“
DEMON MATH
What is JUST in a world
you've ripped in two
as if there could be
a half for me
a half for you
what is FAIR when
there is nothing
left to share
what is YOURS when
your pain is mine to bear
this sad math is mine
this mad path is mine
subtract they say
don't cry
back to the desk
try
forget addition
multiply
and i reply
this is why
remainders
hate
division.
”
”
Kami Garcia (Beautiful Chaos (Caster Chronicles, #3))
“
Maven Calore is not his own self. He told me as much. He is a construct, a creation of his mother's additions and subtractions. A mechanical, a machine, soulless and lost. What a horror, to know that someone like this holds our fates in the palm of his quivering hand.
”
”
Victoria Aveyard (King's Cage (Red Queen, #3))
“
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.
”
”
Bess Streeter Aldrich (A Lantern in Her Hand)
“
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
“
Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
”
”
Julian Barnes
“
So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
“
To be a success, you will have people walk out on you, walk over you, and walk away from you. If these things didn't happen, you wouldn't have such great people who walk with you, walk beside you, and walk into your life. Cherish the subtractions and you will be blessed with additions.
”
”
Robert J. Braathe
“
The process of change is made up of subtraction and addition. Taking something off and then puttin something on.
”
”
Creflo A. Dollar
“
Addition by subtraction.
”
”
Joshua Fields Millburn (Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists)
“
Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
There was no addition or subtraction in life that did not require some time for adjustment.
”
”
Laura Imai Messina (The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World)
“
Life is addition! Death is subtraction. You add to your life by imagining whatsoever things are true, lovely, noble, and Godlike. Imagine and feel yourself successful, and you must become successful. You are never a slave to circumstances, environment, or conditions.
”
”
Joseph Murphy (Believe in Yourself)
“
That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.
”
”
Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
“
It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
...whatever we do whatever way
we move forward
there will be damage carried
from all previous rows and columns
in this mathematical computation
we make, all the multi-configured additions and subtractions
in language America,
in all bases, particularly
I'm thinking about
at the moment
1492, 1776, 1861, 1867, 1980, 2016, 2020.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
There is no subtraction or division in the mind, there is only addition and multiplication. You cannot take away anything by force from the mind.
”
”
Sadguru (Mind is your Business and Body the Greatest Gadget (2 Books in 1))
“
Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).
”
”
Milan Kundera (Immortality)
“
what is JUST in a world
you’ve ripped in two
as if there could be
a half for me
a half for you
what is FAIR when
there is nothing
left to share
what is YOURS when
your pain is mine to bear
this sad math is mine
this mad path is mine
subtract they say
don’t cry
back to the desk
try
forget addition
multiply
and i reply
this is why
remainders
hate
division
”
”
Kami Garcia (Sublimes creatures)
“
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there’s not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't)
“
He's teaching her arithmetic,
He said it was his mission,
He kissed her once and said,
"Now that's addition."
And as he added smack by smack
In silent satisfaction,
She sweetly gave the kisses back and said,
"Now that's subtraction."
Then he kissed her, she kissed him,
Without an explanation,
And both together smiled and said,
"That's multiplication."
Then Dad appeared upon the scene and
Made a quick decision.
He kicked that kid three blocks away And said, "That's long division!
”
”
Dan Clark (Chicken Soup for the College Soul: Inspiring and Humorous Stories About College)
“
Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
”
”
Umberto Eco
“
How precisely did one calculate the value of a soul? What complicated additions and subtractions did one have to do to work out which life was worth more than another?
”
”
E.M. Duffield-Fuller (Felgrim (Darkwatch Trilogy #1))
“
Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no finite commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity-even the confused and cheating heart of the man in front of her, even the paltry thing now clenched and faltering inside her own chest-could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, full of multitudes without end.
”
”
Brady Udall (The Lonely Polygamist)
“
No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).
”
”
Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)
“
... time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what's left...
”
”
Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
“
There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
Cheer up, my dear," said Rose, leaning affectionately on her husband's arm; "it is altogether addition and not subtraction; you have not lost a daughter but gained a son.
”
”
Martha Finley (The Complete Elsie Dinsmore Series)
“
You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack--there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
my hope for you
is that you greet your reflection with kind eyes.
that you never look to someone else for your belonging.
always moving from a space of worthiness,
longing for nothing of addition or subtraction
”
”
Danielle Doby (I Am Her Tribe)
“
In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.
”
”
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
“
He wondered how he ever could have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet (The Space Trilogy, #1))
“
But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.” If this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom from obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.
”
”
Jennifer Senior (All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood)
“
In Northamptonshire dialect 'to thaw' is 'to ungive.' The beauty of this variant I find hard to articulate, but it surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves be a form of gift -- an addition to the landscape that will in time be subtracted by warmth.
”
”
Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks)
“
The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau
“
Life for me is a game of addition and subtraction, multiplying and dividing. It feels like failing the same calculus class over and over again.
–Evan Nightfly, Anonymous
”
”
Hunter Miller
“
Days and nights among the trees is not time off the books. It is not a subtraction from the days of life but an addition to them.
”
”
Dan White (Under the Stars: How America Fell in Love with Camping)
“
time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left,
”
”
Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
“
Life has no beginning to the tales it weaves, no real end, neither―only additions and subtractions, is all. Papa became a subtraction the morning he died, erased from my life, never to return.
”
”
Beem Weeks (Jazz Baby)
“
And in this new place in my life- I was sleeping alone for over a year, finding the middle of the bed, and really working on myself- I started to become worried about meeting someone because I was really feeling different than I had ever felt in my life. So strong, and I didn't want anyone to take that away. Someone would have to be the human equivalent of addition and not subtraction. Period.
”
”
Drew Barrymore
“
One must know addition and subtraction (material knowledge) before proceeding to higher mathematics (spiritual knowledge). Without knowledge, life does not blossom and a person remains in raja guna and tama guna.
”
”
Anil B. Sarkar (Make Life Successful)
“
The question of accumulation,” Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
All of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.
”
”
Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
“
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
“
The Accounting of Love and Hospitality -
Sermon on the Account
Do enough for others that it's impossible
For them to keep accounts
Of what they owe you
Or what you've done.
Lose the account yourself,
Expect nothing in return.
Make a habit of giving things away.
Pay for other people's meal,
Friends and strangers.
Keep no accounts on that either.
Take what is offered to you,
But expect or demand nothing.
Tell the people in your life
That you appreciate them
As often as you can.
There may be a day when you can't.
Tell your kids and spouse that you love them,
Often and every night.
Remind yourself
What it is you love about them.
Look for ways to be kind and helpful,
There are plenty to find.
Do things without telling others
You've done them.
Don't even remind yourself.
Do acts of kindness, then let them go.
Live a life without clinging to expectations
About who you should be.
Your friends and family will change,
Everything does, you will.
Life has a lot of additions and subtraction;
Change is inevitable.
Spend time mindfully changing yourself
Towards kindness and patience.
At the end of your life,
Which could be any moment,
Let the ones that knew you
Have lived a better life because you were there.
Let your accounts be settled
And forgive other people's.
”
”
Eric Overby
“
Use the art of reduction in every aspect of life. The Tao is all about simplicity, so the Tao process is about subtraction rather than addition. Remove obstacles and complexity to unleash the power of your natural capabilities and to fully express your vast potential.
”
”
Derek Lin (The Tao of Happiness: Stories from Chuang Tzu for Your Spiritual Journey)
“
You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.
”
”
Anthony de Mello (Awareness)
“
The suite was set: Chris and I in the left, back room; Tom and Ricky in the left, front room; Junior and Danny Tampon in the back, right room next to the bathroom; and Dickstein all by his peanut-dick-self in the front, right room. It was quite a radical change from the suite that surrounded me, Chris, and Tom the previous year. Just getting rid of Lebeuf was addition by subtraction. The Beachside Dorm, Suite 524, would be one of the happiest places in my two-decade life. Freedom of expression was never diminished, unless Dickstein opened his mouth and shit flew out of it.
”
”
Phil Wohl (Suite Dream)
“
You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
But I think that so many of the rest of us do what we can to avoid this math because if we do the subtraction, do the addition, our own personal sum will be unbearable sorrow, terror, and a feeling of being entirely out of control. I think many of us do what we can to avoid this math because we know that if we do the subtraction, do the addition, our psyches and our consciences and our lives will forever be changed; and we know that no matter how fierce the momentum that leads to this subtraction and addition, no matter our fears that we may be crushed (or perhaps more fearsome, ridiculed), that we will be led in some way to oppose the subtraction of life and the addition of toxics to this planet that is our only home.
”
”
Derrick Jensen (The Myth of Human Supremacy)
“
Having an aversion to something and an attraction towards something else is the basis of identification. Whatever you are averse to dominates your mind. The nature of your mind is such that if you say, “I do not want something,” only that thing keeps happening in your mind. There is no subtraction or division in the mind, there is only addition and multiplication.
”
”
Sadguru (Mind is your Business and Body the Greatest Gadget (2 Books in 1))
“
Sirine buys sweet, dense Mexican candies, pastel-colored Korean candies, crackling layers of tea leaves, lemongrass, kaffir leaves, Chinese medicinal herbs and powders, Japanese ointments and pastes. She tastes everything edible, studies the new flavors, tests the shock of them; and she learns, every time she tastes, about balance and composition, addition and subtraction.
”
”
Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent)
“
Louisa, never wonder!'
Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder. Bring to me, says M'Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it will never wonder.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Hard Times)
“
Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
The Grace represents the interconnection of everything, the world of life and the world of the dead, Additive and Subtractive, as well as the spark of the gift that runs though it all. The Grace does more though, than simply represent Additive and Subtractive magic, Creation and obliteration, life and death, it connects them into a cohesive whole. The power of Orden deals with life, death and the whole nature of existence so the key also needs to have both sides. It needs both Additive and Subtractive, life and death to be complete.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus, #1))
“
This is so whether the said body of citizens or its prevailing part does this directly of itself, or commits the task to another or others who are not and cannot be the legislator in an unqualified sense but only in a certain respect and at a certain time and in accordance with the authority of the primary legislator. And in consequence of this I say that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive their necessary approval from the same primary authority and no other: whatever may be the situation concerning various ceremonies or solemnities, which are not required for the results of an election to stand but for their good standing, and even without which the election would be no less valid. I say further that it is by the same authority that laws and anything else instituted by election must receive any addition or subtraction or even total overhaul, any interpretation and any suspension: depending on the demands of time and place and other circumstances that might make one of these measures opportune for the sake of the common advantage in such matters.
”
”
Marsilius of Padua (The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought))
“
A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
Weight Loss Versus Health Gain:
"Forget the idea of 'losing' anything. Let that happen organically. Instead, focus only on adding the healthy habit of juicing into your system. Think only about the healthy changes you are integrating into your body and not so much about taking anything away. Now, this is more empowering position in which you put yourself. You are in charge of the adding, but you have no control of the subtracting. Let the weight loss be a natural result of the changes that you make and think in terms of adding health into your system instead. Juicing is one such addition.
”
”
Farnoosh Brock (The Healthy Juicer's Bible: Lose Weight, Detoxify, Fight Disease, and Live Long)
“
Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
“
the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.
”
”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature)
“
The worst class of sum worked in the every-day world, is cyphered by the diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as to their own.
The habit, too, of seeking some sort of recompense in the discontented boast of being disappointed, is a habit fraught with degeneracy. A certain idle carelessness and recklessness of consistency soon comes of it. To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up, is one of its perverted delights ; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the the worst for it.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
“
After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.
This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder)
“
So manifestation isn’t really about addition. It’s about subtraction. It’s about letting go of our unnecessary rational thoughts to such a degree that our inherent level of abundance – a deeper part of what we are – is allowed to clearly show itself. This is going against the grain of how our culture has taught us to operate. Socially, in many subtle and inadvertent ways, we’re conditioned to think negatively and from a place of scarcity; to interpret everything rationally, and constantly try hard to get what we want. We want to mentally add more, instead of realizing that by subtracting everything that we don’t mentally need we end up getting what we do need.
”
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Neville Goddard (Manifestation Through Relaxation: A Guide to Getting More by Giving In (Relax with Neville))
“
I wonder if all these bad things will change when I’m a high schooler…”
“At the very least, they most certainly won’t change if you intend to remain the way you are.” Way to go, Yukinoshita-san! Not going easy on the young'un just after you finished apologizing to her!
“But it’s enough if the people around you change,” I remarked. “There’s no need to force yourself to hang out with others.”
“But things are hard on Rumi-chan right now and if we don’t do something about it…” Yuigahama looked at Rumi with eyes full of concern.
In response, Rumi winced slightly. “Hard, you say… I don’t like that. It makes me sound pathetic. It makes me feel inferior for being left out.”
“Oh,” said Yuigahama.
“I don’t like it, you know. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Why?” Yukinoshita questioned her.
Rumi seemed to have some trouble speaking, but she still managed to form the right words. “I… got abandoned. I can’t get along with them anymore. Even if I did, I don’t know when it’ll start again. If the same thing were to happen, I guess I’m better off this way. I just” She swallowed. “don’t wanna be pathetic…”
Oh. I get it.
This girl was fed up. Of herself and of her surroundings.
If you change yourself, your world will change, they say, but that’s a load of crap.
When people already have an impression of you, it’s not easy to change your preexisting relationships by adding something to the mix. When people evaluate each other, it’s not an addition or subtraction formula. They only perceive you through their preconceived notions.
The truth is that people don’t see you as who you truly are. They only see what they want to see, the reality that they yearn for.
If some disgusting guy on the low end of the caste works his arse off on something, the higher ones just snicker and say, “What’s he trying so hard for?” and that would be the end of it. If you stand out for the wrong reasons, you would just be fodder for criticism. That wouldn’t be the case in a perfect world, but for better or worse, that’s how things work with middle schoolers.
Riajuu are sought for their actions as riajuu, loners are obligated to be loners, and otaku are forced to act like otaku. When the elites show their understanding of those beneath them, they are acknowledged for their open-mindedness and the depth of their benevolence, but the reverse is not tolerated.
Those are the fetid rules of the Kingdom of Children. It truly is a sad state of affairs.
"You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself". The hell was up with that? Adapting and conforming to a cruel and indifferent world you know you’ve already lost to – ultimately, that’s what a slave does. Wrapping it up in pretty words and deceiving even yourself is the highest form of falsehood.
”
”
Wataru Watari (やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4)
“
A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. When several other signs were later added to the Arab numerals (such as the signs for addition, subtraction and multiplication), the basis of modern mathematical notation came into being.
”
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Therefore, we are led to the conclusion that growth in the spiritual life (and this is surprising to capitalists) takes place not by acquisition of something new. It isn’t like the acquisition of new information, which some call “spiritual capitalism.” In reality our growth is hidden. It is accomplished by the release of our current defense postures, by the letting go of fear and our attachment to self-image. Thus, we grow by subtraction much more than by addition. It’s not a matter of more and better information. The wisdom traditions say that information itself is not the key. Once our defenses are out of the way and we are humble and poor, truth is allowed to show itself. It is not acquired. It shows itself when we are free from ideology, fear, and anger. “I know” won’t get us anywhere. The truth is, I don’t know anything. Our real hero is Forrest Gump! Perhaps he was a metaphor for beginner’s mind. Only nonknowing is spacious enough to hold and not distort the knowing that is possible.
”
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Richard Rohr (Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer)
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Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word-our tragedy.
"The question of accumulation," Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack-there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
”
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
to be more confidence you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about what other people think of you
Confidence is not something you feel or possess, it's something others use to describe what they see when they look at you
Forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking
Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so what they're thinking
You are the only the person you actually are; you may not may not be the person they actually want
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost.
And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.
You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you're as healed as you're likely to be
Pain can make you want to die. Discomfort can make you want to kill. Chronic discomfort itself can be deadly
Letting go of a dream because it cannot be yours is not failing.
If you have children and your spouse is abusing them physically, mentally, or sexually, leave now.
It never takes courage to leave.
It takes love.
..everything there is was born from a collision.
Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.
Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another
”
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Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.)
“
When people already have an impression of you, it's not easy to change your pre-existing relationships by adding something to the mix. When people evaluate each other, it's not an addition or subtraction formula. They only perceive you through their preconceived notions. The truth is that people don't see you as you truly are. They only see what they want to see, the reality that they yearn for.
”
”
Wataru Watari (やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。1)
“
Most strategic interactions are one of two kinds of “games.” In the first type of game, both sides win. Both sides are better off at the end than at the beginning. Or, at least, both sides go into the game expecting to benefit at the end. The first type of game is a win-win game. To make it work, both sides usually give something to the other side. Or trade something. Or exchange something. Or pool their resources. So something bigger is built. So they can share in something greater. So both sides win. It’s a Positive-Sum Game.6 The second type of game is different. It’s when only one side can win. At the end, only one side is better off. Which means one side isn’t better off. The other side is worse off. The other side lost. The second type of game is a win-lose game. Totaling up the additions and subtractions at the end, you get zero. What is added to one side is taken from the other side. A plus for one is a minus for the other. It’s a Zero-Sum Game. Zero-Sum Games are competition or conflict over something. Maybe it’s land. Or money. Or influence. Or a customer relationship. If one side wins it, the other side loses it. There’s a third kind of game, but it’s rare. It’s rare because both sides lose. Both sides are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It’s a Negative-Sum Game. If it’s planned, a Negative-Sum Game is expected to be short. Like in a war of attrition. Because people can only stand to lose for so long. People want to return to Positive-Sum Games and Zero-Sum Games as quickly as they can. The first two types of games happen all the time. In business. In war. In politics. In espionage. Even in friendships. Zero-Sum Games and Positive-Sum Games are everywhere.7
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John Braddock (A Spy's Guide to Strategy)
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my hope for you
is that you greet your reflection with kind eyes.
that you never look to someone else for your belonging.
always moving from a space of worthiness,
longing for nothing of addition or subtraction.
”
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Danielle Doby (I Am Her Tribe)
“
With the best of intentions, we value addition, not subtraction, more, not less.
”
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Lisa Bodell (Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters)
“
This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. When several other signs were later added to the Arab numerals (such as the signs for addition, subtraction and multiplication), the basis of modern mathematical notation came into being.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Our life is full of additions and multiplications. If you are not afraid of subtractions and divisions, you are on the way to attain salvation!
”
”
Abhijit Kar Gupta
“
Mother nature is a master mathematician specialising in addition and subtraction. Our lives run linearly, a series of integer numbers alternating between two poles to opposite ends of the spectrum through our lives, making a journal of our time.
Mankind tries to quantify these events for easier understanding, study for future prevention or record keeping. Oftentimes they're events that mother nature throws at us which cannot be enumerated or fit on mathematical scales. These are events that cause big shifts but are still incomprehensible.
They remain an enigma to us and requires an inner understanding that's different in each and every person.
True human grit is to soak ourselves in each moment on separate points of the spectrum either for good or worse and knowing there's no other way except through the centre of every singular moment
Real strength comes as we accept the chapters as they're and keeping the long-term outlook of our feelings constant to the extreme right pole despite fluctuations from events.
So until subtractions exceeds the left pole we'll meet.
”
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Eagerson Muchemwa
“
The truth about healing is that you don’t need to heal to be whole. By whole, I mean damaged, missing pieces of who you were, your heart—missing what feels like some of your most important parts. Yet not missing any part of you at all. Being, in truth, larger than you were before. Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.
”
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Augusten Burroughs (This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't)
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Constant addition without subtraction always make a mess.
”
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Marty Neumeier
“
Not in Emptiness, but as Emptiness, I am released from the fate of a never-ending addition of parts, and I stand free as the Source and Suchness of the glorious display. I taste the sky and swallow whole the Kosmos, and nothing is added to me; I disappear in a million forms and nothing is subtracted; I rise as the sun to greet my own day, and nothing moves at all.
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Ken Wilber (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution)
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time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left,
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Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
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Listening to the empty house, hearing the old voices upstairs and her mother calling them to dinner, their feet booming on the stairs, the fire in the stove ticking as though it spoke to time like some deranged clock, as though the log in the stove were spitting out the time stored in its wood, thinking, time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left, the slow sleeping breath before her.
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Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
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Father Peregrine leaned heavily forward. “Adam alone did not sin. Add Eve and you add temptation. Add a second man and you make adultery possible. With the addition of sex or people, you add sin. If men were armless they could not strangle with their hands. You would not have that particular sin of murder. Add arms, and you add the possibility of a new violence. Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other. Add sex to amoebas, add arms and legs, and you would have murder and adultery. Add an arm or leg or person, or take away each, and you add or subtract possible evil.
”
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Ray Bradbury (The Stories of Ray Bradbury)
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thinking, time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what’s left,
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Paul Lynch (Prophet Song)
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Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now." He looked around the room. "How do you keep track now, by the way— writing with a burnt match on the margins of a telephone directory?
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
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To expound Scripture is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view. The expositor pries open what appears to be closed, makes plain what is obscure, unravels what is knotted and unfolds what is tightly packed. . . . Whether long or short, our responsibility as expositors is to open it up in such a way that it speaks its message clearly, plainly, accurately, relevantly, without addition, subtraction or falsification.
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Matt Chandler (Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church: The Jesus-Centered Church (None))
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Today’s computers use transistors. When used in computers, transistors basically function the same way relays do, but (as we’ll see) they’re much faster and much smaller and much quieter and use much less power and are much cheaper. Building an 8-Bit Adder still requires 144 transistors (more if you replace the ripple carry with a look-ahead carry), but the circuit is microscopic. Chapter 13. But What About Subtraction? After you’ve convinced yourself that relays can indeed be wired together to add binary numbers, you might ask, “But what about subtraction?” Rest assured that you’re not making a nuisance of yourself by asking questions like this; you’re actually being quite perceptive. Addition and subtraction complement each other in some ways, but the mechanics of the two operations are different. An addition marches consistently from the rightmost column of digits to the leftmost column. Each carry from one column is added to the next column. We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing. For example, let’s look at a typical borrow-laden subtraction
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Charles Petzold (Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software)
“
If by “system” is meant the logical arrangement of certain laws which have been derived and deduced from one fundamental principle by pure thought, in disregard of the actual facts (speculative system), then theology certainly is not a system. Systems of that kind are in place only where one is not dealing with things as they actually exist but only with ideal things, as is the case in “pure” mathematics, as distinguished from “applied” mathematics. They are not in place in the field of natural science and history, much less in theology. To apply the methods of the speculative systematizer to science and history is not only unscientific, but also downright nonsensical, because it proceeds on the assumption that facts are obedient to human thinking. Philosophical idealism has been justly called a derangement of the human mind, in which man labors under the obsession that his thoughts (ideas) are the rule and measure of things. Edm. Hoppe remarks in Der Alte Glaube: “Nature” [and he might have added history] “is not so obliging as to follow the diagram of the textbook.”195 Much less may the speculative systematizer intrude into the field of theology, because the Christian doctrine is fixed by Scripture. It is a finished product, which no human thinking may or can change in the least. Here every addition and every subtraction is absolutely and expressly forbidden (Joshua 23:6; Matt. 5:17-19; John 10:35; 8:31; Gal. 1:6-9). It is not the business of the theologian to deduce, through a process of thought, the Christian doctrine from some one fundamental principle or from some one fact, e. g., from the fact of regeneration, nor to construct it from the so-called “whole of Scripture,” which is a logical monstrosity. His work is limited to drawing the Christian doctrine in all its parts directly from those Scripture statements that treat the respective doctrine (sedes doctrinae). When we arrange all the Scriptural statements concerning the various doctrines under the proper heads, we have that well-ordered system of Christian doctrine which we need in this life; and God will not have us ask for something better.
”
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Francis Pieper (Christian Dogmatics: Volume 1)
“
Spread a mindset, not just a footprint. Running up the numbers and putting your logo on as many people and places as possible isn’t enough. 2. Engage all the senses. Bolster the mindset you want to spread with supportive sights, sounds, smells, and other subtle cues that people may barely notice, if at all. 3. Link short-term realities to long-term dreams. Hound yourself and others with questions about what it takes to link the never-ending now to the sweet dreams you hope to realize later. 4. Accelerate accountability. Build in the feeling that “I own the place and the place owns me.” 5. Fear the clusterfug. The terrible trio of illusion, impatience, and incompetence are ever-present risks. Healthy doses of worry and self-doubt are antidotes to these three hallmarks of scaling clusterfugs. 6. Scaling requires both addition and subtraction. The problem of more is also a problem of less. 7. Slow down to scale faster—and better—down the road. Learn when and how to shift ears from automatic, mindless, and fast modes of thinking (“System 1”) to slow, taxing, logical, deliberative, and conscious modes (“System 2”); sometimes the best advice is, “Don’t just do something, stand there.
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Robert I. Sutton (Scaling up Excellence)
“
seemed almost certain to the mathematicians that since the general first, second, third, and fourth degree equations can be solved by means of the usual algebraic operations such as addition, subtraction, and roots, then the general fifth degree equation and still higher degree equations could also be solved. For three hundred years this problem was a classic one. Hundreds of mature and expert mathematicians sought the solution, but a little boy found the full answer. The Frenchman Évariste Galois (1811— 1832), who refused to conform to school examinations but worked brilliantly and furiously on his own, showed that general equations of degree higher than the fourth cannot be solved by algebraic operations. To establish this result Galois created the theory of groups, a subject that is now at the base of modern abstract algebra and that transformed algebra from a a series of elementary techniques to a broad, abstract, and basic branch of mathematics.
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Morris Kline (Mathematics and the Physical World (Dover Books on Mathematics))
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Any teaching that in any way detracts from Christ’s exclusive role is by definition both wrong and ineffective. The teachers themselves are probably not denying that Christ was central to God’s saving purposes. They seem rather to be arguing that certain practices must be added on in order to achieve true spiritual fulfillment. But, for Paul, in this case, addition means subtraction: one cannot “add” to Christ without, in effect, subtracting from his exclusive place in creation and in salvation history.
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Douglas J. Moo (The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (The Pillar New Testament Commentary (PNTC)))
“
Your organization’s culture is the product of the people in it, and every addition and subtraction will alter the chemistry. Do everything you can to keep it harmonious.
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Lee Cockerell (Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney)
“
Switch the Skills, Switch the Schools Education researcher Sugata Mitra, who has showed how much poor children in the developing world can learn on their own when provided with nothing more than some appropriate technology, has a provocative explanation for the emphasis on rote learning. In his speech at the 2013 TED conference, where his work was recognized with the one-million-dollar TED prize, he gave an account of when and why these skills came to be valued. I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire]. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. . . . They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.10
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
“
I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire]. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. . . . They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.10 Of
”
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
“
In the success equation, subtraction comes before multiplication or addition. You must sow before you can reap a harvest.
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Mensah Oteh (Unlocking Life's Treasure Chest: Wisdom keys to keep you inspired, encouraged, motivated and focused)
“
Every day in summer, trees release about 29 tons of oxygen into the air per square mile of forest. A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable.
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Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
Boys start life on one side of the equation and girls on another side, our father explains. The boys' side has additions and the girls' subtractions. Girls have been unfairly pushed onto the margins where human failings will harm them more. "That," he said, "is human history.
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Lan Cao
“
Though it was a son, brother and husband who entered the river, the mythic initiation endows him with his fundamental humanity. Located in the amniotic waters, he goes through the process of physical drinking, which gives him the metaphysical insight into the Divine. He responds in a sensuous, poetic outpouring, and is honored with gender-inclusive clothing from the Divine court. Unlike other initiation rites, there are no additions to or subtractions from the body: no tattoos, circumcision or scarring marked his transition. In Guru Nanak’s case, his new identity is marked by the unity of bana (the material cloth) and bani (poetry); sirpao (dress) and nam (word).
”
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Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh (Sikhism: An Introduction (International Library of African Studies))