Emily Lindbloom

“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

“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

“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 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