The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you're grinding and shaping.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

America has had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others.

That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.