Quotes from David Darling

It is one of the fundamental mysteries of nature, this dichotomy between what is given and what we, with our minds, create. We owe our very existence as a species to our ability to delineate patterns. We can even see patterns where none exist – the faces in a sun-lit curtain, the Greek heroes and monsters among the stars. What else might the human mind be recognizing that is not really there? And what, in any case, do we mean by "real"?

Knowing too much about a subject can make us overly cautious. Having a lot of conventional wisdom may make us doubt our own hunches and intuition because we're more likely to think that any seemingly good ideas that pop into our heads are wrong if they don't square with what we've previously learned.

You're more likely to die from a falling coconut than from a shark attack, and more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes and, over a lifetime, spends twenty-five years sleeping. About 11 percent of the population are left-handed. The most typical human face on Earth is that of a 28-year-old Chinese man.

The expression 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics' was popularised by Mark Twain and attributed by him, in his autobiography, to the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Statistics can easily fool us if used incorrectly, or if we fail to take in the whole picture of what's going on. The situation is even worse when data are presented in a way that's deliberately misleading – as often happens in advertising and politics. Without resorting to outright lies, there are plenty of ways to distort data to create a false impression.

Truth and beauty are closely related but not the same. You're never sure that you have the truth. All you're doing is striving towards better and better truths and the light that guides you is beauty.

There's evidence, too, that being good at maths is tied to a more general capacity to spot hidden structures in data. This could explain why it's common to find people who excel at both maths and music, and why training at chess can help improve maths scores – both music and chess have complex data structures at their heart.