Michael Cervieri
@ronaut
Pondering bees and trees along the CT-RI border. Writing children’s stories.
Michael Cervieri
michael.cervieri.com
"On land, multicellular life stays pretty close to the surface. But every depth of the ocean is inhabited, in numbers that we are just beginning to appreciate...
"...Comparing the inhabitable terrain of the ocean to that of the land yields a startling statistic: The ocean represents something very close to 99 percent of the biosphere. Spread out as
... See morePeople do not want to believe it is true - Christian Åslund, The photographer capturing the vanishing of glaciers
What I’m trying to say is that instead of thinking of the Earth as just another planet and life as ubiquitous in the universe, the truth is that Earth is not just another planet. The Earth is a very rare oasis that has supported life for at least three and a half billion years, which allowed for life to change and adapt to different environments
... See moreGeorge Leonard on how mastery is nothing but a series of plateaus with brief spurts of progress:
“The most important lessons here — especially for young people — is that even if you’re shooting for the stars, you’re going to spend most of your time on a plateau. That’s where the deepest, most lasting learning takes place, so you might as well enjoy... See more
“The most important lessons here — especially for young people — is that even if you’re shooting for the stars, you’re going to spend most of your time on a plateau. That’s where the deepest, most lasting learning takes place, so you might as well enjoy... See more
Brain Food: A Series of Plateaus
We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique. - Sanjiv Gambhir, ‘Smart toilet’ monitors for signs of disease
Technology and Clever
Hard tech is the tools themselves. Soft tech is the knowledge and practices needed to effectively use tools. If you give a chimp a bow and arrow, he has the hard tech, but he doesn't have the soft tech. - What if it's 90% soft tech
The post-Copernican narrative decreased the value of our world, and we constructed a whole civilization based on the idea that we can use and abuse it. We built giant cities and industries by essentially consuming the entrails of our planet. Oil, gas, and coal—the insides of the planet—fed our technologies, and it all worked until it didn’t. - Marc
... See moreThe progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had.... See more
Jared Diamond • The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.