Quotes

I love to read and I come across different things that really hit home with me, so I am starting a regular post category so that I can share these quotes with others. Here are a few that I really enjoy:

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. (Professor Dumbledore, Harry Potter)

The behavior of the fully human being is always unpredictable, simply because it is free. (John Powell)

To tell you my thoughts is to locate myself in a category. To tell you about my feelings is to tell you about me. (John Powell)

To my ears a lot of religious exortation seems to be aimed about two to three miles above where most people really live. (John Powell)

A man who would be his sisters keeper must protect every woman first of all from himself, from everything that calls itself love... (George MacDonald)

Every father who loved his children, ought to make them independent of himself, that neither clog, nor poet, nor hindrance of any kind might hamper the true working of their consciences: then would the service they rendered their parents be precious indeed! Then, indeed, would love be lord, and neither self, nor fear of man, nor fear of fate be a law in their life! (George MacDonald)

He loves Thee too little
Who loves anything together with Thee
Which he loves not for Thy sake. (St. Augustine)

In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon... (Alexander Dumas)

Children always say 'do it again'.. God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we. ( G.K. Chesterton)

When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die. (Jim Elliot)

Be careful, lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon. (Nietzsche)

Human Brain

The human body is one of the most amazing things God ever built. I think He enjoys us learning about its design, because we keep discovering just how complex it really is. The article below that I have partially quoted from is about researchers trying to simulate the human brain. They are starting with a mouse brain (3,500 times less complex) and finally were able to do what it does in 6 times the time. And to do so, it is "leveraging IBM's technical resources to the limits". How great is our God!

From the article...

Their first goal is to build a "massively parallel cortical simulator" that re-creates the brain of a mouse, an organ 3,500 times less complex than a human brain (if you count each individual neuron and synapse). But even this is an undertaking of epic proportions. A mouse brain houses over 16 million neurons, with more than 128 billion synapses running between them. Even a partial simulation stretches the boundaries of modern hardware. No, we don't mean desktop hardware. We're talkin' supercomputers.

So far, the team has been able to fashion a kind of digital mouse brain that needs about 6 seconds to simulate 1 second of real thinking time. That's still a long way from a true mouse-size simulation, and it runs on a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 8,192 processors, four terabytes of memory, and 1 Gbps of bandwidth running to and from each chip. "Even a mouse-scale cortical simulation places an extremely heavy load on a supercomputer," Modha explains. "We're leveraging IBM's technological resources to the limit."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147452,00.asp