Analog Design Quotes

Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.

The first condition, then, of what is called a selfish love among men is lacking with God. He has no natural necessities, no passion, to compete with His wish for the beloved's welfare; or if there is in Him something which we have to imagine after the analogy of a passion, a want it is there by His own will and for our sakes. And the second condition is lacking too. The real interests of a child may differ from that which his father's affection instinctively demands, because the child is a separate being from the father with a nature which has its own needs and does not exist solely for the father nor find its whole perfection in being loved by him and which the father does not fully understand. But creatures are not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go, if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.

He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald’s collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant’s feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald’s interminably circular book on Design, which rambled on from difficulty to difficulty, from momentarily illuminated clearing to prickling thicket of honest doubt.

The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule. It became the poster molecule for an age of excess. No amount of it was ever enough. The molecule created ever-higher tolerance. Plus, it had a way of railing on when the body gathered the courage to throw it out. This wasn’t only during withdrawals. Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose in the human body, which then expels them. Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled. It resisted being turned into glucose and it stayed in the body. “We still can’t explain why this happens. It just doesn’t follow the rules. Every other drug in the world—thousands of them—follows this rule. Morphine doesn’t,” Coop said. “It really is almost like someone designed it that way—diabolically so.

Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as “the invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love”. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling”.

As technology leaked into every nook in my life, with its countless distractions, my methodology provided an analog refuge that proved invaluable in helping me define and focus on what truly mattered.

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.

More familiar is the argument from design, an approach that penetrates deeply into issues of fundamental scientific concern. This argument was admirably summarized by David Hume: “Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it; you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.… All these various machines, even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the production of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties proportioned to the grandure of the work which he has executed.

Clearly, there exists an entire class of people who gain immense profit, prestige and power from the existence of the government. It is equally true that, as a collective, these people have enormous control and influence over the minds of children, since it is that same government that educates virtually every child for six or more hours a day, five days a week, for almost a decade and a half of their formative years. To analogize this situation, can we imagine that we would be at all surprised that children who came out of 14 years of religious indoctrination would in general believe in the existence and virtue of God? Would we be at all surprised if the strong arguments for atheism were left off a curriculum expressly designed by the priests, who directly profit from the maintenance of religious belief? In fact, we would fully expect such children to be actively trained in the rejection of arguments for atheism – inoculated against it, so to speak, so that they would react with scorn or hostility to such arguments.

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea. “Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea. The Army’s Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five “most important goals,” and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent—it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.

Consider finding a mate, someone to live with in a close relationship, usually as husband and wife. It is indeed a sort of market problem, in that the issue is not just finding a satisfactory person but also finding someone, confronted with the same search problem, who is willing to consider you as his or her best choice. Finding a match between husband and wife is like finding a trade in a financial market. It entails learning a market price (in the marriage market it is one’s attractiveness to certain kinds of potential spouses) and finding the best deal at that price. This analogy is not meant to put a commercial slant on a very personal problem, but instead to start us thinking about how we can design a better solution to the problem.

Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred. The matter in controversy is the existence of design in the Universe, and it is not permitted to assume the contested premises and thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design, and adaptation before these circumstances are made apparent in the Universe, thence justly inferring a contriver is a popular sophism against which it behooves us to be watchful. To assert that motion is an attribute of mind, that matter is inert, that every combination is the result of intelligence is also an assumption of the matter in dispute. Why do we admit design in any machine of human contrivance? Simply, because innumerable instances of machines having been contrived by human art are present to our mind, because we are acquainted with persons who could construct such machines; but if, having no previous knowledge of any artificial contrivance, we had accidentally found a watch upon the ground, we should have been justified in concluding that it was a thing of Nature, that it was a combination of matter with whose cause we were unacquainted, and that any attempt to account for the origin of its existence would be equally presumptuous and unsatisfactory. The analogy, which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art and the various existences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know before hand that human intelligence is capable of producing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be destroyed. Our entire ignorance, therefore, of the Divine Nature leaves this analogy defective in its most essential point of comparison.

Arnold Harberger, Milton Friedman & Co. Inc., your modest proposal of partial equilibrium for the general good is not without its own internal contradictions. Moreover, you cannot take complete credit for this program of equilibriation. Although you and your colleagues and disciples at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago may have dedicated two decades to the design of the program and the technical training of its executors, it took the approach of another major economic and political crisis of capitalism, analogous to that of the 1930's, to mobilize the political support and the military force to instal a government prepared to put your program of equilibration and your equilibrating experts to work in Chile - and you, Milton Friedman, are still waiting to put your part of the same program, complete with Brazilian style indexing, into practice at home for the glory and benefit of the bourgeoisie in the USA, whom you so faithfully serve as paid executors and executioners.

Let’s step back. Every year between 1950 and 2000, Americans increased their productivity about 1 to 4 percent.1 Since 2005, however, this growth has slowed in advanced economies, with a productivity decrease recorded in the United States in 2016.2 Maybe our rapidly evolving technology that promises us near-limitless options to keep us busy is not, in fact, making us more productive? One possible explanation for our productivity slowdown is that we’re paralyzed by information overload. As Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind, information overload is worse for our focus than exhaustion or smoking marijuana.3 It stands to reason, then, that to be more productive we need a way to stem the tide of digital distractions. Enter the Bullet Journal, an analog solution that provides the offline space needed to process, to think, and to focus. When you open your notebook, you automatically unplug. It momentarily pauses the influx of information so your mind can catch up. Things become less of a blur, and you can finally examine your life with greater clarity.

Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God, and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection. Whoever scruples this fundamental truth deserves every punishment which can be inflicted among philosophers, to wit, the greatest ridicule, contempt, and disapprobation. But as all perfection is entirely relative, we ought never to imagine that we comprehend the attributes of this divine Being, or to suppose that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creature. Wisdom, thought, design, knowledge—these we justly ascribe to him because these words are honorable among men, and we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to these qualities among men. He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension; and is more the object of worship in the temple than of disputation in the schools.

What are we to make of the existence of historical patterns? It is often said that history repeats itself, sometimes as tragedy, sometimes as farce, sometimes with special flourishes and variations, but this notion stands at odds with our modern understanding of history as an arc of progress. As Weber pointed out, modernity hinges on the collective belief that history is an ongoing process, one in which we steadily increase our knowledge and technical mastery of the world. Unlike the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, who believed that history was cyclical, the modern standpoint is that time is going somewhere, that we are gaining knowledge and understanding of the world, that our inventions and discoveries build on one another in a cumulative fashion. But then why do the same problems—and even the same metaphors—keep appearing century after century in new form? More specifically, how is it that the computer metaphor—an analogy that was expressly designed to avoid the notion of a metaphysical soul—has returned to us these ancient religious ideas about physical transcendence and the disembodied spirit?

Grades can also be profoundly unfair, especially for students who are unable to keep up, because the level of the exams usually increases from week to week. Let’s take the analogy of video games. When you discover a new game, you initially have no idea how to progress effectively. Above all, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of how bad you are! That’s why video game designers start with extremely easy levels, where you are almost sure to win. Very gradually, the difficulty increases and, with it, the risk of failure and frustration—but programmers know how to mitigate this by mixing the easy with the difficult, and by leaving you free to retry the same level as many times as you need. You see your score steadily increase . . . and finally, the joyous day comes when you successfully pass the final level, where you were stuck for so long. Now compare this with the report cards of “bad” students: they start the year off with a bad grade, and instead of motivating them by letting them take the same test again until they pass, the teacher gives them a new exercise every week, almost always beyond their abilities. Week after week, their “score” hovers around zero. In the video game market, such a design would be a complete disaster. All too often, schools use grades as punishments.

It will be agreed that you can’t divide a cake up into its component crumbs and say ‘This crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe, this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe’, etc. In this sense it will be agreed that the whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. But now suppose we change one word in the recipe; for instance, suppose ‘baking-powder’ is deleted or is changed to ‘yeast’. We bake 100 cakes according to the new version of the recipe, and 100 cakes according to the old version of the recipe. There is a key difference between the two sets of 100 cakes, and this difference is due to a one-word difference in the recipes. Although there is no one-to-one mapping from word to crumb of cake, there is one-to-one mapping from word difference to whole-cake difference. ‘Baking-powder’ does not correspond to any particular part of the cake: its influence affects the rising, and hence the final shape, of the whole cake. If ‘baking-powder’ is deleted, or replaced by ‘flour’, the cake will not rise. If it is replaced by ‘yeast’, the “cake will rise but it will taste more like bread. There will be a reliable, identifiable difference between cakes baked according to the original versoin and the ‘mutated’ versions of the recipe, even though there is no particular ‘bit’ of any cake that corresponds to the words in question. This is a good analogy for what happens when a gene mutates.

It will be agreed that you can’t divide a cake up into its component crumbs and say ‘This crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe, this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe’, etc. In this sense it will be agreed that the whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. But now suppose we change one word in the recipe; for instance, suppose ‘baking-powder’ is deleted or is changed to ‘yeast’. We bake 100 cakes according to the new version of the recipe, and 100 cakes according to the old version of the recipe. There is a key difference between the two sets of 100 cakes, and this difference is due to a one-word difference in the recipes. Although there is no one-to-one mapping from word to crumb of cake, there is one-to-one mapping from word difference to whole-cake difference. ‘Baking-powder’ does not correspond to any particular part of the cake: its influence affects the rising, and hence the final shape, of the whole cake. If ‘baking-powder’ is deleted, or replaced by ‘flour’, the cake will not rise. If it is replaced by ‘yeast’, the “cake will rise but it will taste more like bread. There will be a reliable, identifiable difference between cakes baked according to the original version and the ‘mutated’ versions of the recipe, even though there is no particular ‘bit’ of any cake that corresponds to the words in question. This is a good analogy for what happens when a gene mutates.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Chinese seek victory not in a decisive battle but through incremental moves designed to gradually improve their position. To quote Kissinger again: “Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash: elaborate multi-year maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”48 In an instructive analogy, David Lai illustrates this by comparing the game of chess with its Chinese equivalent, weiqi—often referred to as go. In chess, players seek to dominate the center and conquer the opponent. In weiqi, players seek to surround the opponent. If the chess master sees five or six moves ahead, the weiqi master sees twenty or thirty. Attending to every dimension in the broader relationship with the adversary, the Chinese strategist resists rushing prematurely toward victory, instead aiming to build incremental advantage. “In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battlefields; and the way to fight is force on force,” Lai explains. By contrast, “The philosophy behind go is to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” In a wise reminder, Lai warns that “It is dangerous to play go with the chess mindset. One can become overly aggressive so that he will stretch his force thin and expose his vulnerable parts in the battlefields.

THE SK8 MAKER VS. GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION This new era of global industrialization is where my personal analogy with the history of the skateboard maker diverges. It’s no longer cost-effective to run a small skateboard company in the U.S., and the handful of startups that pull it off are few and far between. The mega manufacturers who can churn out millions of decks at low cost and record speed each year in Chinese factories employ proprietary equipment and techniques that you and I can barely imagine. Drills that can cut all eight truck holes in a stack of skateboard decks in a single pull. CNC machinery to create CAD-perfect molds used by giant two-sided hydraulic presses that can press dozens of boards in a few hours. Computer-operated cutting bits that can stamp out a deck to within 1⁄64 in. of its specified shape. And industrial grade machines that apply multicolored heat-transfer graphics in minutes. In a way, this factory automation has propelled skateboarding to become a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. The best skateboarders require this level of precision in each deck. Otherwise, they could end up on their tails after a failed trick. Or much worse. As the commercial deck relies more and more on a process that is out of reach for mere mortals, there is great value in the handmade and one of a kind. Making things from scratch is a dying art on the brink of extinction. It was pushed to the edge when public schools dismissed woodworking classes and turned the school woodshop into a computer lab. And when you separate society from how things are made—even a skateboard—you lose touch with the labor and the materials and processes that contributed to its existence in the first place. It’s not long before you take for granted the value of an object. The result is a world where cheap labor produces cheap goods consumed by careless customers who don’t even value the things they own.

[W]e can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible. Let's look at this matter of what we think is plausible. What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. Sometimes it is narrower than what is actually there. There is a good analogy with light. Our eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies (the ones we call light), somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from long radio waves at one end to short X-rays at the other. We can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

Do not say that this draft, analogous to the American Constitution, is alien to the European culture and philosophy, and therefore should be rejected. Those who would make such a claim are ignorant of Europe’s history. What the Americans designed at the end of the 18th century stems straight from the constitutional and institutional reflections of European philosophers of that time, including Montesquieu and Locke.

In this chapter, we’re going to explore how these various analogies use the experience of marriage to teach us valuable truths about the nature of God.

Do not say that this draft, analogous to the American Constitution, is alien to the European culture and philosophy, and therefore should be rejected. Those who would make such a claim are ignorant of Europe’s history. What the Americans designed at the end of the 18th century stems straight from the constitutional and institutional reflections of European philosophers of that time, including Montesquieu and Locke.

Wise Investing series is a collection of stories and analogies designed to demonstrate that the winning investment strategy is a simple, elegant,

Wise Investing series is a collection of stories and analogies designed to demonstrate that the winning

Reluctantly Alexander knocked on the door. After coming in, he sat by a quiet Anthony on the bed, and taking a deep breath asked, “Bud, is there anything you want to talk to me about?” “NO!” Anthony said. “Hmm. You sure?” He patted his leg, prodded him. Anthony didn’t say anything. Alexander talked to him anyway. He explained that adults every once in a while wanted to have a baby. The men had this, and the women had that, and to make a baby there needed to be some conjoining, much like a tight connection of mortise and tenon between two pieces of wood. For the conjoining to be effective, there needed to be movement (which is where the mortise and tenon analogy broke down but Anthony thankfully didn’t question it), which is probably the thing that frightened Anthony, but really it was nothing to be afraid of, it was just the essence of the grand design. To reward Alexander’s valiant efforts, Anthony stared at his father as if he had just been told his parents drank the cold blood of vampires every night before bed. “You were doing what?” And then he said, after a considerable pause, “You and Mom were trying to have a—baby?” “Um—yes.” “Did you have to do that once before—to make me?” “Um—yes.” “This is what all adults have to do to make a baby?” “Yes.” “So, Sergio’s mom has three children. Does that mean his parents had to do that... three times?” Alexander bit his lip. “Yes,” he said. “Dad,” said Anthony, “I don’t think Mom wants to have any more children. Didn’t you hear her?” “Son...” “Didn’t you hear her? Please, Dad.” Alexander stood up. “All righty then. Well, I’m glad we had this talk.” “Not me.” When he came outside, Tatiana was waiting at the table. “How did it go?” “Pretty much,” said Alexander, “like my father’s conversation went with me.” Tatiana laughed. “You better hope it went better than that. Your father wasn’t very effective.” “Your son is reading Wonder Woman comics, Tatia,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how effective anything I say is going to be very shortly.” “Wonder Woman?” “Have you seen Wonder Woman?” Alexander shook his head and went to get his cigarettes. “Never mind. Soon it’ll all become clear. So yes for building the house, or no?” “No, Shura. Just lock the door next time.” So the house went unbuilt. Wonder Woman got read, Anthony’s voice changed, he started barricading his bedroom door at night, while across the mobile home, across the kitchen and the living room, behind a locked door, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” played on and on and on.

In one set of experiments, for example, researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity. The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop themselves.1.23 It’s not hard to find an analog in the human world. Consider fast food, for instance. It makes sense—when the kids are starving and you’re driving home after a long day—to stop, just this once, at McDonald’s or Burger King. The meals are inexpensive. It tastes so good. After all, one dose of processed meat, salty fries, and sugary soda poses a relatively small health risk, right? It’s not like you do it all the time. But habits emerge without our permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries. When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25 However, even these habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home, rather than seek out an alternative location. Even small shifts can end the pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, though, we can change the routines.

There is an analogy to this in the way you express a thought. Modern psychology and philosophy both tell us that the initial part of thinking does not take place in words. We pull up our ideas-the thought-from some unconscious level, then find a combination of words and phrases to express them. The thought exists, and its expression in words follows. You can see this, or I should say feel this, if you speak more than one language. Suppose your company is doing business in Moscow and some of the people around the table with you speak only Russian, some only English. You have something to say and you express that thought in Russian; a moment later you express the same thought in English. The "thought" exists somehow independent of how you put it in words. You have an intention of saying something, and find words by some subconscious process to express it. The result is utterance. It can be short and spontaneous, as in a conversation; or lengthy, put together piece by piece, as with a speech you are preparing. Either way it is a combination of ideas and concepts linked together for some purpose, expressed in sentences and phrases, and ultimately in words. You are not mindful of creating a combination, but you have done that nonetheless. It is the same with technology. The designer intends something, picks a toolbox or language for expression, envisions the concepts and functionalities needed to carry it out in his or her "mind's eye," then finds a suitable combination of components to achieve it. The envisioning can happen at one time more or less spontaneously. Or it can be drawn out, and put together in parts with much revision. We will look at how such creation works in more detail in the next chapter. But for now, notice that as with language, intention comes first and the means to fulfill it- the appropriate combination of components-fall in behind it. Design is expression.

A phenomenon familiar to both students of science and historians of science provides a clue. The former regularly report that they have read through a chapter of their text, understood it perfectly, but nonetheless had difficulty solving a number of the problems at the chapter's end. Ordinarily, also, those difficulties dissolve int he same way. The student discovers, with or without the assistance of his instructor, a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered. Having seen the resemblance, grasped the analogy between two or more distinct problems, he can interrelate symbols and attach them to nature in the ways that have proved effective before. The law-sketch, say f = ma, has functioned as a tool, informing the student what similarities to look for, signaling the gestalt in which the situation is to be seen. The resultant ability to see a variety of situations as like each other, as subjects for f = ma or some other symbolic generalization, is, I think, the main thing a student acquires by doing exemplary problems, whether with a pencil and paper in a well-designed laboratory. After he has completed a certain number, which may vary widely from one individual to the next, he views the situations that confront him as a scientist in the same gestalt as other members of his specialists' group. For him they are no longer the same situations he had encountered when his training began. He has meanwhile assimilated a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing.

Knowledge in the head includes conceptual models; cultural, semantic, and logical constraints on behavior; and analogies between the current situation and previous experiences with other situations.

Biblical metaphors aren’t merely creative ways to communicate; they are deeply and fundamentally true, divinely designed analogies that enable us to more fully understand God and his world.

The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power. It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. Its posture is not entirely cynical, though. The technology world has long maintained that the tools it creates are inherently leveling and will serve to collapse power divides rather than widen them.

sn In these vv. 9-10 the tone shifts abruptly from judgment to hope. Hostile nations like Assyria may attack God’s people, but eventually they will be destroyed, for God is with his people, sometimes to punish, but ultimately to vindicate. In addition to being a reminder of God’s presence in the immediate crisis faced by Ahaz and Judah, Immanuel (whose name is echoed in this concluding statement) was a guarantee of the nation’s future greatness in fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises. Eventually God would deliver his people from the hostile nations (vv. 9-10) through another child, an ideal Davidic ruler who would embody God’s presence in a special way (see 9:6-7). Jesus the Messiah is the fulfillment of the Davidic ideal prophesied by Isaiah, the one whom Immanuel foreshadowed. Through the miracle of the incarnation he is literally “God with us.” Matthew realized this and applied Isaiah’s ancient prophecy of Immanuel’s birth to Jesus (Matt 1:22-23). The first Immanuel was a reminder to the people of God’s presence and a guarantee of a greater child to come who would manifest God’s presence in an even greater way. The second Immanuel is “God with us” in a heightened and infinitely superior sense. He “fulfills” Isaiah’s Immanuel prophecy by bringing the typology intended by God to realization and by filling out or completing the pattern designed by God. Of course, in the ultimate fulfillment of the type, the incarnate Immanuel’s mother must be a virgin, so Matthew uses a Greek term (παρθένος, parqenos), which carries that technical meaning (in contrast to the Hebrew word עַלְמָה [’almah], which has the more general meaning “young woman”). Matthew draws similar analogies between NT and OT events in 2:15, 18. The linking of these passages by analogy is termed “fulfillment.” In 2:15 God calls Jesus, his perfect Son, out of Egypt, just as he did his son Israel in the days of Moses, an historical event referred to in Hos 11:1. In so doing he makes it clear that Jesus is the ideal Israel prophesied by Isaiah (see Isa 49:3), sent to restore wayward Israel (see Isa 49:5, cf. Matt 1:21). In 2:18 Herod’s slaughter of the infants is another illustration of the oppressive treatment of God’s people by foreign tyrants. Herod’s actions are analogous to those of the Assyrians, who deported the Israelites, causing the personified land to lament as inconsolably as a mother robbed of her little ones (Jer 31:15).

The easiest way to learn about complex technical things is to follow their discovery, to have the knowledge gained by the earlier men and women (who pioneered the field) unfold in the same way they brought it to light.

But the analogy is even stronger and deeper than the image of the “invisi- ble hand” allows us to infer. Didier Deleule has magisterially analyzed the link between Hume and Smith’s thought and the birth of economic liberalism. He opposes the “naturalism” of Hume and Smith to the “providentialism” of the Physiocrats who are direct tributaries, as we have seen, of a theological paradigm. To the idea of an original divine design, comparable to a project developed in the brain, Hume opposes, as we have seen, that of an absolutely immanent prin- ciple of order, which functions instead as a “stomach,” rather than as a brain. “Why,” he makes Philo ask, “can an ordered system not be woven out of a stom- ach rather than a brain”? (Deleule, pp. 259 and 305, note 30). If it is probable that the Smithian image of the invisible hand is to be understood, in this sense, as the action of an immanent principle, our reconstruction of the bipolar machineof the theological oikonomia has shown that there is no conflict between “provi- dentialism” and “naturalism” within it, because the machine functions precisely by correlating a transcendent principle with an immanent order. Just as with the Kingdom and the Government, the intradivine trinity and the economic trinity, so the “brain” and the “stomach” are nothing but two sides of the same apparatus, of the same oikonomia, within which one of the two poles can, at each turn, dominate the other.

A similar argument can be made about the form that the interface takes—with little pictures of folders and pages and trash cans. Those analogies are based in physical forms and so we associate the simplicity of the physical folder with that of the digital one. At best, we have faith in the interface that it is an accurate simplification of a more complex system behind it, and at worse, we don’t even recognize the complexity at all.

I’ve talked about the mammary gland as a modified sweat gland, but there is another way to think of it: as a modified placenta. The placenta and the mammary gland have much in common. They are specialists, and they are temporary workers. They are designed to nourish a baby. No other organs are so fleeting, so single-minded, as the placenta-mammary dyad. They exist only for the baby, and if the baby does not call on them, they are retired. They are expensive organs, and they are not maintained unless absolutely necessary. That is why the suckling of the baby is crucial to the productivity of the mammary gland. The mammary gland will not continue making milk unless the mechanical sensation of suckling tells it that lactogenesis is necessary. In evolutionary terms, babies die too often to make automatic milk ejection a sane strategy. It would be terribly wasteful if, after the arrival of a stillborn infant, a woman’s body were to generate milk automatically for anything more than a handful of days, at a cost of 600 calories a day. Lactation is a contingent function and a conditioned response, which is why it can be so frustrating to initiate and maintain. The body stands poised to flow, and to stop flowing. In a way, lactation is analogous to blood. Blood must course through your veins nonstop, yet it must be prepared to coagulate if the skin is breached, or else we would bleed to death at the brush of a thornbush.

Samplers and their descendents, the PCM synthesizers (especially the Korg M1 and the Roland JV series), imitated not only real instruments much better than analog synthesizers, but also imitated analog synthesizers so well that the latter threatened to follow in the dinosaurs’ footsteps.

Campers handwrite letters on a form that is scanned into Walden’s computer as PDF files and e-mailed home three days later. Parents can e-mail Walden with notes for their child, and these are printed and delivered to campers three days after being received. The delay of three days on either end was designed to intentionally mimic the same lag that Canada Post experiences, which is crucial, according to Birenbaum, to preserve something he referred to as “the transfer of authority.” “Let’s say a kid is getting bullied in a cabin by another camper,” he said, using a recent example. “If she writes an e-mail home on her phone, her mother reacts immediately, advising action to her daughter, and contacting me to remedy the problem. The mother retains authority. But with a six-day delay from the time the daughter sends her letter to the mother’s response, the camper has to deal with the problem of the bully. Eventually, the camper realizes that ‘Hey, maybe this eighteen-year-old staff member taking care of me is someone who I should talk with,’” and you suddenly achieve that transfer of authority from parent to counselor that is crucial for Walden’s social cohesion.

Once people find an explanation for an apparent anomaly, they tend to believe they can now discount it. But explanations are based on analogy with past experiences, experiences that may not apply to the current situation. In the driving story, the prevalence of billboards for Las Vegas was a signal we should have heeded, but it seemed easily explained. Our experience is typical: some major industrial incidents have resulted from false explanations of anomalous events. But do note: usually these apparent anomalies should be ignored. Most of the time, the explanation for their presence is correct. Distinguishing a true anomaly from an apparent one is difficult.

Even an ostensibly degree-zero affect like animatedness has a version of this subjective/objective problematic at its core—namely, the question of whether “animation” designates highspiritedness, or a puppet-like state analogous to the assembly-line mechanization of the human body famously dramatized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

Before we conclude that human cognitive mechanisms are riddled with biases and errors of judgment, we need to ask which adaptive problems human cognitive mechanisms evolved to solve and what would be “sound judgment” or “successful reasoning” from an evolutionary perspective. If humans have trouble locating their cars by color at night in parking lots illuminated with sodium vapor lamps, we would not conclude that our visual system is riddled with errors. Our eyes were designed to perceive the color of objects under natural, not artificial, light (Shepard, 1992). Many of the research programs that have documented “biases” in judgment, it turns out, have used artificial, evolutionarily unprecedented experimental stimuli that are analogous to sodium vapor lamps. Many, for example, require subjects to make probability judgments based on a single event (Gigerenzer, 1991, 1998). “Reliable numerical statements about the probability of a single event were rare or nonexistent in the Pleistocene—a conclusion reinforced by the relative poverty of number terms in modern band level societies” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1998 p. 40). A specific woman cannot have a 35 percent chance of being pregnant; she either is pregnant or is not, so probabilities hardly make sense when applied to a single case.

The history of our eyes is a lot like that of a car. Take a Chevy Corvette, for example. We can trace the history of the model as a whole—the Corvette—and the history of each of its parts. The ’Vette has a history, beginning with its origins in 1953 and continuing through the different model designs each year. The tires used on the ’Vette also have a history, as does the rubber used in making them. This supplies a great analogy for bodies and organs. Our eyes have a history as organs, but so do eyes’ constituent parts, the cells and tissues, and so do the genes that make those parts. Once we identify these multiple layers of history in our organs, we understand that we are simply a mosaic of bits and pieces found in virtually everything else on the planet.

Each and every day, we all are faced with potential risks and must make risk-to-benefit calculations repeatedly. This is a basic fact of life. Our right to make decisions based on the outcome of these calculations is not outlawed by the government, except when it comes to certain recreational drugs. As a scientist, I find this exception particularly frustrating, even hypocritical. The justification for restricting specific drugs is often related to the purported inherent dangers posed by these chemicals. Heroin use, for example, is said to be inherently more dangerous than other legal activities such as gun or car use are. Really? Guns, let’s not forget, are specifically designed to kill. This is not to say that every owner purchases a gun with this goal in mind. As a budding gun hobbyist, I know that’s not true. Still, each year there are about forty thousand gun-related deaths, and more than half are suicides.2 In 2017, heroin-involved deaths reached an all-time peak at just over fifteen thousand, a number well below that of gun deaths.3 (Again, it’s important to note that most of these heroin deaths occurred because the drug was contaminated with a far more potent fentanyl analog or because it was combined with another sedating drug, such as alcohol or sleeping pills.)

This type of design is called restoring logic, and the example in hydraulic technology is particularly interesting, because it corresponds almost exactly to the logic used in modern electronic computers. The water pressure in the pipes is analogous to the voltage on the wires, and the hydraulic valve is analogous to the metal-oxide transistor. The control, input, and output connections on the valve correspond closely to the three connections (called gate, source, and drain) on a transistor.

The analogy between water valves and transistors is so exact that you could translate the design for a modern microprocessor directly into a design for a hydraulic computer. To do so, you would need to look at the pattern of wires on the silicon chip under a microscope and then bend a set of pipes into the same shapes as the wires on the chip and connect them in exactly the same pattern. In place of each transistor, you would use a hydraulic valve. The pipe that corresponds to the power-supply voltage on your chip would be connected to a pressurized water supply, and the pipe that corresponds to the ground connection could empty down a drain.

Life is one, but consciousness is divided. That is, all of our unconscious bodily functions, such as breathing, digestion, the beating of our hearts, the biochemistry of our metabolism, and so on, are part of a seamless web that does, indeed, include the whole universe. More locally, we are cells in an explosion of protoplasm on this planet that began 3 billion years ago. (This is the key to Dr. Leary’s cryptic epigram, “Your body is 3 billion years old.”) The “body of Buddha,” as Buddhists call it, is, at any moment, in cybernetic contact with each of its parts. This does not involve anything spooky or metaphysical; what I have in mind can be illustrated by the experience of Dr. Ross Ashby, who tried to build an analog computer that would be a model of a generalized animal organism. Dr. Ashby found that such a machine could no more be designed than one could divide by zero in mathematics. It cannot be designed because the feedbacks, the information Bow channels, are not all inside the animal; many are in “the environment.” Dr. Ashby ended by designing his “homeostat,” widely used in biology and cybernetics classes. This is not a model of an animal; it is a model of an-animal-in-an-environment.

A recent drawbridge design by Chris Wilkinson Architects in Great Britain took the human eyelid, of all things, for its analogical model (see Fig. 8-4). The curvature of the bridge provides structural stability, just as it does for the eyelid. When the “lid” is closed, the bridge is down and people and cars can move across it. When a ship approaches, the lid is raised.

Similarity. Analogy is one of the most powerful creative tools. We’ll dig deeper into the power of analogy in the next chapter. Here, consider parallel contexts at one end of the dial and completely unrelated ones at the other. To think of good analogies to try, start with the intended outcome. Want to make ice cream faster? “Who or what is built for speed?” Want to delight your customers? “Who or what delights people?” The brain solves new problems in this way, using its understanding of a familiar topic to grapple with one that appears very different on the surface. You might apply the lessons of high school football to your first job managing a team, or transplant one of Napoleon’s battlefield strategies to a product launch. Consciously or unconsciously, we distill principles from observations and then see where else they might fit. How might we make ice cream like a therapy session? How might an Olympic sprinter serve up an ice cream cone? How might Apple design a container for ice cream sprinkles? How might eating ice cream feel like a roller coaster? Like a magic show? Like a horror movie? HMW questions can be silly or serious.

Researchers have used the analogy of different sizes of sticky notes to represent different learners’ working memories (Alloway & Alloway, 2015).

The question of the baptism of infants cannot be settled on the basis of exegetical data in Acts but only on theological grounds.20 The promise in Acts 2:39 need not mean that children are to be baptized; the promise may mean no more than that the gospel is a blessing not only for the present generation but to their descendants as well — not only to people in Jerusalem but also to those of distant lands — and is analogous to “your sons and daughters” in 2:17.21 The “children” are limited by the following phrase, “every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.” The references to the baptism of households (11:14; 16:15, 31; 18:8) may refer to the “wife, children, servants and relatives living in the house,”22 but they may equally well designate only those of mature age who confessed their faith in Christ.23 It is not certain that such passages mean that the faith of the head of the household sufficed for his children any more than it did for his relatives and slaves.

The victorious concept "force," by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as "will to power," i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc. Physicists cannot eradicate "action at a distance" from their principles; nor can they eradicate a repellent force (or an attracting one). There is nothing for it: one is obliged to understand all motion, all "appearances," all "laws," only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man as an analogy to this end. In the case of an animal, it is possible to trace all its drives to the will to power; likewise all the functions of organic life to this one source.

He first considers belief in God by way of the sensus divinitatis (way 8), articulating an Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model of theistic belief. According to the A/C model, God has given us a faculty for perceiving God that is analogous to sense perception (way 1). If the sensus divinitatis gives us true beliefs, and it is functioning properly in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth, then it gives us knowledge of God. Like perception, this would be a basic belief (not based on argument), but it would still be knowledge.

When it’s said that quantum mechanics is ‘weird’, or that nobody understands it, the image tends to invite the analogy of a peculiar person whose behaviour and motives defy obvious explanation. But this is too glib. It’s not so much understanding or even intuition that quantum mechanics defies, but our sense of logic itself. Sure, it’s hard to intuit what it means for objects to travel along two paths at once, or to have their properties partly situated some place other than the object itself, and so on. But these are just attempts to express in everyday words a state of affairs that defeats the capabilities of language. Our language is designed to reflect the logic we’re familiar with, but that logic won’t work for quantum mechanics.

One of the key lessons to draw from Bazalgette’s sewers is that successful long-term planning needs to be based on building adaptability, flexibility, and resilience into the original design. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand points out that the most long-lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time: They can accommodate different users or be easily extended, retrofitted, or upgraded. He draws an analogy with biology: “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”24 This is exactly where the London sewers were exemplary. By making the tunnels double the size needed at the time, Bazalgette designed long-term adaptability into the system, just as his use of the finest building materials gave the sewers enough resilience to survive over a century of constant wear and tear. Of course, we can learn about resilience not just from cases like the Victorian sewers, but from natural phenomena such as a delicate spider web that manages to survive a storm or the way sweating and shivering help regulate human body temperature.

If you do enough threat modeling, you start noticing all kinds of instances where people get the threat profoundly wrong: * The cell phone industry spent a lot of money designing their systems to detect fraud, but they misunderstood the threat. They thought the criminals would steal cell phone service to avoid paying the charge. Actually, what the criminals wanted was anonymity; they didn't want cell phone calls traced back to them. Cell phone identities are stolen off the air, used a few times, and then thrown away. The antifraud system wasn't designed to catch this kind of fraud. * The same cell phone industry, back in the analog days, didn't bother securing the connection because (as they said): 'scanners are expensive, and rare.' Over the years, scanners became cheap and plentiful. Then, in a remarkable display of not getting it, the same industry didn't bother securing digital cell phone connections because 'digital scanners are expensive, and rare.' Guess what? They're getting cheaper, and more plentiful. * Hackers often trade hacking tools on Web sites and bulletin boards. Some of those hacking tools are themselves infected with Back Orifice, giving the tool writer access to the hacker's computer. Aristotle called this kind of thing 'poetic justice.' [...] These attacks are interesting not because of flaws in the countermeasures, but because of flaws in the threat model. In all of these cases, there were countermeasures in place; they just didn't solve the correct problem. Instead, they solved some problem near the correct problem. And in some cases, the solutions created worse problems than they solved.

For a sense of Carnot’s reasoning, think of a water mill. For a given flow of water, the maximum power it can produce is limited by the height by which the water drops. No amount of cunning design can improve on this limit. The only way to up the power of the mill is to increase the height that the water drops. Analogously, for any heat engine, the power it can produce from a given flow of heat is limited by the temperature difference between its furnace and sink. The only way to up this is to increase this temperature difference. Conversely, reducing the temperature difference will reduce the power output.

What I’m suggesting is that we connect our marriages with our faith in such a way that our experience in each feeds the other. By learning to respect others, meet each other’s sexual needs, overcome dissension, and use the analogies of marriage to foster more creative prayer, we can build and maintain active, growing, and meaningful prayer lives while at the same time developing stronger marriages.

The family analogy is the best picture of what a healthy and vibrant church community is supposed to look like. If you think about it, families are perfectly designed for discipleship: constant access, consistent modeling, demonstration, teaching and training, conflict management and resolution, failure, follow-up and feedback. And this should all happen in an attitude and atmosphere of love. Children are raised, parents are matured, and grandparents are valued all at the same time.

A query is always the starting point of designing a Cassandra data model. As an analogy, a query is a question and the data model is the answer.

The fear programme is designed to get us away from things that are likely to harm us. If we had to make an analogous claim about the purpose of the happiness system, we would be most likely to say that it is there to keep us moving towards things that are likely to be good for us in some appropriate biological sense--mating, good food, pleasant environment--and away from things that are bad for us.

We aren’t designed by God to seek the image of others; we are designed to seek him. When we spend time on social media focusing on how well others present their lives, we are, to use one of my father’s baseball analogies, taking our eye off the ball.

I visited McBeth’s eleventh and twelfth grade classes, which were both working on prototypes for projects they had approached through design thinking. One was a revitalization scheme for Toronto’s waterfront, and the other was creating an indoor agriculture system. The students were producing all sorts of creative solutions, from elaborate models of their waterfront developments to fish farms where the fish’s own waste would fertilize the plants that cleaned the water. It was loud, messy work. At one point, three girls were hand-sawing a piece of lumber balanced between two desks, and sawdust quickly coated their preppy uniforms and hair. With a few exceptions, all the students said they preferred to work without computers on this type of project. They felt they had more creative freedom, were less distracted, could be more accurate to their vision, and gained a better understanding of the scale and materials involved. It also seemed more fun. The groups building models and contraptions around the room were laughing and joking as they glued and taped and cut and broke things. The only ones working on computers were two girls who gave up on a model and decided to make an app instead. They sat side by side, quietly checking out the pricing options on various app-building websites, flipping over to Facebook whenever McBeth was out

The constellation of behaviours we call addiction is provoked by a complex set of neurological and emotional mechanisms that develop inside a person. These mechanisms have no separate existence and no conscious will of their own, even if the addict may often experience himself as governed by a powerful controlling force or as suffering from a disease he has no strength to resist. So it would be more accurate to say: addiction may not be a natural state, but the brain regions in which its powers arise are central to our survival. The force of the addiction process stems from that very fact. Here’s an analogy: let’s say the section of someone’s brain that controls body movements — the motor cortex — was damaged or did not develop properly. That person would inevitably have some kind of physical impairment. If the affected nerves managed nothing more than the motions of the little toe, any loss would hardly be noticeable. If, however, the damaged or undeveloped nerves governed the activity of a leg, the person would have a significant disability. In other words, the impairment would be proportional to the size and importance of the malfunctioning brain centre. So it is with addiction. There is no addiction centre in the brain, no circuits designated strictly for addictive purposes. The brain systems involved in addiction are among the key organizers and motivators of human emotional life and behaviour; hence, addiction’s powerful hold on human beings.

The existence of several examples of intelligence designed under these constraints should give us great confidence that we can achieve the same in short order. The situation is analogous to the history of heavier than air flight, where birds, bats and insects clearly demonstrated the possibility before our culture mastered it.

Analogously, I like to think of the critical intelligence threshold required for AI design as the threshold for universal intelligence: given enough time and resources, it can make itself able to accomplish any goal as well as any other intelligent entity. For example, if it decides that it wants better social skills, forecasting skills or AI-design skills, it can acquire them. If it decides to figure out how to build a robot factory, then it can do so. In other words, universal intelligence has the potential to develop into Life 3.0.

The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.