Michael

“Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.”
― Anonymous

“In Logo, the child controls a little turtle on-screen, issuing it commands to make it move around. The turtle draws a line wherever it goes, so it’s kind of like using a computerized Etch A Sketch. To draw a square, a child would tell the turtle to go forward thirty steps, turn right ninety degrees, then do the same thing three more times. Children quickly got the hang of it, using Logo to write programs that would draw all manner of things, like houses or cars. They’d laboriously write one instruction for each step of the picture, almost the way you’d set up the dots for a connect-the-dots drawing. To draw a bird, they’d connect two quarter circles together.”
― Anonymous

“The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.” With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government protection. That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.”
― Anonymous

“As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better