I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

Bertrand Russell – Sceptical Essays.

Dzing! is a masterpiece. Dzing! smells of paper, and you can spend a good while trying to figure out whether it is packing cardboard, kraft wrapping paper, envelopes while you lick the glue, old books, or something else. I have no idea whether this was the objective, but I have few clues as to why it happened. Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good-quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.

Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Terin and Tania Sanchez

So often I see people make decisions in the market on what makes sense to them. It makes sense to buy stocks when the company insiders are buying. It makes sense to buy stocks that are making positive announcements. It makes sense to listen to what the President has to say about the company’s prospects. However, all that matters is what the market thinks of the company and whether the buyers are more motivated than the sellers. So often, the market does things that do not make any sense until we later learn of what motivated the market to do what it did. Remember, the market is forward looking …

Tyller Bollhorn

The idea of ideas is nice enough in principle; and ideas certainly have had their impact for good. But one of these days one of those nice ideas is likely to have the unintended consequence of destroying everything we know. Meanwhile, we cannot stop creating and exploring new ideas: the genie of ingenuity is out of the bottle.

Seth Lloyd – Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT – at Edge.com

My sense is that ‘professional’ investment strategists are more or less entertainers. They market to an up-scale crowd who have wealth and make up fun stories that make people feel happy and secure. The strategies are sound, more or less, but in the end it doesn’t matter. No one knows what the market is going to do. Not even super-computer algorithms taking into account every scrap of data available since the markets first opened. Trust dictates where you put your money, from treasuries to individual stocks to index funds. Everything else is just an upper class merry-go-round.

From a contribution at Techdirt.com

Yea, Though I Fly Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I Shall Fear No Evil. For I am at 50,000 Feet and Climbing. – Sign over SR71 Wing Ops

 It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed. – US.Air Force Manual

 The three most useless things in aviation are: Fuel in the bowser; Runway behind you; and Air above you. – Basic Flight Training Manual

You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3. -Paul F. Crickmore (SR71 test pilot)

 If the enemy is in range, so are you. – Author Unknown.

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword, obviously never encountered automatic weapons. – General MacArthur

If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up to him. – Borrowed from Infantry Journal

The only time you have too much fuel is when you’re on fire. – Author Unknown 

Any ship can be a minesweeper. Once. – Borrowed from a Naval Ops Manual

There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime. – Sign over Squadron Ops Desk at Davis-Montham AFB, AZ

 If you hear me yell; “Eject, Eject, Eject!”, the last two will be echos. If you stop to ask “Why?”, you’ll be talking to yourself. – Pre-flight Briefing from a Canadian F104 Pilot

You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal. – Lead-in Fighter Training Manual

Airspeed, altitude and brains. Two are always needed to successfully complete the flight. – Basic Flight Training Manual

What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots? If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies; if ATC screws up … the pilot dies. – Sign over Control Tower Door

Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it. – Emergency Checklist

 The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you. – Attributed to Max Stanley (Northrop test pilot)

 If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage it has to be a helicopter — and therefore, unsafe. – Fixed Wing Pilot

When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane,you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash. – Multi-Engine Training Manual

The most famous last words in military aviation are: “Did you feel that?” “What’s that noise?” and “Oh S…!” – Author Unknown

Never trade luck for skill. – Author Unknown

From a contribution by Anatoly Veltman at Daily Speculations

 “For most of us our greatest richness always has been and still remains in dreams. It may be in dreams about our future accomplishments, it may be in dreams about how wonderful it would be to meet that girl … it may be in dreams for our children, or dreams of the past recalled, or of revenge and future justice, or of religion and another world. We cannot hope for economic riches that are really greater than our dreams, but it is also true that economic riches can help our dreams…”

Walter Gutman – You Only Have to Get Rich Once (1949).

… decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

From The Rise of the New Groupthink by Susan Cain

 Misconception: Most of what Americans spend their money on is made in China.

Fact: Just 2.7% of personal consumption expenditures go to Chinese-made goods and services. 88.5% of U.S. consumer spending is on American-made goods and services. The Bureau of Labour Statistics closely tracks how an average American spends their money in an annual report called the Consumer Expenditure Survey. In 2010, the average American spent 34% of their income on housing, 13% on food, 11% on insurance and pensions, 7% on health care, and 2% on education. Those categories alone make up nearly 70% of total spending, and are comprised almost entirely of American-made goods and services (only 7% of food is imported, according to the USDA). Even when looking at physical goods alone, Chinese imports still account for just 6.4% of nondurable goods and 12% of durable goods.

 Misconception: The U.S. owes most of its debt to China.

Fact: China owns only 7.8% of U.S. government debt outstanding. As at August last year, China owned $1.14tr of U.S. Treasuries. Government debt stood at $14.6tr that month. That’s 7.8%. The largest holder of U.S. debt is the federal government itself. The rest of America’s debt is owned by state and local governments ($700bn), private domestic investors ($3.1tr), and other non-Chinese foreign investors ($3.5tr). Of all Treasury debt held by foreigners, however, China is indeed the largest owner ($1.14 trillion), followed by Japan ($937 billion) and the U.K. ($397 billion).

Misconception: The U.S. gets most of its oil from the Middle East.

Fact: Just 9.2% of oil consumed in the U.S. comes from the Middle East. According the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. consumes 19.2m barrels of petroleum products per day. Of that amount, 49% is produced domestically. The rest is imported. Only a small fraction comes from the Middle East, and that fraction has been declining in recent years. The U.S. imports more than twice as much petroleum from Canada and Mexico than it does from the Middle East. Add in the share produced domestically, and the majority of petroleum consumed in the U.S. comes from North America.

From an article by Morgan Housel at the Motley Fool