According To My Calculations Quotes

We're here, and it's nighttime. So according to my calculations, we must not have done anything stupid.

Do not, whatever else you might do,” said the professor, “touch those two stones together.” “Why not?” “Because, according to my calculations, if the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.

Moreover: then, you say, science itself will teach man (though this is really a luxury in my opinion) that in fact he has neither will nor caprice, and never did have any, and that he himself is nothing but a sort of piano key or a sprig in an organ;14 and that, furthermore, there also exist in the world the laws of nature; so that whatever he does is done not at all according to his own wanting, but of itself, according to the laws of nature. Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world.

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

17.  According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans. [Sun Tzu, as a practical soldier, will have none of the “bookish theoric.” He cautions us here not to pin our faith to abstract principles; “for,” as Chang Yu puts it, “while the main laws of strategy can be stated clearly enough for the benefit of all and sundry, you must be guided by the actions of the enemy in attempting to secure a favorable position in actual warfare.” On the eve of the battle of Waterloo, Lord Uxbridge, commanding the cavalry, went to the Duke of Wellington in order to learn what his plans and calculations were for the morrow, because, as he explained, he might suddenly find himself Commander-in-chief and would be unable to frame new plans in a critical moment. The Duke listened quietly and then said: “Who will attack the first tomorrow—I or Bonaparte?” “Bonaparte,” replied Lord Uxbridge. “Well,” continued the Duke, “Bonaparte has not given me any idea of his projects; and as my plans will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?”75] 18.  All warfare is based on deception. [The truth of this pithy and profound saying will be admitted by every soldier. Col. Henderson tells us that Wellington, great in so many military qualities, was especially distinguished by “the extraordinary skill with which he concealed his movements and deceived both friend and foe.”] 19. 

Even until quite recently, many of the world’s inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood: There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill. “So where are we, Russia or Poland?” “According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.” The villagers immediately began dancing for joy. “Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?” “Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!

More often and more insistently as that time recedes, we are asked by the young who our "torturers" were, of what cloth were they made. The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some frantically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators, and then completed by the SS "drill." Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible, but it must bee just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that the great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the "beautiful words" of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin, afflicted by deaths, misery, and remorse, and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will. This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this—ridiculous journal of an aging concierge—if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

At the other extreme, the consumption tax rate should be very, very high for any products that impose massive negative externalities. Consider handgun ammunition. Currently, one can buy five hundred rounds of 9 mm ammunition for about $110 from online U.S. retailers—about twenty-two cents each. But each round of ammunition has a slight chance of falling into the wrong hands and killing someone. How slight? About 10 billion rounds are sold per year in the United States. There are about thirty thousand gun-related deaths in the United States per year (including suicides, homicides, and accidents). Assuming the typical gun death involves one round of ammo, the chance that any given round will end up killing someone is about thirty thousand divided by 10 billion, or three per million. Now, a person’s life is generally reckoned to be worth about $3 million, according to the usual cost-benefit-risk analyses by highway engineers, airlines, and hospitals. If each bullet has a three per million chance of negating a $3 million life, then that bullet imposes an expected average cost on society of $9. That’s about forty times its conventional retail cost of $0.22, so, by my reasoning, it should be subject to a consumption tax rate of 4,000 percent. This is obviously a rough calculation; it ignores the injury costs of nonlethal shootings (which would increase the tax) and the crime-deterrence effects, if any, of citizens having ammo (which would decrease the tax).

Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer. She blushed gorgeously, but her voice was serious as she studied his face. “If things hadn’t gone so well for you-if you hadn’t accumulated so much wealth-you could have been happy up here, couldn’t you?” “With you?” “Of course.” His smile was as somber as hers. “Absolutely.” “Although,” he added, linking her hands behind her back and drawing her a little closer, “you may not want to remain up here when you learn your emeralds are back in their cases at Montmayne.” Her head snapped up, and her eyes shone with love and relief. “I’m so glad. When I realized Robert’s story had been fabrication, it hurt beyond belief to realize I’d sold them.” “It’s going to hurt more,” he teased outrageously, “when you realize your bank draft to cover their cost was a little bit short. It cost me $45,000 to buy back the pieces that had already been sold, and $5,000 to buy the rest back from the jeweler you sold them to.” “That-that unconscionable thief!” she burst out. “He only gave me $5,000 for all of them!” She shook her head in despair at Ian’s lack of bargaining prowess. “He took dreadful advantage of you.” “I wasn’t concerned, however,” Ian continued teasing, enjoying himself hugely, “because I knew I’d get it all back out of your allowance. With interest, of course. According to my figures,” he said, pausing to calculate in his mind what it would have taken Elizabeth several minutes to figure out on paper, “as of today, you now owe me roughly $151,126.” “One hundred and- what?” she cried, half laughing and half irate. “There’s the little matter of the cost of Havenhurst. I added that in to the figure.” Tears of joy clouded her magnificent eyes. “You bought it back from that horrid Mr. Demarcus?” “Yes. And he is ‘horrid.’ He and your uncle ought to be partners. They both possess the instincts of camel traders. I paid $100,000 for it.” Her mouth fell open, and admiration lit her face. “$100,000! Oh, Ian-“ “I love it when you say my name.” She smiled at that, but her mind was still on the splendid bargain he’d gotten. “I could not have done a bit better!” she generously admitted. “That’s exactly what he paid for it, and he told me after the papers were signed that he was certain he could get $150,000 if he waited a year or so.” “He probably could have.” “But not from you!” she announced proudly. “Not from me,” he agreed, grinning. “Did he try?” “He tried for $200,000 as soon as he realized how important it was to me to buy it back for you.” “You must have been very clever and skillful to make him agree to accept so much less.” Trying desperately not to laugh, Ian put his forehead against hers and nodded. “Very skillful,” he agreed in a suffocated voice. “Still, I wonder why he was so agreeable?” Swallowing a surge of laughter, Ian said, “I imagine it was because I showed him that I had something he needed more than he needed an exorbitant profit.” “Really?” she said, fascinated and impressed. “What did you have?” “His throat.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Just try your best, babe,” she said. “That’s the same thing Mrs. Williams’s contract says,” I complained. “How do I know what my best is?” “Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown.” She didn’t understand. According to my black-or-white view of the world, it wasn’t enough to do my best. I had to be perfect. To take care of my mother, to send her to college, I needed to eliminate all mistakes. Mistakes had led to our predicament—Grandma marrying Grandpa, Grandpa denying my mother’s wish to go to college, my mother marrying my father—and they continued to cost us. I needed to correct those mistakes by avoiding new ones, and by getting perfect grades, then getting into a perfect college, then a perfect law school, then suing my imperfect father. But with school getting harder, I couldn’t see how I was going to be perfect, and if I were imperfect, then my mother and Grandma would be disappointed with me, and I’d be no better than my father, and then my mother would sing and cry and peck at her calculator—this was how my mind raced on the playground as I watched the other kids playing tetherball.

The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share. One of the three greatest joys in life is swimming naked in clean tropical sea. We need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve. The lethargy of compounded discomfort and boredom is the trademark of the genuine horror journey. That state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish traveling. Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice. I loved the cat, the cat appeared to love me. As for me, the name Surinam was enough. I had to see a place with a name like that. Stinking with rancid coconut butter, the local Elizabeth Arden skin cream. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. Bali- a museum island, boringly exquisite, filled with poor beautiful people being stared at by rich beautiful people. No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport.

My faults according to the calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps these offences might have been overlooked, had your pride not been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?" "You are mistaken, Mr Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way than as it spared me the concern I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentle-man-like manner. You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any way possible that would have attempted me to accept it. From the very beginning, from the very first moment I must almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish distain for the feelings of others, which such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt you were the last man on earth whom I could ever marry.

Distinguish Between Worry/Rumination and Helpful Problem Solving If you’re smart and you’ve experienced a lifetime of being rewarded for your thinking skills, it makes sense that you’ll default to trying to think your way out of emotional pain. However, because anxiety tends to make thinking negative, narrow, and rigid, it’s difficult to do creative problem solving when you’re feeling highly anxious. People who are heavy worriers tend to believe that worrying helps them make good decisions. However, rather than helping you problem-solve, rumination and worry usually just make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. Do you think people who worry a lot about getting cancer are more likely to do self-exams, have their moles mapped, or eat a healthy diet? According to research, the opposite is probably true. Worriers and ruminators wait longer before taking action. For example, one study showed that women who were prone to rumination took an average of 39 days longer to seek help after noticing a breast lump. That’s a scary thought. If you think about it, worry often comes from lack of confidence in being able to handle situations. Here’s an example: Technophobes who worry a lot about their hard drives crashing are the same people who are scared of accidentally wiping all their files if they attempt to do a backup. Therefore, worry is often associated with not doing effective problem solving. My experience of dealing with technophobic ruminators is that they don’t usually back up their computers! Experiment: To check for yourself whether ruminating and worrying lead to useful actions, try tracking the time you spend ruminating or worrying for a week. If a week is too much of a commitment, you could try two days—one weekday and one weekend day. When you notice yourself ruminating or worrying, write down the approximate number of minutes you spend doing it. The following day, note any times when ruminating/worrying led to useful solutions. Calculate your ratio: How many minutes did you spend overthinking for each useful solution it generated?

The reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge. What is called 'foreknowledge' cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation. There are five sorts of secret agents to be employed. These are native, inside, doubled, expendable, and living. When these five types of agents are all working simultaneously and none knows their method of operation they are called 'The Divine Skein' and are the treasure of a sovereign. Native agents are those of the enemy's country people whom we employ. Inside agents are enemy officials whom we employ. Among the official class there are worthy men who have been deprived of office; others who have committed errors and have been punished. There are sycophants and minions who are covetous of wealth. There are those who wrongly remain long in lowly office; those who have not obtained responsible positions, and those whose sole desire is to take advantage of times of trouble to extend the scope of their own abilities. There are those who are two-faced, changeable, and deceitful, and who are always sitting on the fence. As far as all such are concerned you can secretly inquire after their welfare, reward them liberally with gold and silk, and so tie them to you. Then you may rely on them to seek out the real facts of the situation in their country, and to ascertain its plans directed against you. They can as well create cleavages between the sovereign and his ministers so that these are not in harmonious accord. Doubled agents are enemy spies whom we employ. When the enemy sends spies to pry into my accomplishments or lack of them, I bribe them lavishly, turn them around, and make them my agents. Expendable agents are those of our own spies who are deliberately given fabricated information. We leak information which is actually false and allow our own agents to learn it. When these agents operating in enemy territory are taken by him they are certain to report this false information. The enemy will believe it and make preparations accordingly. But our actions will of course not accord with this, and the enemy will put the spies to death. Sometimes we send agents to the enemy to make a covenant of peace and then attack.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world. en—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. en the ‘Palace of Crystal’ will be built. en ... In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘I say, gentle- man, hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’ at again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very ‘most advantageous advantage’ which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

Run solar orbit computation software ‘Three Body 1.0’!” Newton screamed at the top of his lungs. “Start the master computing module! Load the differential calculus module! Load the finite element analysis module! Load the spectral method module! Enter initial condition parameters … and begin calculation!” The motherboard sparkled as the display formation flashed with indicators in every color. The human-formation computer began the long computation. “This is really interesting,” Qin Shi Huang said, pointing to the spectacular sight. “Each individual’s behavior is so simple, yet together, they can produce such a complex, great whole! Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule, claiming that I suppress creativity. But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.” “Great First Emperor, this is just the mechanical operation of a machine, not wisdom. Each of these lowly individuals is just a zero. Only when someone like you is added to the front as a one can the whole have any meaning.” Newton’s smile was ingratiating. “Disgusting philosophy!” Von Neumann said as he glanced at Newton. “If, in the end, the results computed in accordance with your theory and mathematical model don’t match reality, then you and I aren’t even zeroes.” “Indeed. If that turns out to be the case, you will be nothing!” Qin Shi Huang turned and left the scene.

This proposal I at once adopted, and accordingly found myself one morning at a small station of the Moscow Railway, endeavouring to explain to a peasant in sheep's clothing that I wished to be conveyed to Ivanofka, the village where my future teacher lived. At that time I still spoke Russian in a very fragmentary and confused way—pretty much as Spanish cows are popularly supposed to speak French. My first remark therefore being literally interpreted, was—"Ivanofka. Horses. You can?" The point of interrogation was expressed by a simultaneous raising of the voice and the eyebrows. "Ivanofka?" cried the peasant, in an interrogatory tone of voice. In Russia, as in other countries, the peasantry when speaking with strangers like to repeat questions, apparently for the purpose of gaining time. "Ivanofka," I replied. "Now?" "Now!" After some reflection the peasant nodded and said something which I did not understand, but which I assumed to mean that he was open to consider proposals for transporting me to my destination. "Roubles. How many?" To judge by the knitting of the brows and the scratching of the head, I should say that that question gave occasion to a very abstruse mathematical calculation. Gradually the look of concentrated attention gave place to an expression such as children assume when they endeavour to get a parental decision reversed by means of coaxing. Then came a stream of soft words which were to me utterly unintelligible.

So training smart, training effectively, involves cycling through the three zones in any given week or training block: 75 percent easy running, 5 to 10 percent running at target race paces, and 15 to 20 percent fast running or hill training in the third zone to spike the heart and breathing rates. In my 5-days-a-week running schedule, that cycle looks like this: On Monday, I cross-train. Tuesday, I do an easy run in zone one, then speed up to a target race pace for a mile or two of zone-two work. On Wednesday, it’s an easy zone-one run. Thursday is an intense third-zone workout with hills, speed intervals, or a combination of the two. Friday is a recovery day to give my body time to adapt. On Saturday, I do a relaxed run with perhaps another mile or two of zone-two race pace or zone-three speed. Sunday is a long, slow run. That constant cycling through the three zones—a hard day followed by an easy or rest day—gradually improves my performance in each zone and my overall fitness. But today is not about training. It’s about cranking up that treadmill yet again, pushing me to run ever faster in the third zone, so Vescovi can measure my max HR and my max VO2, the greatest amount of oxygen my heart and lungs can pump to muscles working at their peak. When I pass into this third zone, Vescovi and his team start cheering: “Great job!” “Awesome!” “Nice work.” They sound impressed. And when I am in the moment of running rather than watching myself later on film, I really think I am impressing them, that I am lighting up the computer screen with numbers they have rarely seen from a middle-aged marathoner, maybe even from an Olympian in her prime. It’s not impossible: A test of male endurance athletes in Sweden, all over the age of 80 and having 50 years of consistent training for cross-country skiing, found they had relative max VO2 values (“relative” because the person’s weight was included in the calculation) comparable to those of men half their age and 80 percent higher than their sedentary cohorts. And I am going for a high max VO2. I am hauling in air. I am running well over what should be my max HR of 170 (according to that oft-used mathematical formula, 220 − age) and way over the 162 calculated using the Gulati formula, which is considered to be more accurate for women (0.88 × age, the result of which is then subtracted from 206). Those mathematical formulas simply can’t account for individual variables and fitness levels. A more accurate way to measure max HR, other than the test I’m in the middle of, is to strap on a heart rate monitor and run four laps at a 400-meter track, starting out at a moderate pace and running faster on each lap, then running the last one full out. That should spike your heart into its maximum range. My high max HR is not surprising, since endurance runners usually develop both a higher maximum rate at peak effort and a lower rate at rest than unconditioned people. What is surprising is that as the treadmill

Chris Krueger, long-time Capitol Hill watcher for Guggenheim Securities, says the people expecting this kind of kumbaya moment are “Pollyannas”. He said: “My reading of the White House is that they already feel pretty good about their legacy, having done what no administration since Harry Truman has done and extended access to healthcare.” These are the facts on the ground, which bode ill for investors, but there is a conundrum: history suggests we are at a point in the political cycle when markets usually do well. After some volatility around the midterms, the stock market has historically settled into a very strong year in the third year of the presidential cycle, according to an analysis by Jeff Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac. Sweeping in 180 years of data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and predecessor indices, he calculates the average Year 3 gain to be 10.4 per cent, almost double the next best year, the presidential election year itself.

My goal was always 180 Morning Times a year, but I would guess that hitting 90 was what mostly happened. A good year meant that I got in two-thirds of those 180 days, a bad year, half. That’s the reality. But look at the numbers. Morning Time is a densely rich time. Ninety days of Morning Time a year was 90 days well spent. In my large family it could have been much worse and sometimes was. Sometimes we had bad days, and sometimes we even had bad years. According to my calculations, one good homeschooling year makes up for two bad ones.

According to the academicians who developed capital market theory, risk equals volatility, because volatility indicates the unreliability of an investment. I take great issue with this definition of risk. It’s my view that—knowingly or unknowingly—academicians settled on volatility as the proxy for risk as a matter of convenience. They needed a number for their calculations that was objective and could be ascertained historically and extrapolated into the future. Volatility fits the bill, and most of the other types of risk do not. The problem with all of this, however, is that I just don’t think volatility is the risk most investors care about. There are many kinds of risk.... But volatility may be the least relevant of them all. Theory says investors demand more return from investments that are more volatile. But for the market to set the prices for investments such that more volatile investments will appear likely to produce higher returns, there have to be people demanding that relationship, and I haven’t met them yet. I’ve never heard anyone at Oaktree—or anywhere else, for that matter—say, “I won’t buy it, because its price might show big fluctuations,” or “I won’t buy it, because it might have a down quarter.” Thus, it’s hard for me to believe volatility is the risk investors factor in when setting prices and prospective returns. Rather than volatility, I think people decline to make investments primarily because they’re worried about a loss of capital or an unacceptably low return.

The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself ). It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The non- relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.” Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include. Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit. However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available” and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.” We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded. In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.

You know,” I said as we trudged homeward, “this is an important occasion, and not just because of this great discovery. According to my calculations, tomorrow will be our second anniversary on the island “ “Is this really true?” Elizabeth asked. “I can hardly believe so much time has passed.” “It is true, my dear,” I said. Think of all of the adventures that we have had and that we are safe, well-fed and happy. I am going to declare tomorrow a special day of celebration.” “You mean that we are going to have a party?” cried Francis, jumping for joy. “Oh, I can hardly wait!” Actually, Francis did not have long to wait, for when the morning dawned, Elizabeth and I had the entire day’s festivities planned. Greeting my sons on the lawn beneath Falcon’s Nest, I said, “For the past two years, you boys have been practicing wrestling, running, swimming, shooting and horseback riding here on the island. Now, we are going to determine the champions of these feats.” So, the competitions began, with Elizabeth cheering the boys and Turk and Flora running alongside them. Unquestionably, the highlight of the day was the horseback-riding event. Fritz mounted Lightfoot and Ernest rode Grizzle, but they were no match for Jack’s skillful handling of the wild buffalo. A practiced groom could not have managed a thoroughbred horse with more grace and ease. “Jack, my boy,” I boomed, “I hereby declare you the winner of this contest.” “No, Papa.” interrupted Francis. “You haven’t seen what I can do yet.” Francis rode into the arena, mounted on his young buffalo bull, Broumm, which was just four months old. Elizabeth had made a saddle of kangaroo skin and stirrups that adjusted to Francis’s little legs.

me, if I could buy him another camera, I would’ve in a hot second, but I ain’t got that kinda bread! I only get five bucks allowance a week and according to my calculations, it’d take me, like, FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS to save up $800!

Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.” I need all my courage to die at twenty. “Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.” I will fight for my life. “Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.” Keep believing it. “The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.” (...) “Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.” “People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.” “Good, let’s argue.” “I don’t want to argue.” “Secret lives,” she said. “Dedekind listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards. (...) “Tell me about your mathematical dreams.” “Never had one.” “Cardano did, born half dead, his inner life a neon web of treachery and magic. Gambler, astrologer, heretic, court physician. Schemed his way through the algebra wars.” “Can I see the baby?” “Ramanujan had algebraic dreams. Wrote down the results after getting out of bed. Vast intuitive powers but poor education. Taken to Cambridge like a jungle boy. Sonja Kowalewski wasn’t allowed to attend university lectures. We both know why. When her husband died she spent days and days without food, coming out of her room only after she’d restored herself by working on her mathematics. Tell me, was it Kronecker who thought mathematics similar to poetry? I know Hamilton and many others tried their hands at verse. Our superduper Sonja preferred the novel.

according to my calculations,

Facebook Marketing Course By taking a Facebook marketing course, you can quickly create a means of income on a huge platform like Facebook. This Facebook marketing course covers a large part of digital marketing. When we talk about social media, we mean Facebook as the biggest online social media platform. Because every month on average 2.96 billion people around the world actively use Facebook and 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. So think about how much of a platform you are getting for free to promote your business. Most of us don't know about Facebook's numerous features and tools, or even if we do, we don't know how to use them. Although it is unbelievable, it is true that if we learn the use of those tools, we can easily increase the sales of our website, Facebook page, or e-commerce site many times. Why learn Facebook Marketing? The interface we usually see on Facebook is only 20% of Facebook. The remaining 80 percent are in various subdomains of Facebook. In our country, no one can use 99 percent of Facebook. It cannot be said that more than 5% of the mangoes are used by the common people. And spammers can use 10 percent. So today I will discuss how to earn from Facebook by using the maximum of Facebook. In 2019, Facebook earned $40 million from Facebook ads alone, after paying content creators, bloggers, publishers, and developers. Which has doubled till now. If the calculation includes the amount Facebook pays to those who create content and make videos on Facebook, the amount would be $1 billion. Have you ever wondered why Facebook gives them so much money? The reason is propaganda. As a result of this campaign, the business expanded. That is not in the words - "propaganda is expansion"! The objective of this Facebook campaign and marketing is to increase sales. The higher the sales, the higher the profit. That's why every company now hires its own social media marketing manager to promote its business and increase sales. A social media marketing manager's salary ranges from around $500 to $3,000. In other words, Facebook has facilitated the way to do business in social media as well as to get a job. How many Types of Facebook Marketing? To know how to use Facebook's features and tools, you need to take a Facebook Marketing Course. Facebook marketing is generally of two types, namely – free Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing. In this case, you can do both types of courses. Facebook free and paid marketing is used according to the type of business. Free Facebook Marketing Marketing or advertising on Facebook without spending any money is called Free Facebook Marketing. Let's give an example – “You open a Facebook page for your business, then give it a nice name according to the type of work you do. Then continue to post about your products every day, as well as request your relatives and friends to like your page. Also, ask them to share your page. Give them a little flattery so that they stay by your side and help grow your page by liking-commenting-sharing, etc etc”. But you don't have to spend any money to do them. This is called Free Facebook Marketing. Paid Facebook Marketing On Facebook, those posts that we see under a post (Sponsored) are called paid Facebook marketing. Every company wants everyone to know about their products. So they use paid Facebook marketing in addition to using free Facebook promotion. It is possible to reach very selective customers by using this paid Facebook marketing. For example, "You want your product's customers to be located within the Dhaka Banani area and for both men and women, and you can also give an age limit that people between so and so age will see my ad or post". It is natural that you will not get the benefits that you can enjoy in the case of paid Facebook marketing in the case of free. This is why you need to spend money on paid Facebook marketing.

He (Becker) then shows how a rather agreeable amorality has gained ground among our peasants, because they'd rather pursue their actual interests than the commandments of morality. Because the revolutionary priests and schoolmasters serve the hu man being, they cut off the head of human beings. The revolutionary laymen or the profane ones had no more inhibitions about cutting off heads, but were less concerned about human rights, i.e., the rights of man, than about their own. How does it come about, though, that the egoism of those who assert a personal interest, and inquire of it all the time, still always succumbs to a priestly or schoolmasterly, i.e., an ideal interest ? Their person seems to them too small, too insignificant, and in fact it is, to lay claim to everything and to be able to completely carry it through. There's a sure sign of this in the fact that they divide themselves into two persons, one eternal and one temporal, and every time care either only for the one or only for the other, on Sunday for the eternal, on the workday for the temporal, in prayer for the former, in work for the latter. They have the priest within themselves, and therefore don't get rid of him, and hear themselves getting a tongue-lashing inwardly every Sunday. How people have struggled and calculated to determine these dualistic essences ! Idea followed upon idea, principle upon principle, system upon system, and none were able to hold down the contradiction of the "worldly" person, the so-called "egoist;' for long. Doesn't this prove that all those ideas were too powerless to take up my whole will into themselves and satisfy it ? They were and remained hostile to me, even if the hostility lay concealed for a long time. Will it be like this with ownness? Is it also just an attempt at mediation ? Every principle to which I turned, such as to reason, I always had to turn away from again. Or can I always be rational, setting everything up in my life according to reason ? I can certainly strive for rationality, I can love it, just as I can also love God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my thoughts; it is in my heart, in my head, it is in me like the heart, but it is not I, I am not it.

For Step 2, Maffetone had me wearing a runner’s heart rate monitor, a basic model with a chest strap and wristwatch console. The alarm was set to go off just before I hit my fat-burning threshold, which I’d calculated according to Maffetone’s quick-and-easy equation. To figure out your fat-burning zone, you subtract your age from 180 and then fine-tune by this scale: (a) If you’ve been sidelined for a while with injury or illness, subtract another 5. (b) If you’ve been sidelined a long time (like recovering from a heart attack), subtract 10. (c) If you’ve been training at least four times a week for two years, add 0. (d) If you’ve trained hard for two years and are progressing in competition, add 5. In my case, it works like this: I’m fifty years old, so 180 – 50 = 130.

So I’ve done some research, and according to my calculations there are approximately 32,000,000 creatures like me in other planets. After hours of tedious equations and statically fact checking I have come to the conclusion there must be at least 1000 twins from Mars who are competitive. HEEEIIIILLLLLOOO?

Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces, and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán wrote, “with such force that it will kill a horse.… I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a sword in two pieces when it was held in a man’s hand at a distance of thirty paces.” (Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible, though.)

To make things even better, Erica hadn’t improved much at all during the next few hours of ski school, while the rest of us had. (The rest of us who weren’t faking being beginners, at least.) I had actually turned out to be pretty good at skiing—“a natural,” according to Woodchuck—but everyone else was getting better as well. Even Warren had made progress. He had obviously lied when he’d boasted that he wasn’t so bad at it the night before, but then, he wasn’t terrible, either. Meanwhile, skiing was like Erica’s Kryptonite. She couldn’t seem to do anything right. When she was supposed to turn, she’d go straight. When she was supposed to go straight, she’d turn. And she’d been falling constantly: on the slopes, on the magic carpet, even while merely standing still. According to my calculations, she’d actually spent more time on her butt that morning than on her feet.

The 5/6 ratio stems from the calendrical proportions of ancient Egypt which we witness on the circular zodiac of Dendera; it's calculated by dividing the 30 days of the month (i.e. five periods of six decans each) over the total number of decans in a year (i.e. 36). The result corresponds with the decanal-system daily contribution to the month and is in accordance with my interpretation of the zodiac for including one additional period (of six decans) that is not part of the month and rather of a geometrical significance to reference the eastern portals.

I say you are reading to slow. You need to read at least 93.5 mph. According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Around 2.2 million new titles are published worldwide each year. If a book is in average 250 pages. Or 3 cm. That is 66 km of books every year. Or just 180 meters of books every day. If you can spend 4h/day to read you just need to read 45 meters of books an hour or 1500 bph (Books Per Hour). You are probably reading at 0.025-0.1 books per hour. But if you practice, you might have a chance? If each book contains 250 pages. And each page is on average 20 cm tall. And you can spend 4h on average each day reading. That means you have to read text at a speed of 187.5 km/h to keep up. However that is probably a bit too fast, since there is usually some white space on each page of a book so lets round it down to 150km/h. According to Stephen Hawking “if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.” 90mph equals 144.841 km/h. I say, Stephen Hawking was a bit too generous. I calculated the reading speed needed on my own and came to the same approximately the same conclusion as Hawking. Yes I know. Great minds think a like, but since I think my calculation was a bit better. It must mean I'm a bit smarter than him, right? Not that I would want to flatter myself, just a little bit smarter is enough. Now I just need to study physics so I can solve how we may travel back in time to keep up reading all the books or make an alternative world with less authors so we can keep up reading. If you like me, think this situation is unacceptable. You too may sign my petition to forbid anyone from writing more than one book of 250 pages in their entire life for the next 2000-10.000 years. So we can catch up with reading all those books. You will have to excuse me but I tried to set my goal of reading 2.3 million books next year here on goodreads. But it only allowed to set the counter to 99 thousand so unfortunately it will have to wait until they fix this. I suspect the limit is there by intent. Since if everyone read all the books published each year and a few millions more, goodreads would not be needed. Their business model is based on you not reading 150kmbookpages/h. I have contacted customer support, unfortunately they did not take my suggestion seriously, if you could please help me and also email them then hopefully they will come to their senses and fix this once they see there is a demand. (Don't do this, it's just a joke.) In the meantime I will just go back to reading 10-20 books a year.

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Building Insurance Your Guide" by michael a.n.p. cretikos.] ________________________________________ 5 out of 5 stars ________________________________________ Share This Review FacebookTwitterLinkedInPinterestShare ________________________________________ Building Insurance: How to Select the Correct Building Sum Insured Value for Low-Rise and High-Rise Structures authored by Michael A. N. P. Cretikos is a comprehensive guide on how to select the best policy and factors to consider to avoid being in a situation of underinsurance. According to the author, he filled in the gap that exists in knowledge by introducing the Building Sum Insured Value (BSI) based on current rental value, and according to him, this method is the most accurate that there is. The author highlighted situations in which underinsurance is inevitable and underlined ways to avoid such situations. Taxes such as stamp duties on insurance could be disincentives, and the author discouraged it. He advised the readers to always opt for 100% coverage so that the loss can be fully catered for and the insured reinstated back to their previous position. Several acts and policies were stated, and the authors made suggestions for innovations; the ICA code wasn’t left out; he highlighted the fault in it and gave feasible solutions. This book was very informative, and I enjoyed reading it. The author's in-depth research shines through and adds a layer of authenticity to the book. I loved the fact that as much as the author criticized the already existing policies, he made suggestions for improvement. I equally appreciated the fact that there were so many quotations backed up with references so the readers can verify at their will. The step-by-step calculations and clearly outlined tables also enhanced my understanding of how numerical values are arrived at, and I absolutely loved it. As much as I enjoyed reading this book, I found some parts overly repetitive, and I also found the consistent use of bold texts quite distracting. I loved the keypoints outlined in every section; it made the important information very easy to grasp. Overall, this book was an enlightening read and would keep readers eager to learn more. I rate this book five out of five stars because of its informative contents and the fact that my dislikes weren’t enough to remove a star. I didn't find any errors while reading, which implies that the book was perfectly edited. I’d recommend this book to people who are interested in the workings of building insurance.