369776251796254722]
In 1786 [Lord George] was excommunicated from the Church of England for refusing to appear before an ecclesiastical court … [He] responded that “to expel him from a society to which he never belonged, was an absurdity worthy of an archbishop”.
[Metropolitan, v7, n2]
Axolotls are amphibious organisms that live in rivers in Mexico. The water they live in is iodine deficient therefore they have hypothyroidism. This is why they have a distinctive half finished metamorphic appearance (gills + lungs). If you put them in iodine rich water as tadpoles then they ‘finish’ metamorphosis and become salamanders.
[@_captainscience; https://twitter.com/_captainscience/status/1371199557338562560?s=09]
This … was famously expressed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in pictorial terms. Before we observe it, the wave function of a cat might be a superposition of a sleeping cat and an awake cat (in Schrödinger’s version, the cat was dead or alive, but it isn’t nice to joke about dying cats).
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]
[Niels Bohr] wrote “the description of a quantum system cannot be separated from the measuring instruments that interact with it” … [this] is misleading because it seems to make “measuring instruments” necessary … [the] observation needs to be generalised and the need for a measurer removed. This can be done by saying that the description of a physical system cannot be separated from the other physical systems that interact with it … Properties of a quantum system exist only at the point of interacting with something else.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]
If we think of the physical world as if it were made by little stones each with its own properties, the jump from this picture to the subjective experience of mental phenomena is huge. But if the physical nature of the world is better described in terms of how physical systems, simple [and] complex … affect one another, perhaps the disjoint will appear less dramatic: products of the mind are just the complex phenomenon formed by the tangled and richly interwoven interactions between the world and the brain.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]
We shouldn’t force what we have discovered about nature to align with [our] prejudices: rather, our prejudices should be modified by our discoveries about nature.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
[Borges, Essay: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins]