deas, in this view, are simply mental constructs that humans forge in order to cope with the world. Ideas do not exist in some ideal realm waiting to be discovered, any more than did the telegraph or the cotton gin. They are brought into existence to deal with the environment, and when the environment changes, ideas change as well.

According to Menand, the two greatest influences on pragmatism were the Civil War and Darwin's "Origin of Species."

The Civil War, erupting out of a long and bitter national debate over slavery and resulting in staggering losses of life and property, convinced many of the younger generation to reject any and all absolutes.

"The Civil War discredited the assumptions of the generation before it. The postwar reaction was against certitude and philosophical infallibility. There was a sense that the country had been too sure of itself."

For as long as anybody can remember, the newspaper has been the primary info-hub through which people interacted. Oh, people might have talked to the shoe-shine man or their broker about what they heard on the radio or saw on television, but nothing could beat the newspaper as a source for socially lubricating conversation. How many times have you heard a conversation start, "Didja see that article ..."?

By sniffing the bits of social currency an acquaintance had withdrawn from the pages of his daily and was trying to cash—say, a quip about that picture of an egg frying on a city street the paper published; or a comment about a movie review or comic strip; or an opinion about local government based on a piece by a political columnist—the sniffer could learn reams about his social contact.

1. Focus on what matters the most. ~

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee

2. Come out of “Me, Me, Me” shell ~

“Real living is living for others.” - Bruce Lee

3. Control your mental chatter ~

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” - Bruce Lee

4. Strive to live the life of values and transparency ~

“If you make an ass out of yourself, there will always be someone to ride you” - Bruce Lee

5. Set achievable goals ~

“As you think, so shall you become.” - Bruce Lee

6. Stay away from the influence of negativity ~

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” - Bruce Lee

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

." "The research consistently finds that, in fact, government efforts to correct market failures have little effect, or actually make things worse."

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"There is a tendency for people to say, 'If things are safer, then I will take more risk,' " he added. "It does not have to involve government interventions: Drugs are developed to reduce blood pressure, so people say, 'Okay, I can eat more, and it does not matter if I gain weight, because I can take this pill.