Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.

There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded had the internal combustion engine had the technology and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years.

When you are studying jazz the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

Well the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer so basically I'm a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with - since 1995 - is Joan Lader who also studied with Gavert.

I kind of fell backwards into acting. I was studying to be a high school teacher. I look now and I understand completely or actually barely how much work it is to be a teacher. It's an incredible amount of work.

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Study how water flows in a valley stream smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains rivers plants and trees - should be your teacher.

The only consistent hobby I've had is studying Spanish and French because of some delusion of grandeur to work around the world. I love sports but usually I'm looking for the next job.

As an example one of the schools I have been studying is too small to compete effectively in most sports but participates with vigor each year in the state music contests.

The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

I don't necessarily love the sports per se I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless.

No one has done a study on this as far as I can tell but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn't create that - society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about about society being more open and I think that's good.

No doubt it is true that science cannot study God but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.