Yquotes.com

 

Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram.second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram.second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram.second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million. I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat.
--
Jeff's view on science and scientists (Amsterdam, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, ISBN 0-444-52133-X, pbk.), Ch. 5: "The tragic matter" (p. 43)

 

Gottfried Schatz

» Gottfried Schatz - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

And they ask me, "Well, is it alright if we let the drug-sniffing dog walk along the outside of the plane?" I said, "That's fine," and the dog walks back and forth a few times, and the cop says, "Well, the dog gave us the signal there are drugs on the plane," and I was like, "...No, he didn't! That dog didn't do anything, I was starting straight at him! He didn't wink, blink, woof, or paw. What's his signal, a blank stare? [Mimes a blank stare] That's all he did!" And the cop says, "Well, the dog gave us the signal there are drugs on the plane," And I said, "Well I said there are no drugs on the plane. Who are you going to believe, me or...Ah, f**k it, whatever." It takes them an hour and a half to search this plane, and I'm standing there going, "Oh, come on!" And of course there are no drugs on the plane, and I think that's it, and then the cop goes, "Now that dog needs to sniff that bag you have with you," and I was like, [Scooby Doo voice] "Ruh Roh!" They found 7/8 of a gram of marijuana in my bag. I consider myself OUT of marijuana when I have 7/8 of a gram. That's no weed.

 

Ron White

 

Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ...

 

Charles Stross

 

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

 

Robert Cecil

 

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

 

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil

 

The foot, the pound, and the pint are all close to the size of many things used in daily life. In contrast, the metre, the kilogram, and the litre are all rather large, and the centimetre, the gram, and the millilitre rather small, for many practical uses.

 

Thomas Flanagan