Of course, genuine knowledge must ultimately be based upon fact, or else it isn't genuine. Facts are the links holding together the picture of reality. But facts by themselves, without some kind of theory, don't amount to anything worth having. They are the untold clattery mountains of unassembled lego sets that, even when the last piece is pressed into place, will only ever approximate the total gravity of the thing assembled. 

The essential point of what I'm saying is that we need to start treating knowledge - genuine knowledge - as the natural outgrowth of living systems, not just a somewhat accidental repository for something called 'data', the content (or allegedly universal "meaning") of which can be manipulated with equal facility by man or machine.

Roscoe plays a cover

Thoughts crystallize (if they really are physical things) into their peculiar geometry, analogous to phase changes and sudden precipitations from solution of a solid form. 

The flux of fresh impulses redissolves them, only for a new configuration to reemerge. Subsequent patterns contain permutations, simple or complex, of previous states embedded within them. A certain "stickiness" prevails: some notions become more deeply embedded than others.  

It is just possible then, that, like snowflakes, no two thoughts are exactly alike. 

(Note that the crystal growth of a snowflake is a route to crystallization distinct from, e.g., gas deposition or precipitation from solution).

Only the lonely

Only the truly ignorant and the truly mad believe they truly understand.

"Data" is not knowledge: it is neither conoscere (noscere, connaître, kennen...) nor sapere (scire, savoir, wissen...). 

The English language lacks this distinction. 

Knowledge in whatever form requires a knower to be known, the full reality of which is a fact in turn; an event that may itself become known by the knowers, so that "they know that I know that I don't know" does in fact become a distinct possibility. 

(This is certainly a curious result).

If one wishes to make a country "great", one presumably must first possess an adequate idea of greatness. 

For a start, we could admit that no aspect of buying, selling, or owning a motorized vehicle is truly "great", and that sending living beings into space lacks any practical utility. 

A team of alien astrobiologists someday probing our derelict world might easily conclude, observing the empty husks of our computer-enhanced vehicles, that they were really a nascent form of semi-autonomous life that briefly flourished, dominated, then destroyed what remained of the Earth's delicate balance of life along with their diseased and thoroughly anesthetized, zombie-like inhabitants.

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And then what will they do with their billions, once the radioactive miasma has settled on a charred and mutilated planet where nothing grows, when all simply rots where it stands or crumbles away into dust?

What would being "rich" actually mean?