Accidental Inventions Quotes

What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.

Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible.   The

I'm not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn't the shortest kid in the class.

Whenever people nominate the world’s most important inventions (the internal combustion engine, the world wide web, battery storage), I always suggest the pill and the tampon

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off.

Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

It [the mind] can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools.

The problem is that while twenty-first-century physics fell accidentally into the twentieth century, twenty-first-century mathematics hasn't been invented yet. It seems that we may have to wait for twenty-first-century mathematics before we can make any progress, or the current generation of physicists must invent twenty-first-century mathematics on their own.

Our Saviour's meaning, when He said, He must be born again and become a little child that will enter in the Kingdom of Heaven is deeper far than is generally believed. It is only in a careless reliance upon Divine Providence, that we are to become little children, or in the feebleness and shortness of our anger and simplicity of our passions, but in the peace and purity of all our soul. Which purity also is a deeper thing than is commonly apprehended. For we must disrobe infant-like and clear; the powers of our soul free from the leaven of this world, and disentangled from men's conceits and customs. Grit in the eye or yellow jaundice will not let a man see those objects truly that are before it. And therefore it is requisite that we should be as very strangers to the thoughts, customs, and opinions of men in this world, as if we were but little children. So those things would appear to us only which do to children when they are first born. Ambitions, trades, luxuries, inordinate affections, casual and accidental riches invented since the fall, would be gone, and only those things appear, which did to Adam in Paradise, in the same light and in the same colours: God in His works, Glory in the light, Love in our parents, men, ourselves, and the face of Heaven: Every man naturally seeing those things, to the enjoyment of which he is naturally born.

The human species is over-developed into two strands, the clever and inventive, and the destructive and distressing, all stemming from evolutionary accidental surplus consciousness. We have developed to the point of outgrowing the once necessary God myth, confronting the accidental origins of everything and realizing that our individual lives end completely at death. We have to live and grow old with these sad and stubborn facts. We must sometimes look at the vast night sky and see our diminutive place reflected in it, and we realize that our species’ existence itself is freakishly limited and all our earthly purposes are ultimately for nought. We can never organize optimal living conditions for ourselves, and we realize that our complex societies contain abundant absurdities. World population increases, information overload increases and new burdens outweigh any benefits of material progress however clever and inventive we are.

There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing a achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negros did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That wad Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.

Did the guy who invent the shower cap also invent the fitted bed sheet?

Pepsi.

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.

They could pretend when they were alone. Lie to themselves about what this was between them. Hell, he could invent a million reasons why he’d stalked over and staked his claim here. But the truth lay behind the sound of her moan and Tyler’s answering groan. Kissing Sherry wasn’t about her damn rules.
It wasn’t to save his career.
This woman was in his arms because he wanted her there.

The comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satisfied with an impersonal God and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of “the Son of Man.” In Rasputin the rejected and agonizing monarchy found a Christ in its own image. “If there had been no Rasputin,” said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old regime, “it would have been necessary to invent one.” There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined.

They amplified existing problems or invented ones that didn’t exist, polarizing and making people fearful of one another. Then they pointed to what they’d created and said they were the only ones with solutions.

In the course of re-inventing the internet, Japan accidentally found a way to raise the dead. While most countries would have stopped what they were doing, prayed to various deities—as religion was still valid at this point—and then shit their pants, this was Japan. The internet had been powered by ghosts ever since.

he had developed a system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights. In winter he would have to devise something warmer, but he couldn’t think of winter yet. He was barely making it from one day to the next as it was. At moments—while he was skidding

Strange, the impact of History, the grip it had on us, yet it was nothing but words. Accidental accretions for the most part, leaving most of the story out. We have not yet begun to explore the true power of the Word, I thought. What if we broke all the rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language itself, made History a partisan ally? Of course, the Phantom was already onto this, wasn't he? Ahead of us again. What were his dialectical machinations if not the dissolution of the natural limits of language, the conscious invention of a space, a spooky artificial no-man's land, between logical alternatives. I loved to debate both sides of any issue, but thinking about that strange space in between made me sweat. Paradox was one thing I hated more than psychiatrists and lady journalists.

Since my school days when I accidentally discovered this form of verse called ‘Limerick’, I have often wondered about the origin of the name. Was it invented in Ireland perhaps? After some research and several years, I think not. The limerick must have been invented long before it reached the jocular pubs of Limerick in Ireland where the Irish undoubtedly made very good use of it whilst consuming copious amounts of Guinness.

Two thousand years ago, give or take, we humans built the second miracle for ourselves: distillation, one of the earliest tools used by the earliest scientists. Invented by alchemists searching for the fundamental spirits that inhabit everything on earth, the still accidentally gave rise to an entirely new way to convey flavor and aroma, and an array of drinks that became a staple of human consumption. Plus it gave rise to the modern study of chemistry and made possible our petroleum-based economy.

system that enabled him to sleep in clean sheets every night without the trouble of bed changing. He’d been proposing the system to Sarah for years, but she was so set in her ways. What he did was strip the mattress of all linens, replacing them with a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine. He thought of this invention as a Macon Leary Body Bag. A body bag required no tucking in, was unmussable, easily changeable, and the perfect weight for summer nights.

That Cicely’s brave undertaking ought to come to some great result in itself, that she ought to be able to make her way nobly, as her purpose was, working with her hands for the children that were not hers, bringing them up to be men, having that success in her work which is the most pleasant of all recompenses, and vindicating her sacrifice and self-devotion in the sight of all who had scoffed and doubted — this, no doubt, would be the highest and best, the most heroical and epical development of story. To change all her circumstances at a stroke, making her noble intention unnecessary, and resolving this tremendous work of hers into a gentle domestic necessity, with the “hey presto!” of the commonplace magician, by means of a marriage, is simply a contemptible expedient. But, alas! it is one which there can be no doubt is much preferred by most people to the more legitimate conclusion; and, what is more, he would be justified by knowing the accidental way is perhaps, on the whole, the most likely one, since marriages occur every day which are perfectly improbable and out of character, mere tours de force, despicable as expedients, showing the poorest invention, a disgrace to any romancist or dramatist, if they were not absolute matters of fact and true. Pardon the parenthesis, gentle reader.

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

Are humans moral creatures whose actions are judged by some external or divine standard, or are we simply accidental winners of an utterly random contest of genes? If it’s the latter, does that mean we are only answerable to whatever ethical standards we invent for ourselves?

In retrospect, the fact that Toy Story was the beginning of Steve’s professional resurrection seems preposterously appropriate. Its plot established the Pixar formula: a likable character is the cause of his own downfall, often as a result of hubris; but he (or she, once Pixar finally made Brave) overcomes weakness through kindness, bravery, quick wits, invention, or some combination thereof, and thereby earns a redemption that makes him—or her—an even better and more complete toy (or bug, car, fish, princess, monster, robot, mouse, or superhero!). The hero’s downfall, incidentally, often involves some kind of exile, as in Toy Story, where Woody “accidentally” sends Buzz careening into Sid’s backyard, and then must join him to engineer a hair-raising escape from that evil child. The parallels to Steve’s own exile from Apple are obvious.

The parallel between the Pyramid Age achievements and those of the Nuclear Age force themselves upon one, however reluctant one may at first be to admit them. Once again, a Divine King, embodying all the powers and prerogatives of the whole community, supported by a revered priesthood and a universal religion, that of positive science, had begun the assemblage of teh megamachine in a technologically more adequate and impressive form. If one forgets the actual part played by the King (wartime American President), by the Priesthood (secret enclave of scientists), by the vast enlargement of the bureaucracy, the military forces, and the industrial establishment, one would have no realistic conception of what actually took place. Only in terms of the Pyramid Age do all the seemingly dispersed and accidental events become polarized into an orderly constellation. The construction of the modernized totalitarian megamachine, fortified by the invention of mechanical and electronic agents that could not be fully utilized until this assemblage had taken place, proved to be Hitler's most sinister, if wholly unintended, contribution to the enslavement of mankind.

I love conversations!” “Why?” “Because we’re all crazy!” said Serge. “And that’s how society makes progress: imaginations getting together and glancing off each other in accidental tangents of invention.

The discovery of the power of injected water was luck; understanding and exploiting it was anything but. Newcomen and Calley replaced18 the accidental hole in the cylinder with an injection valve, and, ingeniously, attached it to the piston itself.

objects

The popsicle was accidentally invented by an 11-year-old in 1905. He mixed sugary soda powder with water and left it out overnight. It was a cold evening, so the mixture froze. He woke up to the discovery and devoured the icy treat by licking it off the wooden stirrer.

Despite Acton's optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as "one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces." "Nationality," newly flourishing in Europe in Acton's day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. "The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality....Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational....The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom." And the State (as in Bismarck's Prussia)-the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism-was "a vast abstraction above all other things" (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives.

There are lots of people who aren't going to like this book, whether they are into morals or not. I figure there are three distinct groups of people who'll hate this thing. Hate group number one consists of most of the people who are mentioned in the book. Hate group number two consists of all the people who aren't mentioned in the book and are pissed at not being able to join hate group number one. Hate group number three doesn't give a damn about the other two hate groups and will just hate the book because somewhere I write that object-oriented programming was invented in Norway in 1967, when they know it was invented in Bergen, Norway, on a rainy afternoon in late 1966. I never have been able to please these folks, who are mainly programmers and engineers, but I take some consolation in knowing that there are only a couple hundred thousand of them. My guess is that most people won't hate this book, but if they do, I can take it. That's my job.

His coils helped him discover yet another phenomenon that would change the world: radio waves. When Tesla tuned two coils to resonate at the same frequency, he found that he could send and receive signals. He had accidentally built the first radio transmitter and made the first transmissions, methods he would patent within two years. Tesla’s continued research in the field of ultra-high-frequency energy led him to conclude that it was only a matter of time until science would discover

Anaesthesia is an eighteenth century term derived from the Greek word ‘an’, which means ‘without’, and ‘aisthesis’ meaning ‘sensation’.

Antibiotics are bacteria busters!!

It seems not improbable that when Turing let slip the fact of his homosexuality “accidentally,” especially to a young man like Bayley, he was hoping against hope that the admission might provoke an expression of reciprocal desire. That rarely happened. Later he told Robin Gandy, “Sometimes you’re sitting talking to someone and you know that in three quarters of an hour you will either be having a marvellous night or you will be kicked out of the room.

Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible.

Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible. The conclusion is summarized even more succinctly: Invention can’t happen by accident.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

The primary intention of any new invention is it's practical application, followed by a subsequent accidental misuse, and eventual premediated abuse.

corn blobs

Nestle

lol” which stands for “lots of laughs

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” ~ William Morris

Dr. Ferris leaned toward Dr. Stadler—through the staccato hoof-beats of the announcer’s voice galloping across the continent with a description of the new invention—and said in the tone of a casual remark, “It is vitally important that there be no criticism of the Project in the country at this precarious time,” then added semi-accidentally, as a semi-joke, “that there be no criticism of anything at any time.” “—and the nation’s political, cultural, intellectual and moral leaders,” the announcer was yelling into the microphone, “who have witnessed this great event, as your representatives and in your name, will now tell you their views of it in person!

Economics at Brockton

The accelerated pace of technological innovation in modern times, however, was by no means the sole result of the new awareness of invention. At least as important was the fact that, at some point during the Industrial Revolution, progress became sustained. A transition took place from a situation in which inventions were for the most part not only exceptional but accidental and unexpected, to one in which technological change—and the anticipation of technological change—became the normal state of affairs. Applied to the military sphere, this meant that war itself became an exercise in managing the future, and the most successful commanders were not those most experienced in the ways of the past but, on the contrary, those who realized that the past would not be repeated. In addition to becoming sustained, technological progress also became deliberate and therefore, up to a point, predictable. No longer regarding new devices as the gift of the gods or, increasingly, even as the near-miraculous brain-child of individual inventors, society began developing technology in directions which for one reason or another appealed to it. Often vast human and economic resources were expended to obtain some desired result, and the time was to come when it seemed that a goal only had to be formulated in order to be achieved.

And it was invented by a woman!

Evolution is the sadistic headmaster of the Succeed-or-Die School of Invention, motto: Disce aut consumere!—“learn or get eaten!” It is sad and sometimes ugly when a species fails in this school, especially ugly if the change they are confronted with is caused by human thoughtlessness. Sometimes the two happen in tandem and ugliness can create unexpected beauty. New railway lines are notorious for the havoc and destruction they can bring to a landscape, impacting both natural and artificial environments. However, the need to keep general human traffic away from the iron dragons that pass along these new lines has created a new habitat and led to a renaissance in rare wildflowers in some areas. But perhaps the most surreal and ironic example of this is the fact that many naturalists now support the military’s habit of firing big explosive shells at landscapes. Exploding ordnance falling from the sky has the dependable effect of keeping humans away and, consequently, firing ranges have accidentally created some of the most healthy ecosystems in Britain. Naturalists and the military are now working more closely, and this unlikely partnership is becoming less accidental and more deliberate.

Europe had come out of the fourteenth century pandemic as a world in flux. In this milieu, it was possible to think the unthinkable. It’s hardly accidental that in the wake of the Black Death, movements swelled up to translate the Bible into languages people actually spoke. Many wanted to see for themselves what the scriptures said because it kind of looked like maybe, perhaps, just maybe—here’s the unthinkable part: maybe the church had gotten something wrong.

They need to invent locks for those chests.

As he listened about the paint in the tube, Dr. Sheffield wondered if toothpaste could be put in such a tube. At that time, a family had a jar of toothpaste, and, when ready to brush their teeth, each person would moisten the brush bristles, dip the brush into the jar, and remove a small glob of toothpaste. Dr. Sheffield believed this was unsanitary. Dr. Sheffield had his own brand of toothpaste, Créme Dentifrice, so he decided to market it in tubes. People liked the idea, and soon Colgate, a leading national toothpaste brand, was using the packaging technique as well. The first tubes were metal, but, when there was a metal shortage in the 1940s because of World War II, the tubes began to be made with plastic as well, and, in recent days, they are made completely of plastic. Also, caps used to unscrew, but many are now flip-top so that the cap does not roll away. Dentists recommend you use this product three times a day, so you have likely seen this accidental discovery . . . the toothpaste tube.

I lived in my mind, with my negative and judgemental thoughts, and had no idea they were inventing my life experiences.

In India there is a sect of Jainist monks called the Shvetambara, who always carry a broom and sweep the ground before them as they walk, lest they accidentally tread on some insects and squash them.

The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. Yet to the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. Gunpowder’s subsequent career is even more telling. One might have thought that the Daoist alchemists would have made China master of the world. In fact, the Chinese used the new compound mainly for firecrackers. Even as the Song Empire collapsed in the face of a Mongol invasion, no emperor set up a medieval Manhattan Project to save the empire by inventing a doomsday weapon. Only in the fifteenth century – about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder – did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields. Why did it take so long for the deadly potential of this substance to be put to military use? Because it appeared at a time when neither kings, scholars, nor merchants thought that new military technology could save them or make them rich.

We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention.

The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.

The order of discovery concerning the materials in the human environment and of the technology that resulted from such discoveries was not haphazard or accidental. The order of discovery followed a logical order and an order that it had to follow. The easier discoveries were made before the harder discoveries; discoveries that were dependent upon prior discoveries being made, were only made after those discoveries; and inventions that were not economic or did not meet human needs were not made until they made economic sense or until a need arose. The course of human social and cultural history is written into the structure of the universe.

Oh,” he said, stopping in the doorway. “I should probably warn you. Your beds might take a little getting used to.” “Why?” Tesla asked. “What’s wrong with them?” When Uncle Newt had shown them their room earlier, the beds had looked normal enough. Not that Nick and Tesla had paid much attention to them. They’d been distracted—and horrified—by the posters haphazardly stapled to the wall: Teletubbies, Elmo, Smurfs, Albert Einstein, and the periodic table. (Nick and Tesla had quickly agreed that the first three would “fall down” and “accidentally” “get ripped” at the first opportunity.) “There’s nothing wrong with your beds, and everything right!” Uncle Newt declared. “I’m telling you, kids. You haven’t slept till you’ve slept on compost!” “What?” Nick and Tesla said together. Even Uncle Newt couldn’t miss the disgust on their faces. “Maybe I’d better come up and explain,” he said. Uncle Newt pulled the comforter off Nick’s bed and revealed something that didn’t look like a bed at all. It was more like a lumpy black sleeping bag with tubes and wires poking out of one end. “Behold!” Uncle Newt said. “The biomass thermal conversion station!” Nick reluctantly gave it a test-sit. It felt like he was lowering himself onto a garbage bag stuffed with rotten old food. Because he was. “As you sleep,” Uncle Newt explained, “your body heat will help decompose food scraps pumped into the unit, which will in turn produce more heat that the convertor will turn into electricity. So, by the time you wake up in the morning, you’ll have enough power to—ta da!” Uncle Newt waved his hands at a coffeemaker sitting on the floor nearby. “Brew coffee?” Tesla said. Uncle Newt gave her a gleeful nod. “We don’t drink coffee,” said Nick. “Then you can have a hot cup of invigorating fresh-brewed water.” “Great,” Nick said. He experimented with a little bounce on his “bed.” He could feel slimy things squishing and squashing beneath his butt. “Comfy?” Uncle Newt asked. “Uhh … kind of,” Nick said. Uncle Newt beamed at his invention. “Patent pending,” he said. Uncle Newt was a gangly man with graying hair, but at that moment he looked like a five-year-old thinking about Christmas. Tesla gave the room a tentative sniff. “Shouldn’t the compost stink?” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Each biomass thermal conversion station is completely airtight!” Uncle Newt’s smile wavered just the teeniest bit. “In theory.” Nick opened his mouth to ask another question, but Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice. “Well,” he said, slapping his hands together, “I guess you two should wash your teeth and brush your faces and all that. Good night!

Horology is a term used to indicate the study of time.

All that becomes known of the course of events in War is usually very simple, and has a great sameness in appearance; no one on the mere relation of such events perceives the difficulties connected with them which had to be overcome. It is only now and again, in the memoirs of Generals or of those in their confidence, or by reason of some special historical inquiry directed to a particular circumstance, that a portion of the many threads composing the whole web is brought to light. The reflections, mental doubts, and conflicts which precede the execution of great acts are purposely concealed because they affect political interests, or the recollection of them is accidentally lost because they have been looked upon as mere scaffolding which had to be removed on the completion of the building. If, now, in conclusion, without venturing upon a closer definition of the higher powers of the soul, we should admit a distinction in the intelligent faculties themselves according to the common ideas established by language, and ask ourselves what kind of mind comes closest to military genius, then a look at the subject as well as at experience will tell us that searching rather than inventive minds, comprehensive minds rather than such as have a special bent, cool rather than fiery heads, are those to which in time of War we should prefer to trust the welfare of our women and children, the honour and the safety of our fatherland.

The fear of needles is known as Trypanophobia!

When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment,