1563-32
We tend to assume that the way to get more time is to speed up. But speeding up can actually slow us down. Anyone who has ever rushed out of the house only to realize that their keys and wallet are sitting on the kitchen table knows this only too well. And it's not just our efficiency that is reduced. The quality of the experience suffers too, as we become less aware or 'mindful.'Have you ever eaten an entire meal without tasting any of it? Hurrying up doesn't just give us less time, it can also steal the pleasure and benefit from the time that we do have. For many of us, hurrying is a way of life. Some of us enjoy the thrill that it gives us while others are driven crazy by the constant pressure and feel that their lives are speeding up to an unacceptable degree. Either way, there are almost certainly areas of our life that could be enhanced by a little go-slow behavior.

1713-40
Time spent on on-line interaction with members of one's own, preselected community leaves less time available for actual encounters with a wide variety of people. If physicists, for example, were to concentrate on exchanging email and electronic preprints with other physicists around the world working in the same specialized subject area, they would likely devote less time, and be less receptive to new ways of looking at the world. Facilitating the voluntary construction of highly homogeneous social networks of scientific communication therefore allows individuals to filter the potentially overwhelming flow of information. But the result may be the tendency to overfilter it, thus eliminating the diversity of the knowledge circulating and diminishing the frequency of radically new ideas. In this regard, even a journey through the stacks of a real library can be more fruitful than a trip through today's distributed virtual archives, because it seems difficult to use the available "search engines" to emulate efficiently the mixture of predictable and surprising discoveries that typically result from a physical shelf-search of an extensive library collection.

1763-31
Interest in extremely long periods of time sets geology and astronomy apart from other sciences. Geologists think in terms of billions of years for the age of Earth and its oldest rocks ― numbers that, like the national debt, are not easily comprehended. Nevertheless, the time scales of geological activity are important for environmental geologists because they provide a way to measure human impacts on the natural world. For example, we would like to know the rate of natural soil formation from solid rock to determine whether topsoil erosion from agriculture is too great. Likewise, understanding how climate has changed over millions of years is vital to properly assess current global warming trends. Clues to past environmental change are well preserved in many different kinds of rocks.