“
I love running. I’m not into marathons, but I am into avoiding problems at an accelerated rate.
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Jarod Kintz (At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.)
“
Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
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Douglas Coupland (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture)
“
All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death
“Like gasoline?” – Nick
“Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Invincible (Chronicles of Nick, #2))
“
Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.
The tears threaten to return, so I willfully banish all thoughts from my head and take a few more deep breaths. I'm suddenly dizzy from the panic attack I've just suffered, and I close my eyes, resting my head against the warm leather of my steering wheel. Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.
”
”
Jonathan Tropper (The Book of Joe)
“
Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, I've never asked. But I believe I've heard of the way time can suddenly accelerate on people when they're going through even the most youthful and highly esteemed stages of life. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one, changing the relationship between them, making the eyes larger, the expression sadder, the mouth more final, leaving great creases in the forehead. But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with the same sort of interest I might have taken in the reading of a book.
”
”
Marguerite Duras (The Lover)
“
For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
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Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
“
Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (The Tenth Circle)
“
Loneliness doesn’t exist on any single plane of consciousness. It’s generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you’re reminded of what this baby’s carrying under the hood.
”
”
Jonathan Tropper (The Book of Joe)
“
(Novelists, when their characters drive cars, never feel compelled to describe precisely what the physical actions are of hands, feet, eyes, knees, elbows. Yet many of these same novelists, when their characters copulate, get into such detailed physical description you’d think they were writing an exercise book. We all know the interrelation between the right ankle and the accelerator when driving a car, and we needn’t be told.
”
”
Donald E. Westlake (Dancing Aztecs)
“
The Ego is ignorant towards both sigils and symbols, but they both give the Ego a flow of knowledge from themselves. All knowledge of ideas, gained by means of sigils, should be re-clothed in pure symbolism to designate and stimulate its own wisdom. Symbolism is also a means of accelerating and exhausting by living a belief instead of repressing it by choice rather than of necessity, which serves its own time. All begging, self-punishment, sacrifice, etc., is but an attempt to escape the law of reaction or Karma, and by symbolising the reading of these laws, they hope to take that power from nature.
”
”
Austin Osman Spare (Book of Pleasure in Plain English)
“
Never be rigid on an action plan that always fails, freezes and frustrates. Perhaps what you need is a change of your methods you run with the peak velocity!
”
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Israelmore Ayivor (The Great Hand Book of Quotes)
“
However, as you’ll learn in this book, when you trust that the Universe has your best intentions in mind, you can unravel yourself from that which you do not want.
”
”
Ryuu Shinohara (Accelerated Manifesting: 7 Hidden Secrets to Supercharge Your Reality, Rapidly Shift Your Identity, and Speed Up the Manifestation of Your Desires (Law of Attraction Book 5))
“
Flying kisses are ones that make your insides feel like you're accelerating to reach altitude, and the moment you begin to soar, your chest can fill with air again, and your body floats free. I never had a flying kiss and always thought Mum was talking romantic nonsense." He took a deep breath, looked back at his hands, and smiled. "Apparently, it wasn't nonsense.
”
”
April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
“
Master: It is Love. Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. Not: I love you if, or I love myself if. There is no if. There is no justification. There is no explanation. It is just to love. Love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your enemies. This is simple, common sense, but we cannot love others until we love ourselves. That is why we must begin with self-love.
”
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Miguel Ruiz (The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship (A Toltec Wisdom Book))
“
Not surprisingly, the experience set my mind whirring. And not surprisingly, my meetings with Bojia soon led me to start asking myself the same questions I was asking him to explore: What is my value set and where did it come from? How do I think the Machine works today? And what have I learned about how different peoples and cultures are being impacted by the Machine and responding to it? That’s what I started doing—in the pause—and the rest of this book is my answer.
”
”
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.
”
”
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
This ain’t no cloud, folks! And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source “the cloud,” this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it “the supernova”—a computational supernova. The
”
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.” Of course, that doesn’t mean having no opinion. Rather, it means having no limits on your curiosity or the different disciplines you might draw on to appreciate how the Machine works. Wells calls this approach—which I will employ in this book—being “radically inclusive.” It involves bringing into your analysis as many relevant people, processes, disciplines, organizations, and technologies as possible—factors that are often kept separate or excluded altogether. For instance, the only way you will understand the changing nature of geopolitics today is if you meld what is happening in computing with what is happening in telecommunications with what is happening in the environment with what is happening in globalization with what is happening in demographics. There is no other way today to develop a fully rounded picture.
”
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Breakthroughs in information and communications technology are leading to forms of dematerialization unimaginable just a decade ago. Consider smartphones. They require more energy to manufacture and operate than older cell phones. But by obviating the need for separate, physical newspapers, books, magazines, cameras, watches, alarm clocks, GPS systems, maps, letters, calendars, address books, and stereos, they will likely significantly reduce humanity’s use of energy and materials over the next century. Such examples suggest that holding technological progress back could do far more environmental damage than accelerating it.
”
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Michael Shellenberger
“
He thought back but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator, thought away. From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books and papers and stories and sorrows: let it sink into the ocean. She had her wallet and her sleeping bag and her running shoes and her van; and she drove as if this were the point from which the rest of her life might begin.
”
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Andrea Barrett (Servants of the Map: Stories)
“
The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. “This dynamic country,” he wrote, “subjects its inhabitants to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a generation than is normally
the case with other great nations.”
Such trends have only accelerated since Erikson made that observation in 1950. The effects of rapid social and economic shifts on the parenting environment are too well known to need detailing here. The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult.
The result being successive generations of children in alienation, drug use and violence — what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.” Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.”
These patterns characterize not only the earlyyears of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need — stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories — is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.
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Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
Auctions are also to be avoided, both because you will be competing against a larger number of potential buyers and because you will be making decisions in an accelerated time frame, which makes it difficult to do your due diligence. When it’s a good time to buy there will be an abundance of discounted properties to be found, so you won’t need to rely on auctions.
”
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Manny Khoshbin (Manny Khoshbin's Contrarian PlayBook)
“
There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.
”
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Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties: A Book)
“
It’s important to mention that it’s not wise to always rely on motivation or inspiration. Those require you to be in a positive state of mind, which isn’t always possible. It also puts you in a mindset where you have a prerequisite to learning and focusing. You need to feel inspired, you need to feel motivated, or you need to be in the right state of mind. This, we all know, definitely isn’t always possible.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
“
In his book The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed to the body of evidence showing that even “students who receive honors grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.
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Scott H. Young (Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career)
“
I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
“
When you attempt to multi-task, your focus, attention, and energy is spent switching between your tasks and re-orienting yourself to exactly where you were before you switched. It’s like swimming against the current. Every time you take a stroke, you might only get one quarter of a stroke forward because of the current, and sometimes you might even go backwards despite your best efforts. It’s an inefficient use of your time that ends up in your becoming well-versed in the beginning stages of many tasks, but never quite seeing them to completion. The better approach is to be willfully ignorant of everything else you need to do, while giving full attention to one task at a time. In a sense, a lumberjack can only chop the tree in front of him or her, and can’t do anything with a bunch of half-chopped trees. Chopping the tree in front of you will allow you to make better progress on everything more than actively working on it while multi-tasking.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
“
The full extent of Samuel’s powers had yet to be determined because he was in a Claire Vinson daze for much of his rapid acceleration to adulthood. The combination’s were endless as his father Maxwell had emerged from the union of Daniel and Nicole – vampire and protector – with a full cycle of facades, including wolf, hippopotamus, Orca killer whale and Bottlenose dolphin. But he also had the capability of copying anything he could see and he was a master of battle strategy.
”
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Phil Wohl (Book of Gabriel (Blood Shadow, #6))
“
There’s a common misconception that Silicon Valley is the accelerator of the world. The real story is that the world keeps getting faster—Silicon Valley is just the first place to figure out how to keep pace. While Silicon Valley certainly has many key networks and resources that make it easier to apply the techniques we’re going to lay out for you, blitzscaling is made up of basic principles that do not depend on geography. We’re going to show you examples from overlooked parts of the United States, such as Detroit (Rocket Mortgage) and Connecticut (Priceline), as well as from international companies, such as WeChat and Spotify. In the process you’ll see how the lessons of blitzscaling can be adapted to help build great companies in nearly any ecosystem, albeit with differing degrees of difficulty. That’s the mission of this book. We want to share the secret weapon that has allowed Silicon Valley to punch so much (more than a hundred times) above its population index so that those lessons can be applied far beyond the sixty-mile stretch between the Golden Gate Bridge and San Jose. It is sorely needed.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
I nowadays have the feeling that not only are most bookmen are eccentrics, but even the act they support--reading--is itself an eccentricity now, if a mild one. Interrupted narrative has become a natural thing. One could argue that Dickens and the other popular, serially published nineteenth-century novelists started this, and the television commercial made interruption come to seem normal. But the silicon chip has accelerated the process of interruption beyond all reckoning: iPods, Blackberries, laptops all break narrative into shorter and shorter sequences.
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Larry McMurtry (Books)
“
Some Populists also believed that national salvation could be hastened by eating black bread, dressing up as peasants, living among peasants and adopting the traditions of the peasant commune. In fact, the ancient modes of rural life were already disintegrating, and the peasants, disturbed by this bizarre behavior of their social superiors, were often hostile toward the Populists. Rather than rise up, they either responded with indifference or reported the young revolutionaries to the police. Disappointed, some Populists turned to violence as a means of accelerating the revolution.
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Daniel Kalder (The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy)
“
It is the core argument of this book that these simultaneous accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law together constitute the “age of accelerations,” in which we now find ourselves. These are the central gears driving the Machine today. These three accelerations are impacting one another—more Moore’s law is driving more globalization and more globalization is driving more climate change, and more Moore’s law is also driving more potential solutions to climate change and a host of other challenges—and at the same time transforming almost every aspect of modern life.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
The four levels of competency are: Unconscious competence – We have incorrect intuition about what we’re learning because we don’t understand it at all. Conscious incompetence – We have incorrect analysis about what we’re learning, because we only know some of the ground rules. Conscious competence – We have correct analysis but not habits or intuition yet, as we’re only getting started with successful application of the ground rules. Unconscious competence – We have correct intuition about the future because we have seen and analyzed the application of the ground rules enough that we can understand what will happen before it happens.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
“
Everyone expected me to fall apart after our breakup. Instead I just felt empty. I honestly couldn’t stand their pity. So I came here to get away—and heal.”
“I bet you’re really angry with him. You guys were together for a long time.”
“I was. But the more I think about it and analyze it, it seems like something bigger—like a phantom dark energy was repelling us, like bug spray. I don’t think we were ever meant to be together, and the acceleration of the Big Rip just in- creased over time. I think it was bound to happen eventually, I just wish it didn’t end the way it did.”
“That sounds an awful lot like Fate.”
“No,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s just science.
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Kayla Cunningham (Fated to Love You (Chasing the Comet Book 1))
“
The night before a biochemistry class, I read the last year's lecture notes. I look at the pictures in the book. Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a a few things to memorize. But that's no big deal. I've got the big picture, and that's all I need.
Bring it on professor, I'm ready.
That's right.
The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row.
"Nothin gets past me."
My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went from 30% to 95%.
I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school boards exam in biochemistry. Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.
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”
Peter Rogers
“
Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
“
Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.
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David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
“
The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
“
I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones
as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.
”
”
Mariam Petrosyan (Дом, в котором...)
“
In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A
”
”
Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
“
Having Asperger’s is like having an enhancer plugged into an outlet in our brains. Asperger’s is an accelerator, amplifying the perceptions that we have on the world and the ambiance around us. Like going to the store and buying a device to plug in or install on something in order to make it run faster, Asperger’s will deepen everything’s significance, causing us to take things to a more intense level. Those of us with Asperger’s need to take our time on certain things, which causes us difficulty in accomplishing simple tasks. We learn to diligently persevere and be more prudent and careful.
"Juggling the Issues: Living with Asperger’s Syndrome is an anthology explaining these topics through the eyes of someone with Asperger’s. This is more than a researcher giving an outline of what we face and what we can do. Instead, this is one of those books told by a person who has Asperger’s and has dealt with certain difficulties in order to experience achievements over the past twenty years. I have personally overcome and am still overcoming a lot of the trials that come with having Asperger’s.
”
”
Matthew Kenslow (Juggling the Issues: Living With Asperger's Syndrome)
“
At the Pace of What Is Real Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. —SENG-TS'AN Like most people I know, I struggle with taking too much on, with doing too many things, with moving too fast, with overcommitting, with overplanning. I've learned that I must move, quite simply, at the pace of what is real. While this pace may vary, life always seems vacant and diminished when I accelerate beyond my capacity to feel what is before me. It seems we run our lives like trains, speeding along a track laid down by others, going so fast that what we pass blurs on by. Then we say we've been there, done that. The truth is that blurring by something is not the same as experiencing it. So, no matter how many wonderful opportunities come my way, no matter the importance placed on these things by others who have my best interests at heart, I must somehow find a way to slow down the train that is me until what I pass by is again seeable, touchable, feelable. Otherwise, I will pass by everything—can put it all on my résumé—but will have experienced and lived through nothing.
”
”
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have)
“
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past. In saying of me, “He is no longer a child,” “His tastes will not change now,” and so forth, my father had suddenly made me apparent to myself in my position in Time, and caused me the same kind of depression as if I had been, not yet the enfeebled old pensioner, but one of those heroes of whom the author, in a tone of indifference which is particularly galling, says to us at the end of a book: “He very seldom comes up now from the country. He has finally decided to end his days there.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
“
Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table? That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.
”
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Talmy points out how the mindset behind force dynamics is very different from our best understanding of force and momentum from Newtonian physics. The force-dynamic model in language singles out one entity and conceives of another as impinging on it, whereas in physics neither object in an interaction is privileged. Language conceives of the agonist as having an inner impulse toward motion or rest, whereas physics treats an object as simply continuing at its current velocity. Language distinguishes motion and rest as qualitatively distinct tendencies, whereas physics treats rest as a velocity that happens to be zero. Language treats the antagonist as exerting a force that is stronger than the intrinsic tendency of the agonist. In Newtonian physics, an action and its reaction are opposite and equal, so a pair of touching objects that are at rest, or are moving at a constant velocity, must exert equal forces on each other (if one force were stronger, the two would accelerate in that direction). In language, things can just happen, without stated causes-The book toppled off the shelf; The sidewalk cracked-whereas in physics every event has a lawful antecedent. And in physics, the distinction between causing, blocking, permitting, and helping plays no obvious role.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature)
“
The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
”
”
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
“
Lava is best. It’d certainly help in this situation. WAIT, I HAVE SOME IN MY BACKPACK!” “NOOOO!” we all cried out. But of course, it was too late. The Head Admin emptied the bucket as we ran, and although it did a fantastic job in cooking the giant zombie, it also did a fantastic job in setting fire to the forest around us. “YOU DOLT!” I screamed, as we accelerated our speed, “DO YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU’VE DONE!?” “ALL HAIL THE LAVA GODS!” I’m starting to think he may have hit his head on the way down here. To prevent any further incidents, I grabbed a roll of duct tape and buried him in the stuff. “HAVE MERCY!” With the Head Admin unable to inflict any more trouble, I threw him over my shoulder and ran with the others to safety. And whilst I can’t say I enjoy fleeing for my life, being chased by boiling flames, I will say it did look quite pretty. Oh, and as a plus, it took out all the evil creatures following us. I guess that’s a bonus. “The lava gods are pleased,” the Head Admin grinned, before I stuck duct tape over his mouth as well. That would keep him quiet, I hoped to myself. “OVER THERE!” Dinnerbone shouted, pointing forward to what looked like a mountain. “IT’S A MOUNTAIN!” Charles cried. “A BEAUTIFUL MOUNTAIN!” Dr. Boom looked like he was going to cry out of happiness, “WE’RE SAVED!” “MMMMPHPHPHPHPH!” I could only assume the Head Admin was glad as well. I later found out he had a fear of mountains, and was begging to be left to the lava instead. Oh well.
”
”
Minecrafters (Minecraft: Diary of a Minecraft Explorer - A New Adventure "PART 1" (Unofficial Minecraft Books. 30 BONUSES INCLUDED!))
“
As it was, Einstein merely had the pleasure of renouncing the cosmological constant, which he had never liked.53 In a new edition of his popular book on relativity published in 1931, he added an appendix explaining why the term he had pasted into his field equations was, thankfully, no longer necessary.54 “When I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein,” George Gamow later recalled, “he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life.”55 In fact, Einstein’s blunders were more fascinating and complex than even the triumphs of lesser scientists. It was hard simply to banish the term from the field equations. “Unfortunately,” says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, “it was not so easy just to drop the cosmological constant, because anything that contributes to the energy density of the vacuum acts just like a cosmological constant.”56 It turns out that the cosmological constant not only was difficult to banish but is still needed by cosmologists, who use it today to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.57 The mysterious dark energy that seems to cause this expansion behaves as if it were a manifestation of Einstein’s constant. As a result, two or three times each year fresh observations produce reports that lead with sentences along the lines of this one from November 2005: “The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a ‘cosmological constant’ to his equation for the expansion of the universe but then retracted it, may be vindicated by new research.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated. Experiences had flashed by him in such number that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows. He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine. At last, in Cuba, had come the consummating “crowded hour.” A rush, a roar, the sting of his own blood, a surge toward the sky, a smoking pistol in his hand, a soldier in light blue doubling up “neatly as a jackrabbit” … When the smoke cleared, he had found himself atop Kettle Hill on the Heights of San Juan, with a vanquished empire at his feet.
”
”
Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)
“
It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up.
A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.
”
”
John Thackara (In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (The MIT Press))
“
Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.
”
”
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
“
It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.'
'The what?'
'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'
They drove on the humming highway for a while.
Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.'
'What question?'
'Do you think he's any good?'
'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.'
'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.
James paused for a long moment... He said, 'There's one Boben book, I think it's Cold Season, or maybe it's Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, "a story which Canadians must never tire of telling." What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.'
She shrugged. 'I have no idea.'
'I'll tell you what you think of it. You don't give a shit. I'll tell you what I think of it. I don't give a shit either. But I also think it's the worst bullshit I've ever heard. I think,' he said, accelerating, 'that Ludwig Boben is a fucking asshole.
”
”
Russell Smith (Noise)
“
THE NIGHTGOWN was only the first of the garments in the box. There were seven nightgowns, in fact—one for each day of the week—of delicate silk, lovely georgette, and beautiful tiffany. As Alexandra pulled them out, she draped them on the bed. She’d never seen a nightgown that wasn’t white, but these were almond and pale blush pink, powder blue and soft peach, with delicate edgings of lace and intricate, exquisite embroidery. “They’re stunning,” she said. “Madame Rodale has nothing like them in her book of fashion plates.” Tris just grinned. He seemed different tonight. More relaxed, less worried. She didn’t know what had prompted his sudden good humor, but she didn’t want to question it. She’d rather enjoy it instead. After the afternoon she’d had—starting with Elizabeth’s letter and ending with three fruitless interviews—she wasn’t about to risk the one thing that seemed to be going right. “Are you going to try one on for me?” he asked. Her face heated. He chose a nightgown off the bed, palest lavender with black lace and violet embroidery. “This one,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you require assistance with your dress?” “Just the buttons,” she said, and turned to let him unfasten them. She shifted the nightgown in her hands. It felt so light. “There,” he said when the back of her green dress gaped open. He kissed her softly on the nape of her neck, then settled on one of the striped chairs, sipping from the glass of port he’d brought upstairs with him. “Use the dressing room. I’ll be waiting.” In the dressing room, she shakily stripped out of her frock, chemise, shoes, and stockings, then dropped the nightgown over her head and smoothed it down over her hips. The fabric whispered against her legs. She turned to see herself in the looking glass. Sweet heaven. She’d never imagined nightgowns like this existed. Her nightgowns all had high collars that tied at the throat. This one had a wide, low neckline. Her nightgowns all had long, full sleeves. This one had tiny puffed sleeves that began halfway off her shoulders. Her nightgowns were made of yards and yards of thick, billowing fabric. This one was a slender column that left no curve to the imagination. It was wicked. “Are you ready yet?” Tris called. Alexandra swallowed hard, reminding herself that he’d seen her in less clothing. And he was her husband. Still, wearing the nightgown for him somehow felt more intimate than wearing nothing at all. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Drawing a deep breath, she exited the dressing room, walked quickly through the sitting room, and paused in the bedroom’s doorway. She dropped her gaze, then raised her lashes, giving him the look—the one Juliana had said would make men fall at her feet. Judging from the expression on Tris’s face, it was a good thing he was sitting. The way he looked at her made her heartbeat accelerate. He rose and moved toward her. She met him halfway, licking suddenly dry lips. “Will you kiss me?” she asked softly, reaching up to sweep that always unruly lock off his forehead. It worked this time. He kissed her but good.
”
”
Lauren Royal (Alexandra (Regency Chase Brides #1))
“
The depopulation of rural America at the time, accelerated by the technological revolution that was rendering farm labor superfluous, was one of the most harrowing and large-scale demographic developments of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because relatively few American officials attended to the problems of these people in the 1950s, the mass migrations set the stage for social and racial dynamite that exploded in the cities after 1965.73
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James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
“
It turns out that there is a very good reason the expansion of the universe is
accelerating. All time in every universe moves toward the balance of a universal
zero. Although it is a bit startling to clearly recognize that time has both a beginning
AND an end, in discovering timelessness we also find that our single
cosmos is like a story in a great book that tells an infinite number of stories. All
the stories; my story, your story, exists forever. We are led finally to imagine a
deeper level of reality, even from a purely scientific perspective, where all life
across infinite worlds exists eternally unified within an implicate ground state of
zero, forming an omniscience ever present in our own future.
”
”
Gevin Giorbran (Everything Forever: Learning To See Timelessness)
“
All the structural problems that economists had warned about coalesced after 1973–74 to jolt American life. These included sagging productivity, declining competitiveness in world markets, accelerating inflation, rising unemployment, especially among minorities and the millions of baby boomers now seeking work, and a slowing down in the creation of good-paying, career-enhancing jobs outside of the increasingly dominant service sector.35
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”
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
“
The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities.
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James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
“
getting into the rhythm of nightly homework. Cello practice became part of his nightly routine—and mine. Just ten minutes in the beginning, but then fifteen and even twenty as he moved up through the grades. It was never onerous; always fun. Playing music became as natural as dinner, homework, and bedtime. The Suzuki books start easy but quickly accelerate to more
”
”
Ari L. Goldman (The Late Starters Orchestra)
“
But it is the event horizon around a black hole where the Tull-Toks claim the greatest books are to be found. When a Tull-Tok is tired of browsing through the endless universal library, she drifts toward a black hole. As she accelerates toward the point of no return, the streaming gamma rays and x-rays unveil more and more of the ultimate mystery for which all the other books are but glosses. The book reveals itself to be ever more complex, more nuanced, and just as she is about to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the book she is reading, she realizes with a start that time has slowed down to standstill, and she will have eternity to read it as she falls forever towards a center that she will never reach.
Finally, a book has triumphed over time.
Of course, no Tull-Tok has ever returned from such a journey, and many dismiss their discussion of reading black holes as pure myth. Indeed, many consider the Tull-Toks to be nothing more than illiterate frauds who rely on mysticism to disguise their ignorance.
”
”
Ken Liu (Lightspeed Magazine, August 2012)
“
SAFARI tents remain zipped, hotel pools are empty, game guides idle among lions and elephants. Tour operators across Africa are reporting the biggest drop in business in living memory. A specialist travel agency, SafariBookings.com, says a survey of 500 operators in September showed a fall in bookings of between 20% and 70%. Since then the trend has accelerated, especially in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. Several American and European agents have stopped offering African tours for the time being. The reason is the outbreak of the Ebola virus in west Africa, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The epidemic is taking place far from the big safari destinations in eastern and southern Africa—as far or farther than the
”
”
Anonymous
“
The night before a biochemistry class, I read the lecture notes from last year. I look at the pictures in the book. I read some of the book.
Now, I've got the general concept. Sure...There's a couple of details to fill in and a few things to memorize. but that's no big deal. I've got the big picture and that's all I need.
Bring it on professor. I'm ready.
That's right.
The next day, I'm a goalie sitting in the front row.
Nothin gets past me...
My ability to comprehend a biochemistry lecture just went up from 30% to 95%.
I went on to score 780 out of a possible 800 on the medical school biochemistry boards exam (USMLE 1).
Given that the 99th percentile began around 690, this was one of the highest scores in the USA, perhaps the highest.
”
”
Peter Rogers (Straight A at Stanford and on to Harvard)
“
Part of the purpose of life and the path of self-realization is to develop this ability to see and understand with a full spectrum prism consciousness. This will incredibly accelerate your spiritual growth and expand your consciousness. It will help you to understand and have compassion for people from all walks of life. It will make you a better spiritual teacher, counselor, and person.
”
”
Joshua D. Stone (The Golden Book of Melchizedek: How to Become an Integrated Christ/Buddha in This Lifetime Volume 1)
“
These six strategies will greatly improve your psychological and physical well-being. They will help you be happier and live a life of meaning and purpose, and—as I show throughout the book—enhance success. The strategies are not complicated; applying them to your daily life does not require complex training or huge lifestyle changes. In fact, these strategies tap into resources you already have.
”
”
Emma Seppälä (The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success)
“
There was something growing in me. Something far more than the festering hate that had begun too many years ago. This girl that sits obediently in the bath, awaiting her master's return was just an image, a picture in a book with no accompanying explanation. She sits in silence, she answers his questions and she succumbs his touches without complaint. But in the dark recesses of her mind something continues to thrive. Like a switch flipped it had changed her from the pathetic, frightened girl into a soulless demon playing a sickening game. Dragging him in with her acquiesce until she could chew him up and spit him out.
My mouth twitched involuntarily.
A low panic started, my heart rate accelerating instantly, that pounding of rushing blood echoing in my ears. I sat still, concentrating on my mask. Isolating every single individual facial muscle I could find and shouting them down one by one. I had not had a slip up like this in a year. Wearing a mask so long it had changed from uncomfortable to normal.
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Roxanne Lee (The Devil Inside (Wolf Guard #1))
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The trick of switching words’ meanings is one of the oldest in the book. Just think of “freedom” and “democracy” … Ultimately, it’s a problem of shortsightedness. An addiction to what’s next. People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up. Fabricate the “news.” Invent their own “analysis.” We’ve been doing that for years. It seems only natural that eventually we’d move on to manufacturing words.… But Synchronic didn’t invent accelerated obsolescence. As a nation we’ve been practicing mass production since before World War II. We believed wastefulness would morph, by magic, into wealth. That if we created enough disposable products, it would help fire consumerism. And it did, for a while. But here’s a dirty secret: resources are finite. Waste enough, and eventually it’s all used up. Language, too. You can’t just coin a word, use it once, and toss it out. But language is just the latest casualty. We always think there’s more of everything, even as we deplete it. Not just petroleum or gold, glacial ice or water, bandwidth. Now even our thoughts and memories are disposable.
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Alena Graedon (The Word Exchange)
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Instead of developing a business plan, find ways to accelerate your learning and validate customers demand. The best way to do this is to build a prototype (with minimal features) and sell it to some early adopters. Then change the product repeatedly – daily if necessary – and keep supplying your customers with the new and improved versions. Listen to their feedback and use those ideas to make a better version and then get more feedback on that. Keep iterating until you get a fully featured product which your customers love.
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BusinessNews Publishing (Summary: The Lean Startup: Review and Analysis of Ries' Book)
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Like high blood pressure and diabetes, chronic inflammation has no visible symptoms (though it can be measured by a lab test known as high-sensitivity C-reactive protein [hs CRP]). But it damages the vascular system, the organs, the brain, and body tissues. It slowly erodes your health, gradually overwhelming the body’s anti-inflammatory defenses. It causes heart disease. It causes cognitive decline and memory loss. Even obesity and diabetes are linked to inflammation because fat cells are veritable factories for inflammatory chemicals. In fact, it’s likely that inflammation is the key link between obesity and all the diseases obesity puts you at risk for developing. When your joints are chronically inflamed, degenerative diseases like arthritis are right around the corner. Inflamed lungs cause asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Inflammation in the brain is linked to Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions, including brain fog and everyday memory lapses that we write off as normal aging—except those memory lapses are not an inevitable consequence of aging at all. They are, however, an inevitable consequence of inflammation, because inflammation sets your brain on fire. Those “I forgot where I parked the car” moments start happening more frequently, and occurring prematurely. Inflamed arteries can signal the onset of heart disease. Chronic inflammation has also been linked to various forms of cancer; it triggers harmful changes on a molecular level that result in the growth of cancer cells. Inflammation is so central to the process of aging and breakdown at the cellular level that some health pundits have begun referring to the phenomena as “inflam-aging.” That’s because inflammation accelerates aging, including the visible signs of aging we all see in the skin. In addition to making us sick, chronic inflammation can make permanent weight loss fiendishly difficult. The fat cells keep churning out inflammatory proteins called cytokines, promoting even more inflammation. That inflammation in turn prevents the energy-making structures in the cells, called mitochondria, from doing their jobs efficiently, much like a heat wave would affect the output of a factory that lacks air-conditioning—productivity declines under extreme conditions. One of the duties of the mitochondria is burning fat; inflammation interferes with the job of the mitochondria, making fat burning more difficult and fat loss nearly impossible. While someone trying to lose weight may initially be successful, after a while, the number on the scale gets stuck. The much-discussed weight-loss “plateau” is often a result of this cycle of inflammation and fat storage. And here’s even more bad news: Adding more exercise or eating fewer calories in an attempt to break through the plateau will have some effect on weight loss, but not much. And continuing to lose weight becomes much harder to accomplish. Why? Because inflammation decreases our normal ability to burn calories. (We’ll tell you more about other factors that contribute to the plateau—and how the Smart Fat Solution can help you to move beyond them—in Part 2 of this book.)
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Steven Masley (Smart Fat: Eat More Fat. Lose More Weight. Get Healthy Now.)
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SMART FAT FACT: THERE ARE NO VEGGIES IN “VEGETABLE” OIL Vegetable oils don’t come from vegetables, so the name is misleading. They are processed from grains such as corn or from other plants such as soybeans. To distinguish these fats from animal fats, manufacturers have long referred to them as “vegetable” oil, and that’s how most consumers refer to them as well. But the name is flat-out wrong. More accurately, they are plant-based oils derived from grains and seeds. We use “vegetable oil” in this book because it is common usage, but we want to point out—and we want you to understand—the inaccuracy of that term. Here’s the solution: For omega-3s to counteract inflammation most effectively, they must be eaten in the correct ratio to omega-6s—ideally, about 1:1. But that’s not what we’re doing. Research indicates that our current consumption of omega-6 fats is about sixteen times greater than our consumption of omega-3s, or roughly a ratio of 16:1. That means we’re giving 1,600 percent more “fuel” to our body’s inflammatory army than to its anti-inflammatory army. As you’ll see, getting this ratio right is vital. Our health depends on it—as do our very lives. While the ratio of 1:1 is the ideal, we believe that you can do just fine with a ratio of anywhere between 1:1 and 4:1. But 16:1? Not so much! Once your ratio is calibrated, smart fats can go to work in your body and bust the cycle of inflammation to help you lose weight, fight disease, and stop accelerated aging.
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Steven Masley (Smart Fat: Eat More Fat. Lose More Weight. Get Healthy Now.)
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You don’t need another book, seminar or coaching program. Though these can dramatically accelerate your process, you really do have everything you need right now inside yourself. Your work, at the end of the day, is simply realizing this. Your need to be different, or to have something else to feel better, is rooted in lies; you can feel better right now, without changing a thing. What’s keeping you from being happy right here, right now, in middle of your process? When you realize there is nothing to fix, you will know that the answer is “Nothing”.
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Jonathan Heston (The Unlimited Self: Destroy Limiting Beliefs, Uncover Inner Greatness, and Live the Good Life)
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In the next few years, those who are first and best in achieving digital trust will become the new superhighways for a unified, single economy firing across a globally connected world. Using the resources and strategies delivered in this book, you can catch up with those who already have figured it out, and then accelerate past them. The first step is to acquire a new way of thinking about trust itself.
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Jeffrey Ritter (Achieving Digital Trust: The New Rules for Business at the Speed of Light)
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This book is about a simple idea: Clarissa and the talent hotbeds are doing the same thing. They have tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can't quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how. In short, they've cracked the talent code.
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Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else)
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The conifer, as the leitmotif of this book, conjures up the essential lesson of the roundabout, going right with its slow yet steady development at first until, finally, reaching a stage of maturity at which it can go left with accelerating growth that outpaces its competition.
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Mark Spitznagel (The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World)
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Expanding our vast love in clusters
Emerging together as one
Accelerating through time
Under the influence of gravity
BOOK: LIFTING THE VAIL
By: A. M. FRITH
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Ana M Frith
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I view the state of Slow simply as a mindful approach to what is happening around you. It is a way to gain enlightenment (and happiness) through thinking, self-contemplation, and intuition. It is using the ability to stop, process, and then proceed in a non-accelerated manner. What is great about this slow mindset is that while the effort can be minimal—the rewards can often be huge.
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Mike Davenport (Rowing Slow: The Secret For Going Fast And Getting What You Want From Your Rowing (Rowing workbook Book 4))
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Minds are made of light (photons). Photons are massless, immaterial, unextended, dimensionless, maximally length contracted and time dilated, as per Einstein's special theory of relativity. Nothing material can be accelerated to light speed. The speed of light is an absolute term, while speed through space is relative. These facts rationally prove that light belongs to a different ontological category from matter, hence materialism is false.
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Thomas Stark (The Book of Thought: Mind Matters (The Truth Series 6))
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Through censorship, our opinions and attitudes will become prescribed by the authorities, with dissenting views labeled as heretical and punishable by law. If this happens, we will surely see the dissolution of the rest of our rights accelerate, unhindered by public scrutiny and outrage.
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Sean Patrick (The Know Your Bill of Rights Book: Don't Lose Your Constitutional Rights—Learn Them!)
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It is often said that a person can only read about five thousand books in a lifetime. It is a small range of books given the accelerating quantity available to us. This limitation might lead some readers to rush their reading, thereby increasing the number of books. This response turns a reader into a tourist, jumping from experience to experience, noting only the highlights, being able to say he or she has done it, though not entirely sure what was done. Another response is to simply and happily acknowledge that life is indeed short, and that our smaller selection of books represents a unique expression of our character. This second choice removes the needless pressure from reading, and restores it as a great pleasure.
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John Miedema (Slow Reading)
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S.M.A.R.T. stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
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The rate at which we can adapt is increasing,” said Teller. “A thousand years ago, it probably would have taken two or three generations to adapt to something new.” By 1900, the time it took to adapt got down to one generation. “We might be so adaptable now,” said Teller, “that it only takes ten to fifteen years to get used to something new.” Alas, though, that may not be good enough. Today, said Teller, the accelerating speed of scientific and technological innovations (and, I would add, new ideas, such as gay marriage) can outpace the capacity of the average human being and our societal structures to adapt and absorb them. With that thought in mind, Teller added one more thing to the graph—a big dot. He drew that dot on the rapidly sloping technology curve just above the place where it intersected with the adaptability line. He labeled it: “We are here.” The graph, as redrawn for this book, can be seen on the next page. That dot, Teller explained, illustrates an important fact: even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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In my life as a human, I see clues that evolution on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos at large is not being pushed from behind in entropic randomness but being pulled forward by complexification, natural selection and other evolutionary forces orchestrated by a strange unseen teleological attractor, in McKenna’s words the 'Transcendental Object' at the end of time. The Noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which we all are immersed, it’s a cognitive layer of the planet, which has found a physical expression in the form of today’s Internet. As the Noosphere gains more coherence, typical of a biological brain, this process of 'planet cognification' accelerates.
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Alex M. Vikoulov (The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and the Omega Point Cosmology (The Science and Philosophy of Information Book 1))
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Technocultural evolution driven by epigenetic and memetic factors, the collective will of humanity to emulate the most successful achievements of Nature with technology, proceeds now millions of times faster than genetic evolution of our species at an ever-accelerating pace.
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Alex M. Vikoulov (TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man (The Cybernetic Theory of Mind Book 2))
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Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors. • Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.
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Lance Henderson (Tor and the Deep Web: Bitcoin, DarkNet & Cryptocurrency (2 in 1 Book): Encryption & Online Privacy for Beginners)
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As he struggled to handle the vehicle, his instructor patiently explaining how to accelerate and steer, he found himself wishing he were back home, reading a book about detectives that drive around in dune buggies and solve mysteries on the beach. Once he flipped the dune buggy and was kicked off the course, he went back to his hotel room and wrote the article in less than an hour and then smoked pot until he fell asleep. He had assumed the same thing would happen with the potato gun story, a few hours of boring explanations of how the cannons were built and what principles they operated on before he watched them fire off a few rounds of potatoes.
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Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang)
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when we see how little we really need - love and connection - then all the getting and grasping that we thought was so essential to our well-being takes its rightful place and no longer becomes the focus or the obsession of our lives. We must try to be conscious about how we live and not get swept away by the modern trance, the relentless march, the anxious accelerator. The Dalai Lama was urging us to be more realistic so we can come to some sense of inner peace now, rather than always chasing after our expectations and ambition for the next.
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Dalai Lama XIV (The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World)
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embrace of the technocratic future leaves us bereft of the magic of the forest from whence we came. In his book, Nature Revealed, Edward O. Wilson writes, “Human nature today remains Paleolithic even in the midst of accelerating technological advance. Thus corporate CEOs impelled by stone-age emotions work international deals with cellular telephones at 30,000 feet.” Open wilderness formed us. We are wild in nature, made of the same stuff as the dolphins and whales, the island foxes, sea birds, and every other creature – bones and sinew, muscle and blood.
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Christian Beamish (The Voyage of the Cormorant)
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There has been less constancy on social and economic matters. The conservative tent has sheltered economic liberals, supporters of state intervention, and thinkers who have been rather hostile to the idea of economic development. Mostly, though, Russian conservatives’ views on economic affairs have been shaped by a dislike of top-down policies of rapid modernization promoted by the Russian state and by suspicion of the state bureaucracy. In the late nineteenth century this led to ideas such as those of Sergei Sharapov and Lev Tikhomirov, who argued that Russia should focus on developing its internal market rather than on products for export. These ideas were combined with support for protectionism and a loose monetary policy, and with suggestions that Russia reduce its dependence on foreign capital. The economic proposals of modern left conservatives, who in the name of social justice argue in favor of a fairer distribution of resources, are in some ways similar. Conservatism is an important part of Russia’s political and intellectual landscape. Indeed, given the accelerating pace of globalization and modernization, it is possible that the current conservative reaction will grow stronger rather than weaker as time goes on. The ideas discussed in this book, therefore, are of more than just historical interest; they will help to shape Russia’s future, for better or for worse, in the years to come.
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Paul Robinson (Russian Conservatism (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies))
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In my life as a human, I see clues that evolution on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos at large is not being pushed from behind in entropic randomness but being pulled forward by complexification, natural selection and other evolutionary forces orchestrated by a strange unseen teleological attractor, in McKenna’s words the 'Transcendental Object' at the end of time. The Noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which we all are immersed, it’s a cognitive layer of the planet, which has found a physical expression in the form of today’s Internet. As the Noosphere gains more coherence, typical of a biological brain, this process of “planet cognification” accelerates.
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Alex M. Vikoulov (The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and the Omega Point Cosmology (The Science and Philosophy of Information Book 1))
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Light is the absolute condition for both spacetime and matter, i.e. all matter comes from light, all matter comes from mind, and the same is true of spacetime. Mind is exactly what matter can never be, which is why no material thing can ever be accelerated to light speed. To convert matter into mind, matter has to undergo a phase transition, as it does in the formation of black hole singularities, and at the Big Crunch which ends the material universe.
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Thomas Stark (The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance (The Truth Series Book 13))
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Historical influences contributing to the protean self can be traced back to the Enlightenment and even the Renaissance in the West, and to at least the Meiji Restoration of the nineteenth century in Japan. These influences include the dislocations of rapid historical change, the mass media revolution, and the threat of human extinction. All have undergone an extraordinary acceleration during the last half of the twentieth century, causing a radical breakdown of prior communities and sources of authority. At the same time, ways of reconstituting the self in the midst of radical uncertainty have also evolved. So much so that the protean self in our time has become a modus vivendi, a “mode of living.” This is especially true in our own country. The same historical forces can, however, produce an apparently opposite reaction: the closing off of the person and the constriction of self-process. It can take the form of widespread psychic numbing—diminished capacity or inclination to feel—and a general sense of stasis and meaninglessness. Or it can lead to an expression of totalism, of demand for absolute dogma and a monolithic self. A prominent form of totalism in our day is fundamentalism. Broadly understood, fundamentalism includes a literalized doctrine, religious or political, enclosed upon itself by the immutable words of the holy books. The doctrine is rendered both sacred in the name of a past of perfect harmony that never was, and central to a quest for collective revitalization. But the totalistic or fundamentalist response is a reaction to proteanism and to the fear of chaos. While proteanism is able to function in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, fundamentalism wants to wipe out that world in favor of a claim to definitive truth and unalterable moral certainty.
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Robert Jay Lifton (Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry)
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tip to reading fast is to practice reading more than one word at a time.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
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to spend twenty minutes reading specific sections of the book in greater detail.
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Peter Hollins (Learn Like Einstein: Memorize More, Read Faster, Focus Better, and Master Anything With Ease… Become An Expert in Record Time (Accelerated Learning) (Learning how to Learn Book 12))
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I’ve always believed that the only reason for salespeople to read this book is to accelerate their success strategy.
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Chris Lytle (The Accidental Salesperson: How to Take Control of Your Sales Career and Earn the Respect and Income You Deserve)
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Once superintelligent AI has settled another solar system or galaxy, bringing humans there is easy — if humans have succeeded in programming the AI with this goal. All the necessary information about humans can be transmitted at the speed of light, after which the AI can assemble quarks and electrons into the desired humans. This could be done either in a low-tech way by simply transmitting the 2 gigabytes of information needed to specify a person’s DNA and then incubating a baby to be raised by the AI, or the AI could assemble quarks and electrons into full-grown people who would have all the memories scanned from their originals back on Earth.
This means that if there’s an intelligence explosion, the key question isn’t if intergalactic settlement is possible, but simply how fast it can proceed. Since all the ideas we've explored above come from humans, they should be viewed as merely lower limits on how fast life can expand; ambitious superintelligent life can probably do a lot better, and it will have a strong incentive to push the limits, since in the race against time and dark energy, every 1% increase in average settlement speed translates into 3% more galaxies colonized.
For example, if it takes 20 years to travel 10 light-years to the next star system with a laser-sail system, and then another 10 years to settle it and build new lasers and seed probes there, the settled region will be a sphere growing in all directions at a third of the speed of light on average. In a beautiful and thorough analysis of cosmically expanding civilizations in 2014, the American physicist Jay Olson considered a high-tech alternative to the island-hopping approach, involving two separate types of probes: seed probes and expanders. The seed probes would slow down, land and seed their destination with life. The expanders, on the other hand, would never stop: they'd scoop up matter in flight, perhaps using some improved variant of the ramjet technology, and use this matter both as fuel and as raw material out of which they'd build expanders and copies of themselves. This self-reproducing fleet of expanders would keep gently accelerating to always maintain a constant speed (say half the speed of light) relative to nearby galaxies, and reproduce often enough that the fleet formed an expanding spherical shell with a constant number of expanders per shell area.
Last but not least, there’s the sneaky Hail Mary approach to expanding even faster than any of the above methods will permit: using Hans Moravec’s “cosmic spam” scam from chapter 4. By broadcasting a message that tricks naive freshly evolved civilizations into building a superintelligent machine that hijacks them, a civilization can expand essentially at the speed of light, the speed at which their seductive siren song spreads through the cosmos. Since this may be the only way for advanced civilizations to reach most of the galaxies within their future light cone and they have little incentive not to try it, we should be highly suspicious of any transmissions from extraterrestrials! In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, we earthlings used blueprints from aliens to build a machine we didn’t understand — I don’t recommend doing this ...
In summary, most scientists and sci-fi authors considering cosmic settlement have in my opinion been overly pessimistic in ignoring the possibility of superintelligence: by limiting attention to human travelers, they've overestimated the difficulty of intergalactic travel, and by limiting attention to technology invented by humans, they've overestimated the time needed to approach the physical limits of what's possible.
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Max Tegmark (Leben 3.0: Mensch sein im Zeitalter Künstlicher Intelligenz)
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Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most successful and sought-after startup accelerators in the tech world. Graham has invested in several blockbuster companies, including AirBNB and Dropbox, both of which are valued in the billions at the time of this writing. After investing in hundreds of companies and considering thousands more, Paul Graham has perfected the art of identifying promising startups. His methods may surprise you. In an interview, Graham highlighted two key strategies: Favoring people over product Favoring determination over intelligence What’s most essential for a successful startup? Graham: The founders. We’ve learned in the six years of doing Y Combinator to look at the founders—not the business ideas—because the earlier you invest, the more you’re investing in the people. When Bill Gates was starting Microsoft, the idea that he had then involved a small-time microcomputer called the Altair. That didn’t seem very promising, so you had to see that this 19-year-old kid was going places. What do you look for? Graham: Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.[74] Your intelligence doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. If you’re reading this book, you’re probably more than capable. Your ideas don’t matter much, either. What matters most—by far, is your perseverance. Stop worrying about your mental aptitude. Stop worrying about the viability of the project you’re considering. Stop worrying about all the other big decisions keeping you up at night. Instead, focus on relentlessly grinding away at your passion until something incredible happens. Your potential output is governed by your mindset, not your mind itself.
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Jesse Tevelow (The Connection Algorithm: Take Risks, Defy the Status Quo, and Live Your Passions)
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In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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faster. As I was closing this book, Walmart announced that to upgrade its ability to compete in e-commerce with Amazon—which still does eight times Walmart’s sales online—it was buying Jet, a year-old Internet retail startup. The Economist reported on August 13, 2016, that Jet’s appeal to Walmart was its “real-time pricing algorithm, which tempts customers with lower prices if they add more items to their basket. The algorithm also identifies which of Jet’s vendors is closest to the consumer, helping to minimize shipping costs and allowing them to offer discounts. Walmart plans to integrate the software with its own.” It turns out that “under a second” was just too damned slow.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Misconception #3. Some physicists claim that length contraction and time dilation are not real and that the physical explanations of Fitzgerald, Larmor and Lorentz are not to be taken seriously. This is not true. As N. David Mermin points out in his popular book on relativity "It's About Time":
Moving clocks really do run slowly and moving sticks really do shrink, if the concept of a clock or the length of a stick has any meaning at all...It is necessary for clocks and sticks really so to behave if the while subject is to fit coherently together, and not collapse into a mass of self-contradiction. - N.D. Mermin
NASA routinely observes time dilation in orbiting satellites and corrections are applied to keep atomic clocks on the GPS satellites in sync with clocks on earth. Time dilation has also been seen in particle accelerators. At the CERN accelerator radioactive particles traveling at 99.9% the speed of light are observed to decay 30 times more slowly than they do at rest.
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Rodney A. Brooks (Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein)
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In Syria, the Obama administration has constantly wrestled with a fiendishly difficult question: Should America and its allies work to take out the murderous Syrian president Bashar al-Assad first—in which case they would lose the support of Iran and Russia and likely introduce even more near-term disorder into Syria? Or should it take out ISIS first—with the tacit support of Iran and Russia—and allow Assad to stay in power, containing total disorder but also crushing the more secular, democratic Syrian opposition? As of the writing of this book, America has not resolved that dilemma.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Female status in Pre-Seizure culture was predicated on appetite control. But a woman in control of her desire did not function economically, and so loops were inserted into culture to accelerate female bonding in acts of over-consumption that defied restraint. These loops gave permission for loss of control. He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through.
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Matthew De Abaitua (The Destructives (The Seizure Trilogy Book 3))