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Rule #1 Exercise boosts brain power. • Our brains were built for walking—12 miles a day! • To improve your thinking skills, move. • Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting. • Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60 percent.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

With experiments reproduced all over the world, enrolling thousands of people, often studied for decades, the results are clear. Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in leisure-time physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise lowers your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

“Back in college, a friend told me she had been raped.” “Jesus.” “Yeah. And I did what I thought a good friend should do. I lost my shit and demanded she go to the police so they could destroy the guy.” “Bet that ended well.” “It was the last time she spoke to me.”

— Digital divide by K. B. Spangler

“I go out of my way to take the ‘fist’ out of ‘pacifist’.”

— Digital divide by K. B. Spangler

Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. —You (also, Nikola Tesla)

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

if we were to divide your cells into “human” and “bacteria” piles, and then try to deduce what you are based on those raw counts alone, we wouldn’t think you’re human. We’d think you’re a group of different bacteria that have figured out how to walk around and chat other groups of bacteria up, and in the course of that contracted a minor infection of humanity.

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

the red grapefruit you’re familiar with didn’t exist before government-sponsored radiation experiments performed the 1950s.

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

1953 CE (landfill mining, in which it was realized that landfill sites capped before recycling became prevalent would have a higher concentration of aluminum—thanks to discarded aluminum cans—than actual aluminum mines)

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary? —You (also, J. M. Barrie)

— How to Invent Everything by Ryan North

Her new home was deception incarnate. It trapped the unwary into thinking it was a darling Craftsman revival, not a slumbering leviathan which awoke to demand sacrifices of tax returns and early withdrawals from pension plans.

— Digital divide by K. B. Spangler

We should be teaching them what life was really like in the past so that they do not mistakenly think that no progress has been made.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

If something is urgent and important, it should be measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Factfulness is … recognizing when a decision feels urgent and remembering that it rarely is.

— Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund