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POPSQuotes : Douglas Adams
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. * As quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams
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POPSBrain drug abuse on the radar 
They restrict the damage that is caused by this kind of drug, in a similar way to the way they have restricted the damage caused by addictive drugs in the present, and the past. One dangerous side effect of 'stay alert' or 'thought accelerators' is that often they can be taken at the expense of the minimum required amount of sleep (which can vary from person to person.) Sleep is necessary for our brains to operate properly, and they've yet been able to find any cases where it can be compromised to any great extent. Sleep deprivation can lead to delusion and psychosis, poor concentration, and performance, and both short and long term memory loss. A bad combination. Where too many 'flashes of brilliance' are really just flashes. By the way. Who is going to test these drugs. Perhaps we'll have some smart monkeys that will unify Einstein's 'Grand Universal Theory' for us. I'm sure they'd find it much easier to be objective. (Douglas Adams told us what happens when you have smart mice
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POPS'Babelfish' to translate alien tongues could be built But Deacon argues that all languages arise from the common goal of describing the physical world. That limits the way a language could be constructed, he concludes. An alien race could use a strange medium like scents as their language, Deacon says, but the scents would still describe objects in their world. An odour that communicates "rock" or "tree" would be analogous to our words for the same objects. So there must be an underlying universal code that can be deciphered, as in mathematics.
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