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.
Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.
There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.
There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.
Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.
It is baffling, I must say, that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything - until, that is, it comes to climate science.
We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.
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