If I could remember the names of all these particles I'd be a botanist.

Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn’t matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn’t fully understand (e.g. Hegel).

In economics, the tragedy of the commons is the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group’s long-term best interests.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can’t program state machines.

What I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.

Life with weed

A life of feeling silly and relaxed forever is one that I just narrowly avoided.

I am firmly convinced that Spain is the strongest country of the world. Century after century trying to destroy herself and still no success.

Failure is not opposite of success but a stepping stone to it.

The other day I was reading a book and I came across a little anecdote. It was about the great Athenian general Themistocles. Before the battle of Salamis, he was locked in a vigorous debate with a Spartan general about potential strategies for defeating the Persians.

Themistocles was clearly in the minority with his views (but which ultimately turned out to be right and saved Western Civilization). He continued to interrupt and contradict the other generals. Finally, the Spartan general threatened to strike Themistocles if he didn’t shut up and stop. “Strike!” Themistocles shouted back, “But listen!”

Every single philosopher in the history of humanity tells you this: Don’t worry about the things you can’t control. And only focus on things you do control. That’s the key to happiness.

U Zrenjaninu, u jednoj fabrici, žene su nosile crvenu traku u vreme menstrualnog ciklusa i tih dana bile plaćene 75% od plate, jer su bile manje produktivne.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Postcolonialist black Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1961 book Wretched of the Earth writes about the volatile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and the conditions of decolonization. In it, he sharply warns the colonized against reproducing and maintaining the oppressive systems of colonization by replacing those at top by those previously at the bottom after a successful revolution.

The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?

Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790

There is a new understanding that tantrums, oppositionalism, [and] negativism are not a sign that the child is terrible or that the child’s age is terrible. It’s a sign that the ability of the child to think through a situation has collapsed because of overwhelming feelings of fear and frustration that dysregulates their emotional composure. There is more of an awareness that when we say the “terrible twos” we’re really talking about the adult experience rather than the child’s.

Employers do not normally appoint themselves arbiters of appropriate behavior outside the workplace.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Poslednja veštica u Evropi je spaljena pod Karađorđom.

The Code of Hammurabi decreed that bartenders who watered down beer would be executed.