Matt > Recent Status Updates

“It’s a little early in the morning for Proust, isn’t it?”

"...Cato's version of old-fashioned, no-nonsense Roman values was as much an invention of his own day as a defense of long-standing Roman traditions. Cultural identity is always a slippery notion, and we have no idea how early Romans thought about their particular character and what distinguished them from their neighbors."

"The Galileans also sought truth, but their approach was the reverse of the Jesuits: instead of imposing a unified order upon the world, they attempted to study the world as given, and to find order within...One approach insisted on a truth imposed from above w/ reason and authority; the other pragmatically accepted the possibility of ambiguity and even contradiction, & sought to derive knowledge from the ground up."

"For the Jesuits, the purpose of mathematics was to establish the world as a fixed and eternally unchanging place, in which order and hierarchy could never be challenged...It was a "top-down" mathematics, whose purpose was to bring rational order to an otherwise chaotic world. For Cavalieri and his fellow indivisiblists, it was the exact reverse..."

"Virtually all the insulin now taken by diabetics is produced by genetically altered bacteria in a lab. Before that it had to be extracted from the pancreases of cows and pigs - a process that was both expensive and lacking in quality control."

"Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and kale didn't exist before humans came along...We've been inventing and adapting all along. And we're better for it."