Never been one to let the carrier drop

I posted this on facebook, but it occured to me it might be worth saving here

“Seeking a middle ground in racial politics, given that one side is nazis, is a little like seeking a middle ground between closed and open on a circuit breaker. It might exist (in the sense that briefly the contacts are in transition and there’s a arc drawn between them) but if you stay there too long shit is probably going to catch on fire and someone is going to get hurt. Some things really are black and white, and I am mystified as to how you can find middle ground between “I want to kill people who are a different race than I am” and “everyone is the same under the skin”.”

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” –Arthur Stanley Eddington

“My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. Sometimes the game might seem easy. Even fun. Other times it might be so difficult you want to give up and quit. But unfortunately, in this game you only get one life. When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over. Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels. Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone. —Anorak’s Almanac, chapter 77, verses 11–20”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player Two

I wonder if solar panels would sell better if they were marketed as ‘free beamed power receivers’

If our experience is all made of information, then experiencing it is all about communication.

–Anonymous