Trobar parella en ciclisme és tan difícil o més que trobar parella a la vida, per això es veuen tants ciclistes sols rodant per la carretera, més que individus a peu. 

Joan Miquel Oliver (Després d'Antònia Font.

Vindran mesos amb erra, El Núvol)

Pues es una oveja espantosa como las demás; pero, como es Dolly, te hace más ilusión.

Anna Veiga dixit (Aunque se quisiera,  es imposible

clonar a la misma persona, El País Semanal)

The crucial difference, though, is that there are vaccines for biological weapons, while there are no vaccines for explosives.

[...] for every terrorist trying to engineer a biological weapon there are a thousand researchers working on a cure.

 

The ghost map [251/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

If this scenario come to pass, the pandemic threat will ultimately be defeated by a different kind of map - not maps of lives and deaths on a city street, or bird flu outbreaks, but maps of nucleotides wrapped in a double helix. Our hability to analyze the genetic composition of any life-form has made astonishing progress over the past ten years, but in many ways we are at the very beginning of the genomic revolution.

The ghost map [249/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

This is the world that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible: a planet of cities.

The ghost map [234/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Snow himself was a kind of a one-man coffeehouse: one of the primary reasons he was able to cut through the fog of miasma was his multidisciplinary approach, as a practicing physician, mapmaker, inventor, chemist, demographer, and medical detective.

The ghost map [226/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

All the local knowledge that so often remains trapped in the minds of the neighborhood residents can now be translated into map form and shared with the rest of the world. As in 1854, the amateurs are producing the most interesting work, precisely because they most textured, granular experience of their community. [...] The may map the intangibles.

The ghost map [219-220/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

The technology has advanced dramatically, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: that there is something profoundly enlightening about seeing these patterns of life and death laid out in cartographic form. The bird's-eye view remains as essential as ti was back in 1854. When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight agains the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

The ghost map [219/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

If Snow and Whitehead's Broad Street investigation showed that urban intelligence could come to understand a massive health crisis, Bazalgette's sewers proved that you could actually do something about it.

[...]

The great killer of the nineteenth-century metropolis had been tamed by a combination of science, medicine, and engineering.

The ghost map [207,215/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

"Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending".

George Eliot

The ghost map [167/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and Vibrio cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. The decision to remove the handle was not based on meteorological charts or social prejudice or watered-down medieval humorology; it was based on a methodological survey of the actual social patterns of the epidemic, confirming predictions put forward by an underlying theory of the disease's effect on the human body. It was based on information that the city's own organization had made visible. For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.

The ghost map [162-163/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

History has its epic thresholds where the world is transformed in a matter of minutes.

The ghost map [162/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Miasma was the intellectual equivalent of a contagious disease; it had spread through the intelligentsia with an alarming infection rate.

The ghost map [144/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

What he needed now were aberrations, deviations from the norm. Pockets of life where you would expect death, pockets of death where you would expect life.

The ghost map [140/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] seeing the patterns more clearly means progress, in the long run at least.

The ghost map [135/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] methane and putrescine and cadaverine are the smoke. Microbes are the fire.

[...] They mistook the smoke for the fire.

The ghost map [130-131/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

All of which begs the central question: Why was the miasma theory so persuasive? Why did so many brilliant minds cling to it, despite the mounting evidence that suggested it false? This kind of question leads one to a kind of mirror-image version of intellectual history: not the history of breakthroughs and eureka moments, but instead the history of canards and false leads, the history of being wrong. Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work.

The ghost map [126/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

The Victorians were literally flushing money down the toilet.

The ghost map [116/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

"Whilst pestilence slays its thousands, fear slays its tens of thousands".

The ghost map [84/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, an abomination against the very origins of life on earth.

The ghost map [38/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] it's been one long Age of Bacteria on this planet since the days of the primordial soup. The rest of us are mere afterthoughts.

The ghost map [36/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Once you began emitting rice-water stools, odds were you'd be dead in a matter of hours.

The ghost map [34/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eigh hours.

The ghost map [32-33/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

The ghost map [14/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[in medieval times] the collecting of human excrements was a venerable occupation.

The ghost map [8/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

But if the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be stinguished within a matter of years.

The ghost map [7/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Waste recycling turns out to be a hallmark of almost all complex systems [...]

The ghost map [6/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)