Eugenics and neurophysiology

...The early literature of eugenics is filled with speculations, and pedigrees laboriously compiled and fudged, about the gene for Wanderlust traced trhough the family lines of naval captains, or the gene for temperament that makes some of us placid and others domineering. We must not be misled by how silly such ideas seem today; they represented orthodox genetics for a brief time, and had a major social impact in America.
---The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould (Ch. 5)

The oscillation correlating to consciousness, or to wakefulness, or whatever... far worse yet, the gene for consciousness, etc.

Attitudes in Computer Use

Just as Google has caused people to have a persistent feeling that pretty much anything can be looked up in a few seconds, habitual Mathematica use causes people to have a persistent feeling that just about anything can be computed, probably before breakfast.

Both are of course only partly true, but what matters is the change in attitude: If you assume you'll be able to find any fact you might need, you soon start reflexively googling things, perhaps even before clearly understanding the question you're trying to answer. And if you assume you'll be able to quickly do any math you need done, you start relying on math more and perhaps doing computations that, upon further reflection, didn't really need to be done.

--Theodore Gray, Co-founder, Wolfram Research

I should step back and figure out why I'm spending so much time at the computer