Accounting Equation Quotes

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond.

People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James—which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole—but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.

Rule #1: If Checking Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investing Account. Rule #2: If Investing Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investments. Rule #3: Never Break Rule #1 or Rule #2.

Do you know what accounts for most research delays? Interruptions that have nothing to do with the research whatsoever.

Talent is part of the equation, but when you combine talent with accountability and authenticity, it is tough to beat.

Well, sir, I think it's just as well that they are being phased out of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the supernova bomb. In the very short time since we were released from the time envelope-' 'Get to the point' 'The robots aren't enjoying it, sir.' 'what' 'The war sir, it seems to be getting them down there's a certain world-weariness.' 'Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping to destroy it.' 'yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted with a certain lassitude. They're just finding it hard to get behind the job. They lack oomph.' 'What are you trying to say?' 'Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir.' 'What on Krikkit are you talking about?' 'Well, in a few skirmishes they've recently, it seems that they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim.' 'And then what do they do?' 'Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly difficult ones by all accounts. And then they sulk.' 'Sulk?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Whoever heard of a robot sulking?' 'I don't know, sir.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Differential equations describe only the final condition in the case of the theory of ideally incompressible fluids. The actual process leading to establishment of the end condition of equilibrium from a state of rest is hardly conceivable without taking compressibility and braking processes into account.

Most importantly, we have our assets: an émigré who has returned to his native town. And we have our liabilities: he is afraid the GPU will take him away.

The ”Dean of science fiction writers” Robert A. Heinlein once said: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.

But Miss Ferguson preferred science over penmanship. Philosophy over etiquette. And, dear heavens preserve them all, mathematics over everything. Not simply numbering that could see a wife through her household accounts. Algebra. Geometry. Indecipherable equations made up of unrecognizable symbols that meant nothing to anyone but the chit herself. It was enough to give Miss Chase hives. The girl wasn’t even saved by having any proper feminine skills. She could not tat or sing or draw. Her needlework was execrable, and her Italian worse. In fact, her only skills were completely unacceptable, as no one wanted a wife who could speak German, discuss physics, or bring down more pheasant than her husband.

Everyone assumes that all we need is less work and more life, then all would be in harmonious balance. Not so. Where it has gone all wrong for so many – women especially – is that they’ve cleared enough time for the ‘life’ part of the equation but not taken into account that home-making isn’t necessarily restful or enjoyable. Your children may be the reason you get out of bed in the morning but you need to accept that spending more time with them is not necessarily any less stressful than work. More time with yourself probably is.

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

At first the night travel promised to be fatiguing, but that was on account of pyjamas. This foolish night-dress consists of jacket and drawers. Sometimes they are made of silk, sometimes of a raspy, scratchy, slazy woolen material with a sandpaper surface. The drawers are loose elephant-legged and elephant-waisted things, and instead of buttoning around the body there

Well, it helped that my husband was upstairs cheating on me. Because I was sickeningly jealous on both accounts. I was jealous when I found out Celia was gay, because it meant that she was with other women, or had been with other women, that her life wasn't just me. And I was jealous that my husband was with a woman upstairs at the very party I was at, because it was embarrassing and threatening my way of life. I had been living in this world where I thought I could have this closeness with Celia and this distance with Don and neither of them would need anything else from anyone else. It was this odd bubble that just up and burst." "I would imagine, back then, it wasn't a conclusion you'd come to easily--being in love with someone of the same sex." "Of course not! Maybe if I'd spent my whole life fighting off feelings for women, then I might have had a template for it. But I didn't. I was taught to like men, and I had found--albeit temporarily--love and lust with a man. The fact that I wanted to be around Celia all the time, the fact that I cared about her enough that I valued her happiness over my own, the fact that I liked to think about that moment when she stood in front of me without her shirt on--now, you put those pieces together, and you say, one plus one equals I'm in love with a woman. But back then, at least for me, I didn't have that equation. And if you didn't even realize that there's a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their ‘own kind’ did these despicable things to the Jewish people.

No one, especially not Birkhoff himself, would claim that the intricacies of aesthetic pleasure could be reduced entirely to a mere formula. However, in Birkhoff's words, "In the inevitable analytic accompaniment of the creative process, the theory of aesthetic measure is capable of performing a double service: it gives a simple, unified account of the aesthetic experience, and it provides means for the systematic analysis of typical aesthetic fields.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, writing as Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south. Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula

Don't get me wrong, loyalty is an admirable quality. But the number of years one has been around does not automatically equate with being a good leader, any more than does merely having the title of manager or vice president. And certainly the things we acquire- fine cars, nice homes- are not measures of our leadership ability. Leadership, more than anything else, is about the way we think. It's a moment-to-moment disciplining of our thoughts. It's about practicing personal accountability and choosing to make a positive contribution, no matter what out role or "level".

Why two (or whole groups) of people can come up with the same story or idea at the same time, even when across the world from each-other: "A field is a region of influence, where a force will influence objects at a distance with nothing in between. We and our universe live in a Quantum sea of light. Scientists have found that the real currency of the universe is an exchange of energy. Life radiates light, even when grown in the dark. Creation takes place amidst a background sea of energy, which metaphysics might call the Force, and scientists call the "Field." (Officially the Zero Point Field) There is no empty space, even the darkest empty space is actually a cauldron of energies. Matter is simply concentrations of this energy (particles are just little knots of energy.) All life is energy (light) interacting. The universe is self-regenreating and eternal, constantly refreshing itself and in touch with every other part of itself instantaneously. Everything in it is giving, exchanging and interacting with energy, coming in and out of existence at every level. The self has a field of influence on the world and visa versa based on this energy. Biology has more and more been determined a quantum process, and consciousness as well, functions at the quantum level (connected to a universe of energy that underlies and connects everything). Scientist Walter Schempp's showed that long and short term memory is stored not in our brain but in this "Field" of energy or light that pervades and creates the universe and world we live in. A number of scientists since him would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium - the Field. Associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the "Field," and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information. If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn't require any scanning mechanism to sift through years and years of memory. If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of perception. Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Field. This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity - and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in the Field. The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality - our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a Field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world began? Where was consciousness-encased inside our bodies or out there in the Field? Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected. In ignoring the effect of the "Field" modern physicists set mankind back, by eliminating the possibility of interconnectedness and obscuring a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. In re-normalizing their equations (to leave this part out) what they'd been doing was a little like subtracting God.

Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beach somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the whole problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn't connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn't blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its own eyes.

Imagine you're sitting having dinner in a restaurant. At some point during the meal, your companion leans over and whispers that they've spotted Lady Gaga eating at the table opposite. Before having a look for yourself, you'll no doubt have some sense of how much you believe your friends theory. You'll take into account all of your prior knowledge: perhaps the quality of the establishment, the distance you are from Gaga's home in Malibu, your friend's eyesight. That sort of thing. If pushed, it's a belief that you could put a number on. A probability of sorts. As you turn to look at the woman, you'll automatically use each piece of evidence in front of you to update your belief in your friend's hypothesis Perhaps the platinum-blonde hair is consistent with what you would expect from Gaga, so your belief goes up. But the fact that she's sitting on her own with no bodyguards isn't, so your belief goes down. The point is, each new observations adds to your overall assessment. This is all Bayes' theorem does: offers a systematic way to update your belief in a hypothesis on the basis of the evidence. It accepts that you can't ever be completely certain about the theory you are considering, but allows you to make a best guess from the information available. So, once you realize the woman at the table opposite is wearing a dress made of meat -- a fashion choice that you're unlikely to chance up on in the non-Gaga population -- that might be enough to tip your belief over the threshold and lead you to conclude that it is indeed Lady Gaga in the restaurant. But Bayes' theorem isn't just an equation for the way humans already make decisions. It's much more important that that. To quote Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, author of The Theory That Would Not Die: 'Bayes runs counter to the deeply held conviction that modern science requires objectivity and precision. By providing a mechanism to measure your belief in something, Bayes allows you to draw sensible conclusions from sketchy observations, from messy, incomplete and approximate data -- even from ignorance.

The truth is that everyone has some level of fear of commitment and being vulnerable, but he allows it to transcend everything. Unfortunately he has a fear of failure and making mistakes, hence why he maintains a best of both worlds position. He’s thinking “If I’m not in it and minimising the impact on me, how the hell can I be impacting her so much? He doesn’t genuinely believe that anything is his fault - most things are ‘seemingly’ totally out of his control and a byproduct of the interaction and the other person not safeguarding themselves. He may assume that because he’s safeguarding himself that you are and that if you’re not, it’s some sort of ‘fault’ in you. He won’t be accountable as it equates to being vulnerable so if you call him on his behaviour he’ll only turn it around on you or deny it. Being noncommittal means that when he thinks about ‘sticking’ with you, he panics that there may be a better option. When you tell him to “Jog on” he panics that you are his best option, so he uses fear to continue keeping his options open.

Among the many vital jobs to be done, the nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis? Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.

Computer simulation often works fine if we assume nothing more than Newton’s laws at the atomic scale, even though we know that really we should be using quantum, not classical, mechanics at that level. But sometimes approximating the behaviour of atoms as though they were classical billiard-ball particles isn’t sufficient. We really do need to take quantum behaviour into account to accurately model chemical reactions involved in industrial catalysis or drug action, say. We can do that by solving the Schrödinger equation for the particles, but only approximately: we need to make lots of simplifications if the maths is to be tractable. But what if we had a computer that itself works by the laws of quantum mechanics? Then the sort of behaviour you’re trying to simulate is built into the very way the machine operates: it is hardwired into the fabric. This was the point Feynman made in his article. But no such machines existed. At any rate they would, as he pointed out with wry understatement, be ‘machines of a different kind’ from any computer built so far. Feynman didn’t work out the full theory of what such a machine would look like or how it would work – but he insisted that ‘if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum-mechanical’.

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that -- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things in the whole world --samurai movies and the Macintosh -- and he understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.

We also find *physics*, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. *Physics* is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a *metaphysics* on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter. For it explains phenomena by something still more unknown than are they, namely by laws of nature resting on forces of nature, one of which is also the vital force. Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world or in nature must necessarily be capable of explanation from purely physical causes. But such an explanation―supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it―must always just as necessarily be burdened with two essential imperfections (as it were with two sore points, or like Achilles with the vulnerable heel, or the devil with the cloven foot). On account of these imperfections, everything so explained would still really remain unexplained. The first imperfection is that the *beginning* of the chain of causes and effects that explains everything, in other words, of the connected and continuous changes, can positively *never* be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, recedes incessantly and *in infinitum*. The second imperfection is that all the efficient causes from which everything is explained always rest on something wholly inexplicable, that is, on the original *qualities* of things and the *natural forces* that make their appearance in them. By virtue of such forces they produce a definite effect, e.g., weight, hardness, impact, elasticity, heat, electricity, chemical forces, and so on, and such forces remain in every given explanation like an unknown quantity, not to be eliminated at all, in an otherwise perfectly solved algebraical equation. Accordingly there is not a fragment of clay, however little its value, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities. Therefore these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i.e., causal, explanation indicate that such an explanation can be only *relatively* true, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only, the ultimate and hence sufficient one, in other words, cannot be the method that will ever be able to lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddles of things, and to the true understanding of the world and of existence; but that the *physical* explanation, in general and as such, still requires one that is *metaphysical*, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions, but for that very reason would have to follow quite a different path. The first step to this is that we should bring to distinct consciousness and firmly retain the distinction between the two, that is, the difference between *physics* and *metaphysics*. In general this difference rests on the Kantian distinction between *phenomenon* and *thing-in-itself*. Just because Kant declared the thing-in-itself to be absolutely unknowable, there was, according to him, no *metaphysics* at all, but merely immanent knowledge, in other words mere *physics*, which can always speak only of phenomena, and together with this a critique of reason which aspires to metaphysics." ―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, pp. 172-173

Dr. Gilligan states: “I am suggesting that the only way to explain the causes of violence, so that we can learn how to prevent it, is to approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, and to think of violence as a symptom of life-threatening pathology, which, like all form of illness, has an etiology or cause, a pathogen.”160 In Dr. Gilligan's diagnosis he makes it very clear that the greatest cause of violent behavior is social inequality, highlighting the influence of shame and humiliation as an emotional characteristic of those who engage in violence.161 Thomas Scheff, a emeritus professor of sociology in California stated that “shame was the social emotion”.162 Shame and humiliation can be equated with the feelings of stupidity, inadequacy, embarrassment, foolishness, feeling exposed, insecurity and the like – all largely social or comparative in their origin. Needless to say, in a global society with not only growing income disparity but inevitably “self-worth” disparity - since status is touted as directly related to our “success” in our jobs, bank account levels and the like - it is no mystery that feelings of inferiority, shame and humiliation are staples of the culture today. The consequence of those feelings have very serious implications for public health, as noted before, including the epidemic of the behavioral violence we now see today in its various complex forms. Terrorism, local school and church shootings, along with other extreme acts that simply did not exist before in the abstractions they find context today, reveals a unique evolution of violence itself. Dr. Gilligan concludes: “If we wish to prevent violence, then, our agenda is political and economic reform.”163

what I knew that morning in March 1977 as we settled around the conference table. I wasn’t even sure how these guys reached us, or how they’d arranged this meeting. “Okay, fellas,” I said, “what’ve you got?” It was a beautiful day, I remember. The light outside the room was a buttery pale yellow, and the sky was blue for the first time in months, so I was distracted, a little spring feverish, as Rudy leaned his weight on the edge of the conference table and smiled. “Mr. Knight, we’ve come up with a way to inject . . . air . . . into a running shoe.” I frowned and dropped my pencil. “Why?” I said. “For greater cushioning,” he said. “For greater support. For the ride of a lifetime.” I stared. “You’re kidding me, right?” I’d heard a lot of silliness from a lot of different people in the shoe business, but this. Oh. Brother. Rudy handed me a pair of soles that looked as if they’d been teleported from the twenty-second century. Big, clunky, they were clear thick plastic and inside were—bubbles? I turned them over. “Bubbles?” I said. “Pressurized air bags,” he said. I set down the soles and gave Rudy a closer look, a full head-to-toe. Six-three, lanky, with unruly dark hair, bottle-bottom glasses, a lopsided grin, and a severe vitamin D deficiency, I thought. Not enough sunshine. Or else a long-lost member of the Addams Family. He saw me appraising him, saw my skepticism, and wasn’t the least fazed. He walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing numbers, symbols, equations. He explained at some length why an air shoe would work, why it would never go flat, why it was the Next Big Thing. When he finished I stared at the blackboard. As a trained accountant I’d spent a good part of my life looking at blackboards, but this Rudy fella’s scribbles were something else. Indecipherable.

As an experiment, I tweaked the questions using Kelly’s “Did I do my best to” formulation. • Did I do my best to be happy? • Did I do my best to find meaning? • Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? • Did I do my best to be a good husband? Suddenly, I wasn’t being asked how well I performed but rather how much I tried. The distinction was meaningful to me because in my original formulation, if I wasn’t happy or I ignored Lyda, I could always blame it on some factor outside myself. I could tell myself I wasn’t happy because the airline kept me on the tarmac for three hours (in other words, the airline was responsible for my happiness). Or I overate because a client took me to his favorite barbecue joint, where the food was abundant, caloric, and irresistible (in other words, my client—or was it the restaurant?—was responsible for controlling my appetite). Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process. After a few weeks using this checklist, I noticed an unintended consequence. Active questions themselves didn’t merely elicit an answer. They created a different level of engagement with my goals. To give an accurate accounting of my effort, I couldn’t simply answer yes or no or “30 minutes.” I had to rethink how I phrased my answers. For one thing, I had to measure my effort. And to make it meaningful—that is, to see if I was trending positively, actually making progress—I had to measure on a relative scale, comparing the most recent day’s effort with previous days. I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.

Most common discussions of political authority presuppose existing political institutions and ask under what conditions do institutions of that kind have legitimate authority. This begs many questions, and precludes many possibilities. It presupposes that either this government has all the authority it claims over its population or it has none. Here again we notice one of the special features of the account of the previous chapter. It allows for a very discriminating approach to the question. The government may have only some of the of the authority it claims, it may have more authority over one person than over another. The test is as explained before: does following the authority's instructions improve conformity with reason? For every person the question has to be asked afresh, and for every one it has to be asked in a manner which admits of various qualifi cations. An expert pharmacologist may not be subject to the authority of the government in matters of the safety of drugs, an inhabitant of a little village by a river may not be subject to its authority in matters of navigation and conservation of the river by the banks of which he has spent all his life. These conclusions appear paradoxical. Ought not the pharmacologist or the villager to obey the law, given that it is a good law issued by a just government? I will postpone consideration of the obligation to obey the law until the last section of this chapter. For the time being let us remove two other misunderstandings which make the above conclusion appear paradoxical. First, it may appear as if the legitimacy of an authority rests on its greater expertise. Are political authorities to be equated with big Daddy who knows best? Second, again the suspicion must creep back that the exclusive concentration on the individual blinds one to the real business of government, which is to co-ordinate and control large populations.

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win—a conviction with much grounding in experience—which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all? On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect been saying), and the statement, "Whatever you do, I don't want you" (which is what racism declares). It is, in other words, both absurd and immoral to equate the despairing response of the victim with the contemptuous assertion of the oppressor. It would, moreover, be tragic if white liberals allowed verbal hostility on the part of Negroes to drive them out of the movement or to curtail their support for civil rights. The issue was injustice before black power became popular, and the issue is still injustice.

Once the process of accounting for every available square inch of terrain and every raw material has begun, it is necessary to convince people to want the converted products. On the environmental end of the equation, the goal is to turn raw materials in the ground, or the ground itself, into a commodity. On the personal end of the equation, the goal is to convert the uncharted internal human wilderness into a form that desires to accumulate the commodities. The conversion process within the human is directed at experience, feeling, perception, behavior and desire. These must be catalogued, defined and reshaped. The idea is to get both ends of the equation in synchrony, like standard-gauge railways. The human becomes the terminus of the conversion of plants, animals and minerals into objects. The conversion of natural into artificial, inherent in our economic system, takes place as much inside human feeling and experience as it does in the landscape. The more you smooth out the flow, the better the system functions and, in particular, the more the people who activate the processes benefit. In the end, the human, like the environment, is redesigned into a form that fits the needs of the commercial format. People who take more pleasure in talking with friends than in machines, commodities and spectacles are outrageous to the system. People joining with their neighbors to share housing or cars or appliances are less “productive” than those who live in isolation from each other, obtaining their very own of every object. Any collective act, from sharing washing machines to car-pooling to riding buses, is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units and private homes. Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience, from sexuality to breast feeding to cycles of mood, are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied, who seek vaginal sprays, chemical and artificial milk, drugs to smooth out emotional ups and downs, and commodities to substitute for experience.

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.

might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl finished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

When they [Shiva and Parvati] play the game of dice, they always wind up in an acrimonious dispute, accusing each other of cheating and many other unfair tricks. Shiva's game of dice is another mythological account of how the world runs, although it is not so well known as the myth of his cosmic dance. The game illustrates the conflict between the individual and cosmic self. The game of dice is also Zarathustra's favorite metaphor along with the metaphor of dance. In 'Before Sunrise', he compares the world to a game of dice by calling the azure bell 'a divine table for divine dice and dice players.' In fact, he equates the cosmic game of dice with the cosmic dance of the world. He says to the azure bell, 'You are to me a dance floor for divine accidents. The dance of Life is the cosmic dance of the azure bell. Just like Shiva's dance, the cosmic dance of Life is a game of dice. That explains why Zarathustra cannot control it. By its nature, the game of dice is beyond control. Parvati gets into vicious arguments with Shiva because she is trying to control what is beyond control. For the same reason, Zarathustra cannot avoid fighting with Life. He cannot resist the temptation to control her.

This lovers quarrel is similar to the one between Shiva and his consort Parvati. When they play the game of dice, they always wind up in an acrimonious dispute, accusing each other of cheating and many other unfair tricks. Shiva's game of dice is another mythological account of how the world runs, although it is not so well known as the myth of his cosmic dance. The game illustrates the conflict between the individual and cosmic self. The game of dice is also Zarathustra's favorite metaphor along with the metaphor of dance. In 'Before Sunrise', he compares the world to a game of dice by calling the azure bell 'a divine table for divine dice and dice players.' In fact, he equates the cosmic game of dice with the cosmic dance of the world. He says to the azure bell, 'You are to me a dance floor for divine accidents. The dance of Life is the cosmic dance of the azure bell. Just like Shiva's dance, the cosmic dance of Life is a game of dice. That explains why Zarathustra cannot control it. By its nature, the game of dice is beyond control. Parvati gets into vicious arguments with Shiva because she is trying to control what is beyond control. For the same reason, Zarathustra cannot avoid fighting with Life. He cannot resist the temptation to control her.

Here's just one of Ramanujan's many provocative formulas: (1+1/2^4) * (1+1/3^4)*(1+1/5^4)*(1+1/7^4)*(1+1/next prime number^4)x...= 105/pi^4. The infinite product on the left side of this equation is based on successive prime numbers raised to the 4th power. Primes are integers greater than 1 that are evenly divisible only by themselves and 1. Thus, 3 is a prime, but 4 isn't because it's evenly divisible by 2. The first nine primes are 2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19, and 23. The primes go on forever, which accounts for the ellipsis at the end of the product in Ramanujan's formula. This formula shows a deep connection between pi and the prime numbers.

Lincoln reached over his shoulder and neatly snagged a laptop off his desk. “Got her computer. I haven’t found anything yet. Most of her work is password-protected, and she used rotating binary generator accounts to give random pass codes. Based on the Bernoulli equation.” Taylor shook her head. “Huh?” “Bernoulli’s principle? Increases in velocity, decreases in pressure create lift. Commonly taught as why airplanes fly, though it would have to be a perfect world for that particular equation to work. It’s just easy to explain. The binary generator uses the velocity equation from Bernoulli to—” Taylor started laughing. Despite the urbane exterior, Lincoln was a computer genius, a regular geek at heart. “What you’re saying is this is pretty sophisticated stuff for a reporter?” “For anyone, actually. There’s something in here she doesn’t want anyone to read, that’s for sure.

The golden equation of life is S = D^P^A. Success is equal to Dreams to the power of Passion to the power of Actions.

Ordinarily we equate accountability with blame and blamelessness, concepts from the world of measurement. When I blame you for something that goes wrong, I seek to establish that I am in the right—and we all know the delicious feeling of satisfaction there. However, inasmuch as I blame you for a miserable vacation or a wall of silence—to that degree, in exactly that proportion, I lose my power. I lose my ability to steer the situation in another direction, to learn from it, or to put us in good relationship with each other. Indeed, I lose any leverage I may have had, because there is nothing I can do about your mistakes—only about mine.

So Charlie decided to take back what rightfully belonged to her. She was no longer as naive as she had once been. She learned everything she could about banking and finance and figured out how to establish a secure Swiss bank account. After that, through Barracuda, she hacked into Lightning’s corporate bank accounts, siphoned out a considerable amount of money, and deposited it in her own account. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she enacted a little more vengeance on Lightning. On the company’s homepage, she altered the slogan to “Committing Evil for 120 years” and animated their lightning logo so that it struck a kennel and set several cartoon dogs on fire. She also removed all the software products for sale on their website, replacing them with particularly horrible items like elephant tusks, rhino horns, and giant panda skins. Finally, she wiped out all of Lightning’s access codes.

change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

In an earthbound perspective that excludes all consideration of God, there will be no day of reckoning. The good will die young, nice guys will finish last, and the murderers, rapists, and warmongers will never be held accountable for their actions. Humans will continue to be free to act like animals, biting and devouring one another. If there is no God, or Creator (no one outside the cycle) all our greatest feats and accomplishments will disappear when we die. Like chasing the wind, whatever we gain, we will eventually lose. Not only will we be forgotten when everyone we know dies, but even the greatest legacies will equate to nothing on the day that the sun burns out and the human race is no more.

It needs to be pointed out that very few of the global carrying capacity models account for human ingenuity. As we have discussed, it is easier not to see things coming than to see them, so we tend to extrapolate into the future directly from the way things are now. That’s unfortunate and, in my view, scientifically wrong, for it eliminates an important factor from the equation.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

Double-entry accounting was popularized in Europe toward the end of the fifteenth century, and most scholars believe it set the table for the flowering of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern capitalism. What is far less well understood is the why. Why was something as dull as bookkeeping so integral to a complete cultural revolution in Europe? Over nearly seven centuries, “the books” have become something that, in our collective minds, we equate with truth itself—even if only subconsciously. When we doubt a candidate’s claims of wealth, we want to go to his bank records—his personal balance sheet. When a company wants to tap the public markets for capital, they have to open their books to prospective investors. To remain in the market, they need accountants to verify those books regularly. Well-maintained and clear accounting is sacrosanct. The ascendance of bookkeeping to a level equal to truth itself happened over many centuries, and began with the outright hostility European Christendom had to lending before double-entry booking came along. The ancients were pretty comfortable with debt. The Babylonians set the tone in the famous Code of Hammurabi, which offered rules for handling loans, debts, and repayments. The Judeo-Christian tradition, though, had a real ax to grind against the business of lending. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” Deuteronomy 23:19–20 declares. “In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God,” Ezekiel 22:12 states. As Christianity flourished, this deep anti-usury culture continued for more than a thousand years, a stance that coincided with the Dark Ages, when Europe, having lost the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, also lost nearly all comprehension of math. The only people who really needed the science of numbers were monks trying to figure out the correct dates for Easter.

the die is cast, There will be time to audit The accounts later, there will be sunlight later And the equation will come out at last.

oncologists met to discuss a replacement for the ASTRO definition. They decided to define treatment failure as a PSA level that has risen 2 ng/ml higher than a man’s PSA nadir (the lowest level it reached following treatment). This definition has been correlated more accurately with long-term results in all patients, and it takes into account such factors as hormonal therapy and the PSA bounce. Failure is now considered to occur when the PSA level reaches the nadir + 2 value. This is called the Phoenix definition. Still, it takes time to determine this value, so this equation should not be used to gauge the success of treatment in men with less than two years’ worth of PSA tests after radiation therapy. Furthermore, the consensus panel that developed this definition cautions,

Despite its overwhelming virtues, the Core Theory is imperfect. Indeed, precisely because it is such a faithful description of reality, we must, in pursuit of our Question, hold it to the highest esthetic standards. So scrutinized, the Core Theory reveals flaws. Its equations are lopsided, and they contain several loosely connected pieces. Furthermore, the Core Theory does not account for so-called dark matter and dark energy. Although those tenuous forms of mater are negligible in our immediate neighborhood, they persist in the interstellar and intergalactic voids, and thereby come to dominate the overall mass of the Universe. For those and other reasons, we cannot remain satisfied.

God is not a robot. He isn’t a comptroller of an accounting company trying to make things add up or work out. He is a being full of deep emotion, longing, and memories of what it used to be like. The incarnation therefore isn’t about an equation but about remembering what home used to be like and making a plan to get back there. Consider this reboot of the Genesis creation account. It may help you see God’s emotion a little better. First off, nothing … but God. No light, no time, no substance, no matter. Second off, God says the word and WHAP! Stuff everywhere! The cosmos in chaos: no shape, no form, no function—just darkness … total. And floating above it all, God’s Holy Spirit, ready to play. Day one: Then God’s voice booms out, “Lights!” and, from nowhere, light floods the skies and “night” is swept off the scene. God gives it the big thumbs up, calls it “day”. Day two: God says, “I want a dome—call it ‘sky’—right there between the waters above and below.” And it happens. Day three: God says, “Too much water! We need something to walk on, a huge lump of it—call it ‘land’. Let the ‘sea’ lick its edges.” God smiles, says, “Now we’ve got us some definition. But it’s too plain! It needs colour! Vegetation! Loads of it. A million shades. Now!” And the earth goes wild with trees, bushes, plants, flowers and fungi. “Now give it a growth permit.” Seeds appear in every one. “Yesss!” says God. Day four: “We need a schedule: let’s have a ‘sun’ for the day, a ‘moon’ for the night; I want ‘seasons’, ‘years’; and give us ‘stars’, masses of stars—think of a number, add a trillion, then times it by the number of trees and we’re getting there: we’re talking huge! Day five: “OK, animals: amoeba, crustaceans, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals … I want the whole caboodle teeming with a million varieties of each—and let’s have some fun with the shapes, sizes, colours, textures!” God tells them all, “You’ve got a growth permit—use it!” He sits back and smiles, says, “Result!” Day six: Then God says, “Let’s make people—like us, but human, with flesh and blood, skin and bone. Give them the job of caretakers of the vegetation, game wardens of all the animals.” So God makes people, like him, but human. He makes male and female.… He smiles at them and gives them their job description: “Make babies! Be parents, grandparents, great-grandparents—fill the earth with your families and run the planet well. You’ve got all the plants to eat from, so have all the animals—plenty for all. Enjoy.” God looks at everything he’s made, and says, “Fantastic. I love it!” Day seven: Job done—the cosmos and the earth complete. God takes a bit of well-earned R&R and just enjoys. He makes an announcement: “Let’s keep this day of the week special, a day off—battery-recharge day: Rest Day.”2 I’m not normally a paraphrase guy, but we always read the creation story like a textbook. I love this rendition because it captures the enthusiastic emotion that God felt about everything He created, especially humans. He loved it all. He loved us. Most of all, He loved the way things were.

Burmese economist U Myint proposes a corruption equation that predicts corruption as a result of economic and political opportunity minus accountability. The equation is:   C = R + D – A   In the above equation, C stands for Corruption, R for Economic Rent, D for Discretionary Powers,

As men and women seek to find independence from God, they have lost a sense of purpose in life. The worth of human personality is often equated with what we do for a living. However, a person’s occupation, community standing, or bank account is not what is important in God’s eyes.

In the success equation, subtraction comes before multiplication or addition. You must sow before you can reap a harvest.

Your associations play a crucial part of your success equation. Study them closely because they will help or hinder you from reaching your potential.

Intuitive explanation. The explanation is again based on the field nature of matter, described by the field equations. Consider two atoms in a rocketship (or in its contents). Suppose that one atom creates a field disturbance and when that disturbance reaches the second atom something happens. (It is the interaction among atoms, after all, that causes everything to happen.) Now if the rocketship is moving, the second atom will have moved farther ahead, so the disturbance must travel a greater distance to get there, even after taking the F-L contraction into account. Since fields travel at a fixed rate, ti will therefore take longer for the disturbance to reach the second atom. (Disturbances that propagate in the backward direction have a shorter distance to travel, but this effect turns out to be not as great.) In short, things happen more slowly when you're moving because the fields have to travel a greater distance.

Physicists have formulated equations that indicate exactly how much length contraction objects will experience and how slow time will progress relative to the stationary observer. These equations take into account the velocity of the observer. The faster the movement, the more space contraction and time dilation will occur. What is the limit of this process? What if people could go very, very fast? If they were actually able to go the speed of light, they would shrink to nothingness and time would totally stop for them. That is, they could not exist. This is yet another consequence of special relativity: there is a type of cosmic speed limit. Nothing can move as fast as, or faster than, the speed of light. This is, quite literally, a limitation described by science.

I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Celestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the 'Living' sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Celestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.

An easy way to keep everything straight is to think of “debit” as meaning “left,” and “credit” as meaning “right.” In other words, debits increase accounts on the left side of the accounting equation, and credits increase accounts on the right side. Also, this helps you to remember that the debit half of a journal entry is on the left, while the credit half is indented to the right.

Through difficult calculations of merciless precision that call upon the full power of modern computer technology, they've shown that unbendable equations of high symmetry account convincingly and in quantitative detail for the existence of protons and neutrons, and for their properties. They've demonstrated the origin of the proton's mass, and thereby the lioness's share of our mass. I believe this is one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

Modern political systems are labeled liberal democracies because they unite two disparate principles. Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property, which is critical for economic growth and prosperity. The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one.

Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my communication policy’s] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times over. Please do not ask for them. To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

No one is hungry for punishment, especially when punishment is equated with publicly declared failure and incompetence.

Shame can falsely equate the quality of the person with the error made. Instead of focusing on correcting and learning from a specific mistake, the employee feels humiliated. Nothing positive comes from humiliation. Employees who feel badly about themselves never do optimal work.

case, when you ask him for the order for the second time, you would step him down from ten thousand shares to five thousand shares, which reduces the energy-in aspect of the closing equation by 50 percent, after you just increased the benefits-out side of the equation during your follow-up presentation. This creates an extremely powerful one-two punch that will significantly increase your closing rate. And, of course, on your third closing attempt, you would step down to a thousand shares … and then down to five hundred shares on your fourth attempt, going all the way down to whatever the firm’s minimum is for opening up a new account.

However, the E=mc2 does not take into account the momentum, which is also a form of energy, and in 1905 Einstein added the momentum (p), thus obtaining the energy-momentum-mass equation (E2=m2c4+p2c2). Since energy is squared (E2) and in the momentum (p) there is time, a square root is used and there are two solutions: negative time energy and positive time energy. Positive time energy implies causality, whereas negative time energy implies retrocausality: the future that acts backwards into the past. This was considered impossible and to solve this paradox Einstein removed the momentum, given the fact that it is practically equal to zero compared to the speed of light (c). In this way, he returned to the E=mc2.

As a mathematician Fantappiè could not accept that half of the solutions of the fundamental equations where rejected and in 1941, while listing the properties of the forward and backward in time energy, Fantappiè discovered that forward in time energy is governed by the law of entropy, whereas backward in time energy is governed by a complementary law that he named syntropy, combining the Greek words syn which means converging and tropos which means tendency. Listing the mathematical properties of syntropy Fantappiè discovered: energy concentration, increase in differentiation, complexity and structures: the mysterious properties of life! In 1944 he published the book “Principi di una Teoria Unitaria del Mondo Fisico e Biologico”[5] (Unitary Theory of the Physical and Biological World) in which he suggests that the physical-material world is governed by the law of entropy and causality, whereas the biological world is governed by the law of syntropy and retrocausality. We cannot see the future and therefore retrocausality is invisible! The dual energy solution suggests the existence of a visible reality (causal and entropic) and an invisible reality (retrocausal and syntropic). The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is a constant, a unity that cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed, and the energy-momentum-mass equation suggests that this unity has two components: entropy and syntropy. We can therefore write: 1=Entropy+Syntropy which shows that syntropy is the complement of entropy. Syntropy is often mistaken with negentropy. However, it is fundamentally different since negentropy does not take into account the direction of time, but considers time only in the classical way: flowing forward. Life lies between these two components: one entropic and the other syntropic, one visible and the other invisible, and this can be portrayed using a seesaw with entropy and syntropy playing at the opposite sides, and life at the center. This suggests that entropy and syntropy are constantly interacting and that all the manifestations of reality are dual: emitters and absorbers, particles and waves, matter and anti-matter, causality and retrocausality

On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes—or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction. You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work.

In retrospect, if our training had been geared to account for Body Alarm Reaction, we would have probably received less physical damage from our attackers. As your mind recognizes a potential threat to your well being, your body will start to react to this stress in a number of ways. One of the first reactions to potential physical harm is the secretion of large amounts of the hormone adrenaline into the bloodstream. Adrenaline is one many hormones that are “dumped” into the body during Body Alarm Reaction.9 Their functions are intended to be biologically protective. Unfortunately, the changes they produce can actually inhibit our ability to physically defend ourselves. The intent of the body’s automatic “call to arms’ is to provide the increases in strength and energy to either fight or run away from the threat. This is sometimes referred to as the “Fight-or-Flight” syndrome. It is a product of our evolution to develop mechanisms that allowed us to survive various physical threats. As the body continues down the path of automatic response the effects of the massive hormone “dump” will manifest itself in several different reactions. There will be an increase in both blood pressure and the heart rate.10 This is designed to increase the blood flow to the brain and the muscles, which will be placed under increased activity levels if you either defend yourself or run away. As blood flow increase to the brain and muscular system, they are the most important to survival at this particular moment, there is a decrease of blood flow to the digestive system, kidneys, liver, and skin. There will be an increase in the respiration rate to assimilate additional oxygen into the system. The increase of blood flow to the brain will induce a higher state of mental alertness and sensory perception. This is with the intent to aid our ability to mentally assess the situation at hand and to decrease our reaction time. It can have some negative effects like tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and an impaired sense of time. There will be an increase in the level of extra energy in our blood with the higher amounts of cholesterol, fats, and blood sugar. In case we might be injured, our body also raises the level of platelets and blood clotting factors to help prevent hemorrhage. One other reaction, one that has serious implications for the martial artist, is that there will be a general increase in muscular tension. This aspect of Body Alarm Reaction alone has limiting effects on several martial skills. One in particular that we should recognize is that muscular tension equates to reduction of speed. So realistically, if we are in Body Alarm Reaction we can expect to be slower than when we are in a normal relaxed state. We can expect to have reduced ability to defend ourselves due to these automatic responses that are intended to provide assistance, but in actuality can greatly hinder that ability.11

The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.

After it was all over, the Carter people were stunned by Kennedy´s conduct. Why? Why would the Kennedy crowd persist in defeat, knowing that their displays of rancor would only further weaken a Democratic president in the face of the Reagan challenge from the right? Well, Kennedy partisans hated to see all the romantic notion of the Kennedy mystique coming to an end. Camelot was dying, and most ignobly, at the hands of these crude Georgia boys. And on the other side of the equation, the Georgia boys could not fathom the animosity. They felt their man was not only a liberal and a populist but a politician of integrity and intelligence who had accomplished much in his few years in the White House. For the Georgians, Kennedy´s behavior at the convention was all about ego. As Jody Powell later said, ¨We neglected to take into account one of the obvious facets of Kennedy´s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness.¨

Many of us have unconsciously accepted a bias for constant productivity and a prejudice against wonder. This bias might account for why people in some cultures influenced by a Protestant work ethic once equated wonder with an illness called “the wonders.

As to the actual method of observing and recording in field-work these imponderabilia of actual life and of typical behaviour, there is no doubt that the personal equation of the observer comes in here more prominently, than in the collection of crystalised, ethnographic data. But here also the main endeavour must be to let facts speak for themselves. If in making a daily round of the village, certain small incidents, characteristic forms of taking food, of conversing, of doing work (see for instance Plate III) are found occurring over and over again, they should be noted down at once.

In recent years we have gotten used to taking “science” and “physical science” to be synonymous. At the same time, we look to scientists to give us a complete theory of reality. These two demands on science cannot be reconciled. So long as “science” is equated with “physical science,” it will be subject to the following limitations: It will be unable to account for consciousness, as the qualitative reality of consciousness cannot be captured in the quantitative language of physical science. It will be confined to telling us what matter does, remaining silent on its intrinsic nature.

Shut out of the European market by Napoleon’s Continental Blockade, English merchants turned with an eager eye towards the South American trade. According to a contemporary account, the exportations consequent on the first opening of the trade to Buenos Ayres, Brazil, and the Caraccas were most extraordinary. Speculation was then carried beyond the boundaries within which even gambling is usually confined, and was pushed to an extent and into channels that could hardly have been deemed practicable. We are informed by Mr. Mawe, an intelligent traveller, resident at Rio Janeiro, at the period in question, that more Manchester goods were sent out in the course of a few weeks, than had been consumed in the twenty years preceding … Elegant services of cut-glass and china were offered to persons whose most splendid drinking-vessels consisted of a horn, or the shell of a cocoa nut … and some speculators actually went so far as to send out [ice] skates to Rio Janeiro.34 The story that ice skates had been shipped south of the Equator entered City legend. When Bagehot alluded to this episode nearly half a century later his readers would have understood the reference.

REPRESSIVE NATURE – MANIPULATIVE The 26th Shadow can be really sneaky. When pride manifests through a repressive human nature it becomes manipulation, but not in an obvious way. This is covert manipulation. These people manipulate others by putting them down, or use guilt and shame as subtle weapons. Often these patterns are acted out unconsciously, which means that such people rarely feel accountable for their actions or the effects they have on others. The 26th Shadow uses its natural cunning to make others feel bad or inferior, behaviour patterns rooted in fear. Pride that is rooted in fear always leads to manipulation. It is a simple and lethal equation.

As a hostage negotiator, one of Abby’s core guides was the 7-38-55 rule. It was a simple equation that stated that when people talked, only 7 percent of what they felt was communicated in their words. Another 38 percent was accounted for in their tone of voice, and 55 percent in their facial expression. The words he’d uttered should have been reassuring.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

Do It step and achieving what you want: Trying is just not in the equation. It’s all about doing.

Rob, by all accounts, had never thought much about race. While he had painstakingly devised methods to navigate the different groups of people in his life, almost all of those people had been black. Uncharacteristically for the average black student coming to Yale, he’d never contemplated, let alone practiced, the fine intricacies of living in a socioeconomic atmosphere not his own. New friendships with people who railed against those intricacies—loudly, profanely—had him thinking about race very much. Typical of Rob Peace, though not of Sherman and the others, he did so intellectually rather than angrily. “Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood,” he once said. “Now he’s in the minority—nobody wants him there, unless it’s to rob his ass—and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There’s no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn’t getting anything productive done until he’s out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don’t have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here—so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it’s annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they’ll ever get from us.

circumstances, like finances or relationship status, generally account for a smaller slice of the happiness equation than our deliberate behaviors.

Dependence is at its maximum at birth, when the human infant is most helpless. In contrast, attachment is not evident until the infant is about six months old. Dependence gradually diminishes until maturity is reached: attachment behaviour persists throughout life. If we call an adult dependent, we imply that he is immature. But if he has no intimate attachments, we conclude that there is something wrong with him. In Western society, extreme detachment from ties with others is usually equated with mental illness. Chronic schizophrenics sometimes lead lives in which relationships with others play virtually no part at all. The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists all concur in regarding man as a social being who requires the support and companionship of others throughout his life.

R.A. was conceived in 2006 by a Swede named Andie Nordgren, and its adherents believed that because love is not a limited resource, traditional hierarchical relationships that treat it as such are not just unnecessary but harmful, perpetuating toxic, retrograde attitudes that equate love with ownership. One should allow space in one’s life for the kind of intimacy that can be cut off when one designates a single person as special and reserved, and therefore owed and owing. Even designating a category of relationship as special and reserved was poison. Romantic relationships are not better than platonic or familial ones. The ingrained belief that romantic love should be life’s organizing principle is inextricably linked to patriarchy and the oppression of minorities, the poor, and immigrants, among other populations. The resulting expectations kill love at the root. When care-taking duties are foisted onto individuals and families, rather than supplied and paid for by the state, as they should be, the state must make it seem like this is the natural and noble situation. Propaganda. Marriage is obviously propaganda, but so are all conventional relationships because all conventional relationships cannot help but situate themselves in relation to marriage. Whether they are like marriage, or on track to marriage, or on track to being like marriage or not. Marriage is all-encompassing and cannot but enforce hierarchy. Thus, ritualized domestic exclusion begets systemic exclusion via our admiration and craving for exclusivity.

There’s a deeper significance of profit than simply the accounting equation, which Rabbi Daniel Lapin gets at in his book Thou Shalt Prosper, where he says, “When you serve the marketplace, they will give you certificates of appreciation with Presidents’ faces on them.

When proponents of metrics advocate “accountability,” they tacitly combine two meanings of the word. On the one hand, to be accountable means to be responsible. But it can also mean “capable of being counted.” Advocates of “accountability” typically assume that only by counting can institutions be truly responsible. Performance is therefore equated with what can be reduced to standardized measurements. When proponents of metrics demand “transparency” they often insinuate that probity requires making explicit and visible as much information as possible. The result is the demand for ever more documentation, ever more mission statements, ever more “goal-setting.”5

The notions of fields and particles, separated by Faraday and Maxwell, end up merging in quantum mechanics. The way this happens in the theory is elegant: the equation of Dirac determines the values a variable can take. Applied to the energy of Faraday's lines, they tell us that this energy can take on only certain values and not others. Since the energy of the electromagnetic field can take on only certain values, the field behaves line a set of packets of energy. These are precisely the quanta of energy introduced by Planck and Einstein thirty years later. The circle closes, and the story is complete. The equations of the theory, written by Dirac, account for the granular nature of light, which Planck and Einstein had intuited.

He suddenly remembered an equation that he had created as a child, after his father had challenged him to determine at what point raindrops of 0.04-centimenter diameter, falling at a speed of 9 meters per second and at a frequency density of 15 drops per square meter per second, would saturate 25 square kilometers of space - taking into account raindrop overlap, naturally. Philip had created an equation in ten minutes, knowing, of course, that the bait and switch from meters to kilometers was merely a cheap trick. He wasn't a complete moron, not even at age nine.

The failure to measure unpaid household services is perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. Estimates suggest that unpaid care work could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and as much as 80% of GDP in low-income countries.2 If we factor this work into the equation, the UK’s GDP in 2016 was around $3.9 trillion3 (the World Bank’s official figure was $2.6 trillion4), and India’s 2016 GDP was around $3.7 trillion5 (compared to the World Bank’s figure of $2.3 trillion).

This race among the superrich—for zeroes in their bank accounts—means a race to transform items of inestimable value into cold, hard cash. The land, what’s on and under the land—all that vibrant life—human effort and creativity, our friendships, our health and the “statistical value” of our very lives, all are being converted into money. We have even equated speech—that unique human gift—with money.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

However, not even science could account for all the variables that people introduced to the equation.

Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of thought into a science. According to classical economic theory, homo oeconomicus, or “economic man”—that is, the model human being that lies behind every prediction made by the discipline—is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations by which economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that makes the equations possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated motivations, there would be too many factors to take into account, it would be impossible to properly weight them, and predictions could not be made. Therefore, while an economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that human beings are not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are makes it possible to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this proportion—and only this—is the subject matter of economic science.

Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

This obsession with measuring and optimizing productivity is not new. In the thirteenth century, Venetian merchants carefully calculated the difference between the costs of the sailing voyages they underwrote and the revenues they ultimately earned from the goods sold, one of the first iterations of the Return on Investment calculation (ROI). This practice gave birth to the double bill accounting system and the “Equity - Assets = Liability” equation that’s still used today to determine the profitability of a business.