Mit University Quotes

Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT

All beliefs about matters of fact or real existence are derived merely from something that is present to the memory or senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing.

What makes America unique is not that it built MIT, or that its grads are generating economic growth and innovation, but that every state in the country has universities trying to do the same. “America has 4,000 colleges and universities,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “The rest of the world combined has 7,768 institutions of higher education.

Maybe the best thing about MIT is that no matter how crazy your idea, nobody says it’s not going to work until it’s proved unworkable.

If Chomsky says the educational system is an undemocratic system, you can say, well, you're there, you have a position at MIT. Well, it's perfectly attuned to the American system of control, a very sophisticated system of control that allows just enough dissidence so that those in power can point to the fact that the university is democratic but not enough dissidence to create a real danger to the system.

We dream of a journey through the universe. But is the universe then not in us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. Inward goes the secret path. Eternity with its worlds, the past and future, is in us or nowhere.

Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run (1998)—These two movies, neither of which is technically science fiction, were released in the same year. We see the idea of timelines branching from a single point which lead to different outcomes. In the example of Sliding Doors, a separate timeline branches off of the first timeline and then exists in parallel for some time, overlapping the main timeline, before merging back in. In Run Lola Run, on the other hand, we see Lola trying to rescue her boyfriend Manni by rewinding what happened and making different choices multiple times. We see visually what running our Core Loop might look like in a real-world, high-stress situation.

Testing creativity and problem-solving skills is arguably harder than testing factual knowledge, but the results of two separate studies conducted by MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, show that teaching children too much too early can backfire.

I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make.

Ich habe meinen Arm schon um mehr Mädchen gelegt als ich mich erinnern kann, aber in diesem Moment und mit diesem Mädchen, das so weit über mir steht, dass ich genauso gut versuchen könnte, die Sterne einzusammeln, fühlt es sich ein bisschen an wie ein schwer verdienter First Down.

Sprache in all ihren Facetten - ihr Lexikon, ihre Wortarten, ihre Zeitformen - ist für Menschen wie Wasser für Fische. Der Stoff unseres Denkens und Lebens, der uns formt und prägt, ohne dass wir uns seiner in Gänze bewusst wären. Wenn ich dieses Bewusstsein herstelle, wenn ich die Grenzen meiner eigenen Wahrnehmung spüre, dann löst das Demut in mir aus. Demut vor der Welt, die ich nur aus meinem eingeschränkten Blinkwinkel betrachte. Ich bin dafür dankbar für das Bewusstsein um die Existenz dieser Grenzen - ich hoffe sie bewahren mich davor, mit unwandelbaren Prämissen und Grundannahmen durch die Welt zu gehen. Das Bewusstsein für unsere Grenzen relativiert die Dinge, die wir ignorant voraussetzen. Die Dinge, die wir als universal postulieren - definieren sie doch nichts mehr als die Grenzen unseres Horizonts.

Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.

Eyebrows were raised in 1994 when Peter Shor, working at Bell Labs, came up with a quantum algorithm that could break most modern encryption by using quantum computing algorithms. Today’s encryption is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Even today, although there are no quantum computers that can implement Shor’s algorithm in full yet, there is worry that most of our encryption will be broken in a few years as more capable quantum computers come along. When this happens, there will be a rush to quantum-safe encryption algorithms (which cannot be broken quickly by either classic or quantum computers).

I stress again, as I did with climate, that the designated experts were catastrophizers, not that all researchers were. There were other experts in resources, such as MIT’s M. A. Adelman and University of Maryland’s Julian Simon, who predicted correctly that fossil fuel resources and other resources would expand. But just as with climate, the mainstream knowledge system chose to designate the catastrophizers as experts. (This was not due to their superior qualifications—while Adelman and Simon were resource economists, Paul Ehrlich’s primary background was in the study of butterflies. I will explain what it is due to in chapter 3.)

Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.

When the interests of Erdos's colleagues drifted away from pure mathematics, he made no secret of his disapproval. "When I wasn't sure whether to stay a mathematician or go to the Technical University and become an engineer, Vazsonyi recalled, "Erdos warned me: 'I'll hide, and when you enter the Technical University, I will shoot you.' That settled the matter." When probability theorist Mark Kac had a paper published in the Journal if Applied Physics based on his work during the war at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, Erdos sent him a one sentence postcard: "I am praying for your soul." Erdos was "reminding me," Kac said, "that I might be straying from the path of true virtue, which, as a matter of fact, I was.

Entrepreneurship itself is an emergent system, where companies create the conditions for experimentation and learning to occur, often symbiotically with customers. In 1978, Eric von Hippel (my PhD advisor at MIT) pioneered the notion of user-driven innovation.10, 11 Back then, the conventional wisdom was that innovation only came from corporate, government, and university research-and-development labs. While some still believe this today, Eric's insight proved to be prescient in many areas, especially in the information age, as the widespread adoption of open-source software and Lean Startup methodologies have demonstrated.12 Twitter is a tangible example since three of the platform's most popular features—the @ reply, the # hashtag indexing, and retweet sharing—were all generated bottom-up by users.

I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.

The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

As World War II was ending, the great engineer and public official Vannevar Bush argued that America’s innovation engine would require a three-way partnership of government, business, and academia. He was uniquely qualified to envision that triangle, because he had a foot in all three camps. He had been dean of engineering at MIT, a founder of Raytheon, and the chief government science administrator overseeing, among other projects, the building of the atom bomb.4 Bush’s recommendation was that government should not build big research labs of its own, as it had done with the atomic bomb project, but instead should fund research at universities and corporate labs. This government-business-university partnership produced the great innovations that propelled the U.S. economy in the postwar period, including transistors, microchips, computers, graphical user interfaces, GPS, lasers, the internet, and search engines.

Er hatte die Weiber kennengelernt, er war mit ihnen fertig. Unvergleichlich idealere Werte enthielt das Bier. Das Bier! Der Alkohol! Da saß man und konnte immer mehr davon haben, das Bier war nicht wie kokette Weiber, sondern treu und gemütlich. Beim Bier brauchte man nicht zu handeln, nichts zu wollen und zu erreichen, wie bei den Weibern. Alles kam von selbst. Man schluckte: und da hatte man es schon zu etwas gebracht, fühlte sich auf die Höhen des Lebens befördert und war ein freier Mann, innerlich frei. Das Lokal hätte von Polizisten umstellt sein dürfen: das Bier, das man schluckte, verwandelte sich in innere Freiheit. Und man hatte sein Examen so gut wie bestanden. Man war „fertig“, war Doktor! Man füllte im bürgerlichen Leben eine Stellung aus, war reich und von Wichtigkeit: Chef einer mächtigen Fabrik von Ansichtskarten oder Toilettenpapier. Was man mit seiner Lebensarbeit schuf, war in tausend Händen. Man breitete sich vom Biertisch her, in die Welt aus, ahnte große Zusammenhänge, ward eins mit dem Weltgeist. Ja, das Bier erhob einen so sehr über das Selbst, daß man Gott fand!

I AM A MACHINE” When I interviewed Dr. Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and cofounder of iRobot, I asked him if he thought machines would one day take over. He told me that we just have to accept that we are machines ourselves. This means that one day, we will be able to build machines that are just as alive as we are. But, he cautioned, we will have to give up the concept of our “specialness.” This evolution in human perspective started with Nicolaus Copernicus when he realized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather goes around the sun. It continued with Darwin, who showed that we were similar to the animals in our evolution. And it will continue into the future, he told me, when we realize that we are machines, except that we are made of wetware and not hardware. It’s going to represent a major change in our world outlook to accept that we, too, are machines, he believes. He writes, “We don’t like to give up our specialness, so you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures—I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we’re going to come to accept it over the next fifty years.” But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a “super-bad robot,” someone has to build a “mildly bad robot,” and before that a “not-so-bad robot.” His philosophy is summed up when he says, “The robots are coming, but we don’t have too much to worry about. It’s going to be a lot of fun.” To him, the robot revolution is a certainty, and he foresees the day when robots will surpass human intelligence. The only question is when. But there is nothing to fear, since we will have created them. We have the choice to create them to help, and not hinder, us. MERGE WITH THEM? If you ask Dr. Brooks how we can coexist with these super-smart robots, his reply is straightforward: we will merge with them. With advances in robotics and neuroprosthetics, it becomes possible to incorporate AI into our own bodies.

The concept of “I,” as a single, unified whole making all decisions continuously, is an illusion created by our own subconscious minds.    Mentally we feel that our mind is a single entity, continuously and smoothly processing information, totally in charge of our decisions. But the picture emerging from brain scans is quite different from the perception we have of our own mind.    MIT professor Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, told me that the mind is more like a “society of minds,” with different submodules, each trying to compete with the others.    When I interviewed Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, I asked him how consciousness emerges out of this mess. He said that consciousness was like a storm raging in our brain. He elaborated on this when he wrote that “the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive ‘I’ that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of our muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

The most famous illustration of what happens to those who question the orthodoxy is what befell economist Larry Summers. On January 14, 2005, Summers, then president of Harvard University, spoke to a conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce.16 In his informal remarks, responding to the sponsors’ encouragement to speculate, he offered reasons for thinking that innate differences in men and women might account for some of the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering. He spoke undogmatically and collegially, talking about possibilities, phrasing his speculations moderately. And all hell broke loose. An MIT biologist, Nancy Hopkins, told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” and that she had to leave the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”17 Within a few days, Summers had been excoriated by the chairperson of Harvard’s sociology department, Mary C. Waters, and received a harshly critical letter from Harvard’s committee on faculty recruiting. One hundred and twenty Harvard professors endorsed the letter. Some alumnae announced that they would suspend donations.18 Summers retracted his remarks, with, in journalist Stuart Taylor Jr.’s words, “groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies.

entire project would be kicked back, and he would need to start the submission process again. The proposal had to be perfect this time. If not, he was sure his competitors would swoop in on this opportunity to launch their own devices. He had spent the last two years on this project, and he was so close—only twenty-seven days left to make all the necessary corrections. He could not afford distractions now. Too much was riding on this; his name was riding on this. He remembered what his father always told him: “No one remembers the name of the person who came in second.” These words motivated him all through high school to earn a full scholarship to Boston University, where he earned his BA and master’s degrees in computer science, and then his PhD in robotics engineering at MIT. Those degrees had driven him to start his own business, Vinchi Medical Engineering, and at age thirty-four, he still lived by those words to keep the company on top. The intercom buzzed. “Your conference call is ready on line one, Mr. Vinchi.” “What the hell were you guys thinking?” Jon barked as soon as he got on the line. Not waiting for them to answer, Jon continued, “Whose bright idea was it to submit my name to participate at this event—or any event, for that matter? This type of thing has your name written all over it, Drew. Is this your doing?” As always, Trent said it the way it was. “If you had attended the last meeting, Jon, you would have been brought up to date for this and would have had the chance to voice any opposition to your participation.” It was a moot point, Jon knew he’d missed their last meeting—actually, their last few meetings—due to his own business needs. But this stunt wasn’t solely about the meeting, and he knew it. “Trent, I have always supported the decisions you guys have made in the past, but I am not supporting this one. What makes you think I will even show? I don’t have time for this nonsense.” “Time is valuable to all of us, Jon. We all have our own companies to run besides supporting what is needed for Takes One. Either you’re fully invested in this, or you’re not. There are times when it takes more than

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

Corporate interests raised a nearly unified voice heralding automation as a certain and universal beneficial advancement. However, some observers saw the new technology as a cause for concern and cautioned that the final word on automation would depend on the choices that industry and the nation made in the face of difficult questions regarding the pace of automation’s implementation, the uses of the new productivity, and the fate of displaced workers as well as depleted or eliminated job classifications, communities, and even industries. Norbert Wiener, for example, a prominent MIT mathematician and pioneer in the science of cybernetics, emphasized the potentially calamitous economic and social consequences of the new production technology. Wiener had begun to express concerns about the impacts of automation on labor and the entire society during World War II, and he authored two books in the immediate Cold War years warning that potentially disastrous unemployment and related social problems may come from industry’s drive toward automation. He characterized automation and computer controls in the production process as the “modern” or “second” industrial revolution, which even more than the first held “unbounded possibilities for good and evil.” 104 In particular, Wiener feared that the larger impact of the changes caused by automation would be a massive displacement of workers, compounded by the profit-driven indifference of industry. “The automatic machine … will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.” 105

My son Aaron, who is a professor of computer science, encountered just such a careless signal when he was on the admissions committee at Carnegie Mellon University. One Ph.D. applicant submitted a passionate letter about why he wanted to study at CMU, writing that he regarded CMU as the best computer science department in the world, that the CMU faculty was best equipped to help him pursue his research interests, and so on. But the final sentence of the letter gave the game away: I will certainly attend CMU if adCMUted. It was proof that the applicant had merely taken the application letter he had written to MIT and done a search-and-replace with “CMU” . . . and hadn’t even taken the time to reread it! Had he done so, he would have noticed that every occurrence of those three letters had been replaced.

In his Nobel lecture, Weinberg says: "At some point in the fall of 1967, I think while driving to my office at MIT, it occurred to me that I had been applying the right [equations] to the wrong problem...The weak and electromagnetic interactions could then be described in a unified way in terms of [spontaneous symmetry breaking].

In 1967, Zuse suggested that the universe itself was running on a cellu- lar automaton or a similar computational structure, a metaphysical position known today as digital physics, a subject Ed Fredkin had himself taken up before becoming acquainted with the work of Zuse. Excited to discover this work, Fredkin invited Zuse to Cambridge, MA. The translation of Rechnen- der Raum reproduced here, from a German (published) version of Zuse’s ideas, was in fact commissioned during Ed Fredkin’s tenure as Director of MIT’s Project MAC10 (the AI lab that was a precursor of the current MIT AI labs)

but because in the universe in which Larry Roberts was educated and now lived, it just wasn’t right for a guy with an MIT PhD in engineering to report to a guy with a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas.

Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.

Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states, “[A]lthough the total energy in the cosmos remains constant, the amount of energy available to do useful work is always getting smaller.” 70 The second law of thermodynamics assumes that the universe is a closed system because there is nothing outside of it. The amount of useful energy is decreasing, therefore there must have been a time when the energy clock began ticking. 71 Walter Brown holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and for many years was a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. “If the entire universe is an isolated system, then, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the energy in the universe that is available for useful work has always been decreasing,” he says. “However, as one goes back in time, the amount of energy available for useful work would eventually exceed the total energy in the universe, which, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, remains constant. This is an impossible condition, implying that the universe had a beginning.

dam·i·an·a   n. a small shrub native to Mexico whose leaves are used in herbal medicine and in the production of a liqueur. It is reputed to possess aphrodisiac qualities.  Turnera diffusa, family Turneraceae.  American Spanish. Dam·i·et·ta   the eastern branch of the Nile delta. Arabic name DUMYAT.  a port at the mouth of this delta; pop. 113,000. Linked entries: DUMYAT da·min·o·zide   n. a growth retardant sprayed on vegetables and fruit, esp. apples, to enhance the quality of the crop. In the U.S., the application of daminozide is now restricted to ornamental plants due to the potential health risks of consuming the chemical.  Chem. formula: C6H12N2O3. dam·mar (also dam·ar)   n. resin obtained from any of a number of tropical and mainly Indo-Malaysian trees, used to make varnish.  The resin is obtained from trees in the families Araucariaceae (genus Agathis), Dipterocarpaceae (genera Hopea, Shorea, and Vatica), and Burseraceae (genus Canarium).  late 17th cent.: from Malay damar 'resin'. dam·mit   exclam. used to express anger and frustration.  mid 19th cent.: alteration of damn it. damn   v. [trans.] (in Christian belief) (of God) condemn (a person) to suffer eternal punishment in hell:

We would have the overwhelming impression that we were re-living the present—déjà vu—perhaps in precisely the same way: hearing the same words, saying the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: such an impression is a clue, that in some past time-point, a variable was changed—re-programmed as it were—and that because of this, an alternative world branched off.

Tyson Dirksen grew up in a family very concerned about the environment, especially California's devastating drought of the 1980's. He started Evolve to try and reduce the use of energy, water, and other raw resources through sustainable design and development and use of green technologies. Tyson is an expert in the high-performance building industry and frequently speaks on the subject at conferences and symposiums. Tyson’s extensive knowledge of real estate investment combined with his expertise in healthy, sustainable, smart and resilient design and construction sets him and Evolve apart.. Tyson received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and holds a Masters in Real Estate Development from MIT. Tyson is a licensed General Contractor, Real Estate Broker, LEED AP certified, Green Point and HERS Rater, and Passive House builder.

In fact, this is where Wheeler’s later insight, that the universe consists of information (“it from bit”), seems to tie surprisingly in with the simulation hypothesis and to the quantum multiverse. It is much easier to think of cloning the information of a universe than it is to think of cloning the actual universe.

The only mechanism we know of that allows us to run the universe multiple times would be a simulated universe. If run on a type of computer, would allow us to run multiple scenarios either serially or in parallel.

Initially, von Neumann was referring to physical machines. The idea that he first presented in a lecture in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s was very complicated. Stephen Levy, in his book, Artificial Life, describes the basic components that made up von Neumann’s theoretical self-replicating machines, which he called kinematics (but which are mostly called von Neumann machines today). The system consisted of raw materials in a lake, along with four components required for this self-replicating machine labelled: A, B, C, and D. Component A was like a factory, which scooped up raw materials from the lake and used them in ways that were dictated by some data, which we might call a computer program today. Component B was a duplicator that read and copied information from the first machine to its duplicates, in the same way that DNA is passed down from parents to children. Component C was like a computer and controlled who did what, like a central processing unit. Component D was the actual data, or instructions, which in those days von Neumann envisioned as a very long tape.

»So sehr du sie auch für dich willst, ich würde niemals wollen, dass du fehlst. Du kannst Zeit mit ihr allein haben. Aber ich brauche keine Zeit mit ihr ohne dich. Ich will nicht auf dich verzichten, wenn ich nicht muss.«

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin, Random House (2005) F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Frank Partnoy, Penguin Books (1999) Ice Age John & Mary Gribbin, Barnes & Noble (2002) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press (2002) Models of My Life Herbert A. Simon The MIT Press (1996) A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe Gino Segre, Viking Books (2002) Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall, Oxford University Press (1970) Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Nt[. Diamond, Perennial (1992) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, Perennial Currents (1998) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin franklin, Yale Nota Bene (2003) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Garrett Hardin, Oxford University Press (1995) The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (1990) Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Ron Chernow, Vintage (2004) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David Sandes, W. W Norton & Company (1998) The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist Robert G. Hagstrom, Wiley (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters Matt Ridley, Harper Collins Publishers (2000) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giz.ting In Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton, Penguin Books Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright, Harper Collins Publishers (1989) Only the Paranoid Survive Andy Grove, Currency (1996 And a few from your editor... Les Schwab: Pride in Performance Les Schwab, Pacific Northwest Books (1986) Men and Rubber: The Story of Business Harvey S. Firestone, Kessinger Publishing (2003) Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 Irving Stone, Book Sales (2001)

MIT physicist Seth Lloyd supports the idea of other worldly portals in his book Programming the Universe. Quantum mechanics has proven that an electron is not only allowed to be in two places at once—it is required to be. Certain particles not only spin in two directions at the same time, but have to do so.21 At really high speeds, atoms require more information to describe their movements, and therefore they have more entropy.22 However, an observer affects the outcome of whatever he or she is observing. As explained in the book The Orb Project, the effect of the observer on the quantum field causes reality to reorganize according to the observation. This means that a newly observed reality descends through the frequency levels below the quantum, becoming dense in material reality.23 The nonobserved information becomes “lost” if it doesn’t qualify as “real” or desirable to the observer. It is not eliminated; instead, the not-selected potential slips into a pocket of “elsewhere.” Conceivably, we can get it back. As Lloyd explains, we can access lost data by “flipping a qubit,” a code phrase that means we can apply a magnetic field to force energy to shift from one state to another.24 We have established that the subtle layer is atop the physical and that the etheric layer of subtle energies is magnetic in nature. Could it be that the information we cannot find—perhaps, the data that could make a sick person well—is lingering a plane above us? We’ve one more law to face: the third law of thermodynamics. Experiments with absolute zero provide a new perspective on it, one that coaxes an understanding of subtle energy. Absolute zero is the point at which particles have minimum energy, called zero-point energy. Researchers including Dr. Hal Puthoff have identified this zero-point energy with zero-point field, a mesh of light that encompasses all of reality. (This field is further explained in Part III.) This field of light is a vacuum state, but it is not empty; rather, it is a sea of electromagnetic energy, and possibly, virtual particles—ideas that can become real. Conceivably, energy should stand completely still at absolute zero, which would mean that information would become permanently imprisoned. Research on zero-point energy, however, reveals that nearing zero-point, atomic motion stops, but energy continues. This means that “lost information” is not really lost. Even when frozen, it continues to “vibrate” in the background. The pertinent questions are these: How do we “read” this background information? How do we apply it? These queries are similar to those we might ask about “hidden” information. How do we access suppressed but desirable data? The answers lie in learning about subtle structures, for these dwell at the interfaces between the concrete and the higher planes. Operate within the subtle structures, and you can shift a negative reality to a positive one, without losing energy in the process.

Dr. Margaret Naeser and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, including Harvard professor Michael Hamblin, a world leader in understanding how light therapy works at the cellular level. Hamblin, at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine, specializes in the use of light to activate the immune system in treating cancer and cardiac disease; he was now branching out into its use for brain injuries. Building on lab work that applied laser therapy to the top of the head (transcranial laser therapy), the Boston group had studied its use in traumatic brain injury and found laser treatment helpful. Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using “laser acupuncture” by placing light on acupuncture points.

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6

Two Awesome Hours in the Morning After identifying your MIT, you need to turn it into a calendar item and book it as early in your day as possible. Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics, suggests that most people are most productive and have the highest cognitive functioning in the first two hours after they’re fully awake. In a Reditt Ask Me Anything, Ariely wrote: One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don't require high cognitive capacity (like social media). If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want.

As economists from the University of Chicago, M.I.T. and the University of Southern California put it in a recent research paper, much of America’s infant mortality deficit is driven by “excess inequality.” American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young. Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Ferguson won an Oscar in 2011 for Inside Job, his documentary on the financial crisis, and was an Oscar nominee for his first documentary, No End In Sight, on the war in Iraq. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT, and has been a technology policy consultant to the White House and the Office of the US Trade Representative, as well as to leading technology companies including Apple, IBM, and Texas Instruments. He was the co-founder of Vermeer Technologies, which invented the web tool Front Page, later sold to Microsoft. A former visiting scholar at MIT and Berkeley, he has also been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He has written four books, and is a life member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a director of the French-American Foundation.

University of California professor Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, and Stefanie Stantcheva of the MIT Department of Economics, carefully taking into account the incentive effects of higher taxation and the societal benefits of reducing inequality, have estimated that the tax rate at the top should be around 70 percent—what it was before President Reagan started his campaign for the rich.68 But

A két véglet között mozog az emberiség ingája, és keresi a középállást. Hitler előtt éppúgy, mint a hitleri időkben folyamatosan azt állították, hogy minden haladás a makacsoknak köszönhető, és a kérdőjel párthívei csupán akadékoskodni tudnak. Nem biztos, hogy ez így van, valami azonban egész bizonyos: vér mindig csak a csökönyösök kezéhez tapad.

Years ago, I was invited to be on a panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d never set foot in a university lecture hall as a student. I’d barely graduated high school, yet I was at one of the most prestigious institutions in the country to discuss mental toughness with a handful of others. At some point in the discussion an esteemed MIT professor said that we each have genetic limitations. Hard ceilings. That there are some things we just can’t do no matter how mentally tough we are. When we hit our genetic ceiling, he said, mental toughness doesn’t enter into the equation. Everyone in that room seemed to accept his version of reality because this senior, tenured professor was known for researching mental toughness. It was his life’s work. It was also a bunch of bullshit, and to me he was using science to let us all off the hook.

Many adherents of the simulation hypothesis think that quantum indeterminacy is simply an optimization technique with the same basic idea: only render that which is being observed so that not every particle in the whole universe has to be rendered at one time, only those which are being observed. Everything else is in a state of superposition, or stored simply as information. If there’s one thought I want to leave you with about computer science and information theory, it’s that optimization of information is one of the key ways in which we accomplish seemingly impossible things. A more detailed overview of both quantum indeterminacy and quantum entanglement as optimization techniques is given in The Simulation Hypothesis.

Today’s 3D printers have started to make a dent in von Neumann’s vision. They are now being used to assemble objects in space from raw materials. This is seen as a critical way we might be able to conduct manufacturing on foreign worlds, as long as raw materials are available. Theoretically, a 3D printer could print another 3D printer, thus realizing von Neumann’s general idea of self-replicating machines.

Most scientists, certainly physicists, conflate the two ideas of randomness and free will. Horgan argues that free will, as we think of it, is about more: “They examine free will within the narrow, reductionistic framework of physics and mathematics, and they equate free will with randomness and unpredictability. My choices, at least important ones, are not random, and they are all too predictable, at least for those who know me.

In just one example of such an attempt to update the metaphor, the Mormon Transhumanist Association has put forth the New God Argument, which argues that we are in a simulation of some sort and that this is not in conflict with their faith (the Church of Latter Day Saints). This is an explicit attempt for existing religions to stay on top of the theological implications of the development of technology and the simulation hypothesis.

Online Tech Ed platforms—such as Coursera (Yale and other universities), edX (Harvard and MIT), and Stanford Online—offer nearly one thousand high-quality courses to the general public, and most are entirely free.

I honestly don’t believe that design is the most important matter today. Instead, I believe we should focus first on understanding computation. Because when we combine design with computation, a kind of magic results; when we combine business with computation, great financial opportunities can emerge. What is computation? That’s the question I would get asked anytime I stepped off the MIT campus when I was in my twenties and thirties, and then whenever I left any technology company I worked with in my forties and fifties. Computation is an invisible, alien universe that is infinitely large and infinitesimally detailed. It’s a kind of raw material that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, and it’s what powers the internet at a level that far transcends the power of electricity. It’s a ubiquitous medium that experienced software developers and the tech industry control to a degree that threatens the sovereignty of existing nation-states. Computation is not something you can fully grasp after training in a “learn to code” boot camp, where the mechanics of programming can be easily learned. It’s more like a foreign country with its own culture, its own set of problems, and its own language—but where knowing the language is not enough, let alone if you have only a minimal understanding of it.

The idea of cosmological inflation, or just inflation for short, was proposed by Alan Guth, now a physics professor from MIT, while he was working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator with his colleagues as a way to solve a number of problems with the existing theories of the origins of the universe. 57 The basic idea is that this inflationary period began very soon after the Big Bang (in this case, I mean very soon, from approximately 10-36 seconds after the to 10-32 seconds). That means the whole process of cosmic inflation started and ended before a single second had passed from the Big Bang! The insight that Guth and his colleagues had was that there was a period of repulsive gravity.

One of the first things Tessa asked me was whether I had seen the whole Metz speech, not just the famous quote, which she repeated word for word:4 We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.

The multiverse idea is so common now in the world of physics that physicists have proposed not just one but many types of multiverses. The one that was most interesting to me, given my previous research into simulation theory, was the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, also known as the parallel universe theory, or the quantum multiverse for short. It is a well-respected explanation for the mystifying phenomenon of quantum indeterminacy by many physicists. In this interpretation, the universe is spinning off new branches every time a quantum measurement is made, resulting in an almost infinite number of parallel universes with some level of shared history.

The second is that far from living in a single universe, we live in a complex, interconnected network of multiple timelines. This concept is broadly referred to today as the multiverse. Not only does the multiverse warp our understanding of the world around us, it also warps our understanding of the past and the future. In short, neither space nor time is what we think it is.

The idea of cosmological inflation, or just inflation for short, was proposed by Alan Guth, now a physics professor from MIT, while he was working at the Stanford Linear Accelerator with his colleagues as a way to solve a number of problems with the existing theories of the origins of the universe. 57 The basic idea is that this inflationary period began very soon after the Big Bang (in this case, I mean very soon, from approximately 10-36 seconds after the to 10-32 seconds). That means the whole process of cosmic inflation started and ended before a single second had passed from the Big Bang! The insight that Guth and his colleagues

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)— As mentioned in the previous chapter this film is one of the best representations of ancestor simulations. When the protagonist finds out he is living in a simulation, one of the RPG players, who exists outside the simulation, tells him that their simulation is “one of thousands.” The thing that makes this simulation unique is that it is the only one where they in turn develop their own ancestor simulations, or nested simulations. Although we see only the nested simulations and not the parallel ones, they are definitely there, which means that it is also faithfully representing a simulated multiverse.

Fringe (2008–2013) and Counterpart (2017–2018)— In the twenty-first century, two popular TV shows demonstrate the idea of a single parallel world that has somehow split off from this world, but retains many similarities, including a shared history. The source of the divergence is never explained fully, but the existence of a parallel world with alternate versions of the main characters is a key plot point in both. Both shows reveal that some physics phenomenon was responsible for either (1) breaching a way into the other universe or (2) causing a branch off the main universe to create the second one.

Sliders (1995) —The science fiction series Sliders is a more direct example of navigating a quantum multiverse. In Sliders, wormholes are used to visit other universes, each of which deviates in some way from our own, many with different versions of the main characters. How do they develop the wormhole? Quinn, the main character, is shown how by a different, parallel version of himself, a theme we will see repeating in other multiverse stories.

Dark Matter (2017) — In a similar manner, the hero of the novel Dark Matter, Jason Dissen, a failed quantum physicist who is happy with this life, encounters an alternate version of himself. This alternate version was more successful as a physicist and developed a machine which can put large objects into superposition (a concept we’ll explore heavily in the next few chapters). This device results in an ability to go to different universes and encounter alternate versions of well, everyone. The other Jason, the brilliant one, is keen on stealing the hero Jason’s happy home life. Chaos ensues. This is well worth a read if you are inclined to read novels and want to consider the possibilities of multiversal travel.

Many of the confounding aspects of quantum physics are confounding only if we insist on a completely deterministic, materialist model of the universe, with a single past and a single future. The observer effect, the collapse of the probability wave, even parallel universes all make much more sense if the universe actually consists of information that is stored, processed, duplicated, and, most important, rendered as the physical world we see around us.

Remember back to Bostrom’s startling simulation argument: if any civilization ever gets to the Simulation Point, then we are already likely in a simulation.

Like all languages, Atom is easier to learn when you’re younger. With Paul Penfield, I co-teach a freshman course at MIT called Information and Entropy. The goal of this course, like the goal of this book, is to reveal the fundamental role that information plays in the universe.

gaseous diffusion method of separating U-235 from U-238; in the laboratory at the University of California, under Ernest O. Lawrence, another group was trying to do the same thing by an electromagnetic process. 5 The committee consisted of: Dr. W. K. Lewis of MIT, Chairman; Roger Williams, T. C. Gary and C. H. Greenewalt of du Pont; and, originally, Dr. E. V. Murphree of Standard Oil Development Corporation. Unfortunately, owing to a subsequent illness, Dr. Murphree was unable to take part in the review. 6

Meditation [is used to] harmonize [yourself] with the universe.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

Die Frage ist nicht mehr, ob man auf Cloud Computing setzt, sondern wann und wie. Die Cloud Infrastruktur- und Cloud Sicherheits-Strategie sollte immer mit der Unternehmensstrategie einhergehen. Denn die Implementierung von Cloud Computing könnte die treibende Kraft für eine Unternehmen oder eine Organisation werden. In einer auf das Geschäftsmodell abgestimmten Cloud-Strategie, ist Cloud Security oftmals der entscheidende Faktor im allumfassenden Sicherheitsmodell. Strategisch muss Cloud-Sicherheit daher eine gemeinsame Aufgabe des Cloud-Providers und des Kunden sein.

Die Hypostasierung von Allgemeinbegriffen hat in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte bekanntlich nicht selten eine verhängnisvolle Rolle gespielt. Eine Gruppe radikaler Begriffsrealisten des Mittelalters sah in Allgemeinbegriffen wie Wärme oder Kälte oder Farbe realere Wesen als in den Einzeldingen, denen nur eine abhängige Art von Realität zukomme. Die Universalien seien Substanzen, welche die Einzeldinge erzeugen und bestimmen. - Ähnlich sehen heute radikale Begriffsrealisten - die es allerdings sind, ohne es zu wissen - im Begriff des "Kapitalismus" ein Wesen, dem eine hohere Realität zukomme als den einzelnen Tatsachen und das diese einzelne Tatsachen erzeuge. Im Kapitalismus wird die causa efficiens gesehen - nicht nur des wirtschaftlichen, sondern alles geschichtlichen Geschehens. Diese magisch-mystische Betrachtungsweise beherrscht einen Teil der neueren soziologischen und wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeiten. Ein auffallendes Beispiel bietet das Buch von SCHUMPETER "Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie" (Deutsche Ubersetzung 1946). Dort wird nicht nur erzahlt, welche Leistungen der Kapitalismus oder der kapitalistische Prozess (also die "Person" oder die "Substanz") auf technisch-wirtschaftlichem Gebiet vollbracht habe. Wir hören auch, dass der aufsteigende Kapitalismus die moderne Wissenschaft schuf, dass er die Malerei seit GIOTTO gestaltete, dass der moderne Pazifismus und die moderne internationale Moral Produkte des Kapitalismus seien, dass und wie er aber eine allgemeine Feindseligkeit gegen sich erzeugt habe und dass er selbst die Mauern zum Einsturz bringe, auf denen er ruhe. - SCHUMPETER ist Positivist. Er will Fakten darstellen, ohne Stellung zu nehmen. Er will im Stile COMTES, der St. Simonisten und vieler anderer Positivisten das Entwicklungsgesetz "beschreiben", das sich in den geschichtlichen Fakten vorfindet. Und er wehrt sich dagegen, von "Kraft", Ursache"" usw. zu sprechen, da sie metaphysische Begriffe seien. Was geschieht aber? Eine anthropomorph gedachte, iibernatiirliche Kraft - eben der "Kapitalismus" - wird für ihn zum Leiter des Marionettenspieles, das Geschichte heißt. Sie gibt den Gesetzgebern ihre Gedanken, den Wissenschaftlern ihre Einfälle, den Moralphilosophen ihre Vorstellungen von der Welt der Werte, und sie führt den Malern den Pinsel. Wir lesen eine Erzählung über ein zeitweise allmächtiges, nunmehr alterndes Wesen und sein Tun. Seit COMTE rühmen sich die Positivisten, das "theologische" und "metaphysische" Zeitalter überwunden und das dritte Stadium der Menschheitsgeschichte, nämlich das positivistische heraufgeführt zu baben. Wie COMTE und viele andere Positivisten merkt aber auch SCHUMPETER nicht, wie sehr er sich von seinem eigenen Programm entfernt und wie er in magisch-mystisches Denken zurückfällt. Wenige Metaphysiker haben so arglos mit einer personifizierten Substanz gearbeitet und so bedenkenlos geglaubt, in ihr die wirkende Ursache aller Geschichte zu finden, wie SCHUMPETER und andere Moderne in dem personifizierten "Kapitalismus". Aus dem mittelalterlichen Universalien-Streit und aus den Misserfolgen des hypostasierenden Begriifsrealismus konnten die heutigen Begriffsrealisten viel lernen, und der VerIauf dieses Streites sollte eine Warnung für sie sein.

Finally, Dr. Sean C. Solomon of MIT reported (in Astronautics, February 1962) that “The Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the moon’s gravitational field indicating the frightening possibility that the moon might be hollow.” Frightening? What, indeed, is the significance of that word? The significance was mentioned by no less a figure than the late and great astronomer Carl Sagan in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966).

Paramatma, die hohe Seele, ist mit Gott vereint, sie ist gottesbewusst, universal bewusst. Ihr eigenes Selbst umfasst alle. Ob es nun gute oder verschlagene Menschen sind, ob sie recht oder falsch gehen, sie sind deren eigenes Selbst; sie betrachtet all diese Personen als ihr Selbst. (S. 182)

Tun? Wir sind das wichtigste magische Bildungsinstitut!", betonte Ridcully. "Aber lehren wir?" "Nur wenn uns nichts anderes übrig bleibt", sagte der Dekan. "Wir zeigen den Studenten, wo die Bibliothek ist, plaudern ein wenig mit ihnen und promovieren die Überlebenden. Wenn sie auf Probleme stoßen, steht meine Tür in metaphorischer Hinsicht immer für sie offen." "In metaphorischer Hinsicht?", wiederholte Ponder. "Ja. In Wirklichkeit ist sie natürlich verschlossen." "Erklär ihm, dass wir nichts tun, Stibbons", verlangte der Dozent für neue Runen. "Wir sind Akademiker.

At what they call the “Ivy Plus” universities (the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, and MIT), more students came from the top one percent of American households than from the entire bottom 50 percent of households in terms of income.

two economists, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, have found that over the past several decades, automation has been destroying jobs faster than it has been creating them.

If you’re a science genius, come to MIT to find out how little you really know. No other school makes such a massive assault on the ego (with little in the way of support to help you pick up the pieces). Technology is a given, but MIT also prides itself on leading programs in economics, political science and management. (The Elite Private Universities - MIT)

If you’re looking for an Eastern version of Stanford, try Duke (with a touch of MIT mixed in). Stanford’s big-time athletics, preprofessional aura, and laid-back atmosphere stand in marked contrast to the Ivy League. In contrast to the hurly-burly of Bay-Area rival Berkeley, Stanford is upscale suburban. (The Elite Private Universities - Stanford University)

I’ve heard a lot about robot caregivers, and I know they’re in development all over the place, from MIT to Japan, and to the extent that some of those robots can help minimize injuries, particularly in lifting and transporting the elderly, I see them as an important supplement to what caretakers do,” Poo says. “But I don’t see them as a replacement for people. Too often, technology ends up being about convenience rather than quality of life. And we overmedicalize elder care when what’s really needed is human touch and a more humane set of solutions and choices.

In all countries ethnic diversity reduces trust. In Peruvian credit-sharing cooperatives, members default more often on loans when there is ethnic diversity among co-op members. Likewise, in Kenyan school districts, fundraising is easier in tribally homogenous areas. Dutch researchers found that immigrants to Holland were more likely to develop schizophrenia if they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Dutch people than if they lived in purely immigrant areas. Surinamese and Turks had twice the chance of getting schizophrenia if they had to deal with Dutch neighbors; for Moroccans, the likelihood quadrupled. Dora Costa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn of Tufts University analyzed 15 recent studies of the impact of diversity on social cohesion. They found that every study had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement.” James Poterba of MIT has found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people without children rises. He notes, however, that the effect “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.” This unwillingness of taxpayers to fund public projects if the beneficiaries are from a different group is so consistent it has its own name—“the Florida effect”—from the fact that old, white Floridians are reluctant to pay taxes or vote for bond issues to support schools attended by blacks and Hispanics. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion of gross state product on public education. Most people believe charity begins with their own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Researchers in Australia have found that immigrants from countries racially and culturally similar to Australia—Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa—fit in and become involved in volunteer work at the same level as native-born Australians. Immigrants from non white countries volunteer at just over half that rate. At the same time, the more racially diverse the neighborhood in which immigrants live, the less likely native Australians themselves are to do volunteer work. Sydney has the most diversity of any Australian city—and also the lowest level of volunteerism. People want their efforts to benefit people like themselves. It has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are of the same race. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference in welfare levels is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties. Americans are not stingy—they give more to charity than Europeans do—but they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are usually homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.

Such creatures were what they saw, because they now rigidly coded the neurons responsible for the sight. For humans too, the brain loses some of its unbounded intelligence whenever it perceives the universe across boundaries. That partial blindness remains inescapable without the ability to transcend. Impressions on our neurons are constantly being set for each of the senses, not just sight. Though we usually call the heavier impressions "stress," all impressions actually create some limitation. For illustrate: In the early 1980s, M.I.T. experts began studying how human hearing function. Hearing seems passive, but in fact every person listens quite selectively to the world and puts his own interpretation on the raw data that comes into his ears. (For example, a skilled singer hears pitch and harmony where a tone-deaf person hears noise.) One experiment involves people listening to fast, basic rhythms (1-2-3 and 1-2-3 and 1-2-3), and teaching them to hear the rhythm differently (1, 2, 3-and-l, 2, 3-and-l, 2). After the noises started to be interpreted distinctly, the participants indicated that the sounds became more vibrant and fresher. The experiment evidently had taught people to change their unseen limits somewhat. The really interesting result, however, was that when they went home these people found the colours seemed lighter, music sounded better, the taste of food immediately became more pleasant, and everyone around them seemed lovable. Just the slightest consciousness opening induced a change in reality. Meditation causes a bigger shift because it opens more channels of awareness and opens them to a deeper level. The shift does not separate us from the normal way we use our consciousness. Building borders will continue to be a fact of life. The twist provided by the rishis was to infuse this behavior with liberation, increasing it to a level which transcends the alienated ego's petty thoughts and desires. The ego typically has no choice but to actively waste life erecting one wall after another.

Both mathematical notation and musical notation point to universes quite different from the one in which ordinary language functions so well. But, in each too, there is genius in the very notation that has developed for giving representation to ideas that seem to lie beyond ordinary language. There are times in mathematics when the similarities in notation is the first clue to a deeper relationship. Similarly musical notation not only created a structure within which Western music could develop but also shows something other than just the sounds being made. It indicates how the various elements stand in relation to one another, how sound creates a space, it shows how different musical voices move against and through each other.

The classification above is based on a 2011 presentation by MIT grad student David Hernandez for my cosmology class. Because such simplistic taxonomies are strictly impossible, they should be taken with a large grain of salt: