Weblog of Quotes and Rants

Some quotes I've been seeing around ever since there was such a thing as "President Trump"

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

-- Theodore Roosevelt

 And this

 Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

-- George Orwell, 1984

 "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

-- George Orwell, 1984

More?

The Secret Keeper is the second book by Kate Morton that I have read, the first being The Forgotten Garden.  They both involve weaving intertwined stories from the past and present into a sort of mystery, but with very human elements. I found them throughly enjoyable.

Some quotes:

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?” 

It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things? 

It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person's presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness. 

Recently NPR has been running a series of articles on lack of funding in biomedical science.  They are all quite interesting, if a bit depressing for someone currently in the field.

I've gathered a couple of the more interesting quotes and phrases I've come across in them.

His NIH grant ran out in 2012 and he hasn't been able to get it renewed.

"We're in survival mode right now," he says.

"The only people who can survive in this environment are people who are absolutely passionate about what they're doing and have the self-confidence and competitiveness to just go back again and again and just persistently apply for funding"

--Robert Waterland, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine 

...he could only get funding to do very predictable, unexciting research. When money gets tight, often only the most risk-averse ideas get funded

he has written a blizzard of grant proposals

According to a research paper published earlier this year, corner-cutting turned out to be the rule, rather than the exception ... because there is little incentive for scientists to take the time to go back and verify results from other labs. "You want to be the first one to show something," he says — not the one to verify or dispute a finding, "because you won't get a big prize for that."

--Stefano Bertuzzi, the executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology

 In the United States, more than 40,000 temporary employees known as postdoctoral research fellows are doing science at a bargain price. And most postdocs are being trained for jobs that don't actually exist. ... The entire system is built around the false idea that all these scientists-in-training are headed to university professorships.

The worst part: The boss spends a huge amount of time in his office writing grants because money is so tight these days even many top-flight ideas don't make the cut. Nearly 90 percent of grant proposals get rejected.

I am currently 5/6 through "Winter's Tale".  I can't decide if the reason I haven't finished it is that the version I've been listening to is difficult to use without going over my cellular data limit, or if it just got too weird. Too wordy. Too...I really don't know.  Normally I like weird and unusual, but this just keeps spreading out more and more and I no longer have a handle on the point of it.  Maybe I'll just watch the movie.

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From a young age, I used to collect quotes in a notebook.  Here are a few that have (so far) withstood the test of time.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition

 -- Timothy Leary

While I do not typically approve of man-bashing feminism, I make exceptions for humor

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors

-- William Ralph Inge

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including American.

-- Adlai Stevenson

Our insignificance is often the cause of our safety

--Aesop

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