Emily Lindbloom > Emily's Quotes

“Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly love and the number of acquaintances we can truly know. We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma. All of these things are expressions of the peculiarities of the human mind and heart, a refutation of the notion that the way we function and communicate and process information is straightforward and transparent. It is not. It is messy and opaque.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.”
― Christopher Chabris, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us

“When light from the sun enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it hits all sorts of molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen molecules) on its way to Earth and bounces off them like a pinball. This is called scattering, which means that on a clear day, if you look at any part of the sky, the light you see has been bouncing around the atmosphere before coming into your eye. If all light was scattered equally, the sky would look white. But it doesn’t. The reason is that the shorter wavelengths of light are more likely to be scattered than the longer ones, which means that blues get bounced around the sky more than reds and yellows. So instead of seeing a white sky when we look up, we see a blue one.”
― Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

“Your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see—and what you miss.”
― Christopher Chabris, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

“In a very real way, then, materials are a reflection of who we are, a multi-scale expression of our human need and desires.”
― Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

“This is essentially why gold is still valuable in the twenty-first century. If gathered together, all the gold ever mined would fit inside a large town house.”
― Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

“Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“What makes him successful is the way that he analyzes information. He is not just hunting for patterns. Instead, Bob combines his knowledge of statistics with his knowledge of basketball in order to identify meaningful relationships in the data.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“When catastrophe strikes, we look for a signal in the noise - anything that might explain the chaos that we see all around us and bring order to the world again.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“shake it off;”
― John Feinstein, The Rivalry: Mystery at the Army-Navy Game

“I feel like if they can handle me, they can probably handle any crowd on the road or any kind of adversity that may come up in a game.”
― John Feinstein, Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers

“You see,” Bouton wrote, “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” Truer words were never written.”
― John Feinstein, Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball