Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Because of human pollution and overpopulation, the birth of a human being, like the death of a tree, is, to planet earth, a tragedy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“It is ironic that as we are becoming a globally connected population of over 7 billion people, that we are rapidly approaching the disconnection phase that environmental collapse will bring.”
― Steven Magee

“Making love instead of war is likely to lead to an even bigger population, which is likely to lead to wars.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“[Europeans lived] in dense, settled populations- cities- where human & animal waste breeds vermin, like mice and rats and roaches. Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though, didn't live in dense settlements, and even those who lived in villages tended to move with the seasons, taking apart their towns and rebuilding them somewhere else. They didn't accumulate filth, and they didn't live crowds. They suffered from very few infectious diseases.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“COVID-19 is dividing the population into those with robust immune systems and those that have immune dysfunction.”
― Steven Magee

“We must consider what we mean when we say that the spiking activity of a neuron 'encodes' information. We normally think of a code as something that conveys information from a sender to a recipient, and this requires that the recipient 'understands' the code. But the spiking activity of every neuron seems to encode information in a slightly different way, a way that depends on that neuron's intrinsic properties. So what sense can a recipient make of the combined input from many neurons that all use different codes? It seems that what matters must be the 'population code' - not the code that is used by single cells, but the average or aggregate signal from a population of neurons.
In a now classic paper, Shadlen and Newsome considered how information is communicated among neurons of the cortex - neurons that typically receive between 3,000 and 10,000 synaptic inputs.They argued that, although some neural structures in the brain may convey information in the timing of successive spikes, when many inputs converge on a neuron the information present in the precise timing of spikes is irretrievably lost, and only the information present in the average input rate can be used. They concluded that 'the search for information in temporal patterns, synchrony and specially labeled spikes is unlikely to succeed' and that 'the fundamental signaling units of cortext may be pools on the order of 100 neurons in size.' The phasic firing of vasopressin cells is an extreme demonstration of the implausibility of spike patterning as a way of encoding usable information, but the key message - that the only behaviorally relevant information is that which is collectively encoded by the aggregate activity of a population - may be generally true.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“You might find no one. Love is one in a trillion. We're eight billion.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We urgently need to either start increasing the size of our planet, or stop increasing the size of our population.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You can measure the stupidity level of a certain population by how fast a rumour spreads through its people.”
― Omar Cherif

“The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Interstellar transport for surplus people presents an musing perspective. Since the ships would take generations to reach most stars, the only people who could be transported would be those willing to exercise strict birth control. Population explosions on space ships would be disastrous. Thus we would have to export our responsible people, leaving the irresponsible at home on Earth to breed.”
― Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

“The corporate controlled government is pursuing policies that will increase the profits of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries at the expense of the health and safety of the mass population.”
― Steven Magee

“The corporate controlled military represents great danger to the health and safety of their own mass population.”
― Steven Magee

“It is a sad state of affairs that the Russians are far ahead of the USA in the science of the long term biological effects of electromagnetic radiation on a global population of over seven billion people.”
― Steven Magee

“The nice thing about government radiation poisoning of the global population is that it affects corrupt government officials just as much as the masses.”
― Steven Magee

“2020 will bring clarity to the global population of planet Earth.”
― Steven Magee

“The corporate government agenda is to maim the population, as that is how you make profits.”
― Steven Magee

“The global population is fighting a losing battle with man-made environmental radiation.”
― Steven Magee

“Education of the global population through quotations.”
― Steven Magee

“The bulk of the population is expected to eventually get COVID-19.”
― Steven Magee

“What we have seen does not sit comfortably with conventional views of the brain. Electrophysiology has been a powerful tool and its returns have permeated our thinking about how the brain works, but the resulting understanding is cursed by overinterpretation. Because spike activity appears to have so much capacity for encoding information, we are tempted to think it in fact conveys a huge volume of information. When we find, in the spike activity of some neuron or another, correlation between some facet and some particular external events, it is tempting to think this is the message the cell is conveying.
A message is only a message if it can be understood by its recipient. Neurons can't decipher long and complex sentences. They have a short attention span, are easily distracted, and much of the time they aren't even listening. A neuron that is quiet at a particular time is likely also to be less sensitive to an input; a cell that is very active might be saturated; and a cell recently activated might be refractory to further activation.
Spike activity is not the output of any neuron, only one of several means by which some of its chemical signals are generated. These signals are generated unreliably and erratically and are recognized imperfectly by their targets. The message carried by the spike activity of a vasopressin cell makes no sense when considered alone. The important signal is generated by a cacophony of noisy and messy cells , and the miracle that demands to be recognized is that this population response is indeed clean, refined and fit for purpose.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“There are many forms of electromagnetic radiation that should never have been deployed on a global population.”
― Steven Magee

“The USA has an established history of developing and deploying biologically toxic technologies on a global population.”
― Steven Magee

“Kindness is researching the biological harm of environmental radiation on a global population of over seven billion people.”
― Steven Magee

“The government is in the business of misinformation of the masses.”
― Steven Magee

“Keynes concluded that citizens both rich and poor would have to be led gradually out of capitalism, a base and repugnant system of morals. His fellow liberals in the 1920s debated the morality and efficacy of capitalism, as well as the correctness of the view that, as one Liberal politician put it, “man’s primary concern is to satisfy in ever ampler degree his physical needs.â€� For Keynes, this might be human nature, but his entanglement with Bateson and Pearson had immersed him in the notion that biological nature was malleable.
Greed would be driven out not just by education but by the eugenic cultivation of “special talents.â€� It would be replaced by “some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow.â€� In the meantime, however, Keynes conceded capitalism’s efficacy. In order to improve productivity to the point where everyone’s needs could be easily satisfied, the coming century still demanded devotion to the god of greed. The goal of the next hundred years of capitalism would be its own extirpation.”
― David Roth Singerman

“During COVID-19, smart people stayed home and waited for ‘Herd Immunityâ€� to establish in the general population.”
― Steven Magee

“The California forest fires may lead to increased disease rates in their population.”
― Steven Magee

“The current anticrime debate takes place within a reified mathematical realm - a strategy reminiscent of Malthus's notion of the geometrical increase in population and the arithmetical increase in food sources, thus the inevitability of poverty and the means of suppressing it: war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.”
― Wahneema Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today

“For all of its technological prowess, our species is still motivated by ancient animal instincts, including the drive to expand and multiply to the limits of the possible.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink