The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
Interpretation
The most accurate way to understand a cat is through direct observation of another cat.
This quote by Norbert Wiener emphasizes the idea that the best way to understand the nature and behavior of a creature, such as a cat, is through the direct observation of similar entities. It suggests that models and representations can only be as good as the subjects they attempt to emulate, highlighting the importance of practical experience in understanding complex systems.
In practice
In a discussion about animal behavior, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of studying animals in their natural context.
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. _x000D_ A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
Almost any questions can be answered,cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that's he way to answer them - not by arguments around a table
Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.
One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
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