Revelation

"Did you ever talk about a movie with someone who read the book? They're always so condescending, like "oh the book was much better than the movie." I say "Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie was this: no reading. It only took two hours, and then I took a nap." […] Every now and then I'll read a book and be so proud of myself that I'll try to squeeze it into conversations. People say "Hey Jim, how are you doing?" and I'll say "I read a book that was two-hundred and fifty pages!" and they'll say "that's great, what was it about?" I say "I have no idea. It took me two years to read it!"—Jim Gaffigan (link)

"Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy."—Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (link)

"One of the best established facts in sleep regulation in mammals is that slow-wave activity increases in proportion to the duration of prior wakefulness and progressively decreases during sleep. […] Is such slow-wave activity a mere epiphenomenon, or does it have some functional significance? According to the [synaptic homeostasis] hypothesis, slow waves occurring in the cortex during sleep would actively promote a generalized depression or downscaling of synapses. In this way, the total synaptic weight to neurons would progressively return to a baseline level, thus effecting a kind of synaptic homeostasis. […] A need to rescale synaptic weight after learning, in order to preserve a constant level of synaptic input without obliterating memory traces, confer stability to neuronal firing, and prevent runaway potentiation or depression, has long been recognized in computational models of synaptic plasticity. […] Provided there is a threshold below which synapses become ineffective or silent, synapses contributing to the noise, being on average weaker than those contributing to the signal, would cease to interfere in the execution, and the [signal-to-noise ratio] would increase."—Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli (link) via RadioLab (31:20)