Ming Lim

“Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“Simply put, Leonardo replaced the mystic black bile, faculties, and spirits that permeated the writings of Galen, Avicenna, de Luzzi, and others, with his physical powers of movement, weight, force, and percussion - the building blocks of mechanics. he further used these mechanical concepts to demystify a whole host of physiological processes.”
― Mario Livio, Why?: What Makes Us Curious

“Zoroaster taught it to his followers in Persia twenty-five hundred years ago. Confucius preached it in China twenty-four centuries ago. Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, taught it to his disciples in the Valley of the Han. Buddha preached it on the bank of the Holy Ganges five hundred years before Christ. The sacred books of Hinduism taught it a thousand years before that. Jesus taught it among the stony hills of Judea nineteen centuries ago. Jesus summed it up in one thought—probably the most important rule in the world: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World