Application Modernization Quotes

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Great. Lookout. I'm a lookout. Another thing to put on my college applications. What do I do if I see someone?" Val looked back. "I'm not sure, actually.
Holly Black (Valiant (Modern Faerie Tales, #2))
How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.
John Maynard Keynes
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)
I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work--that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom.
Emma Goldman (Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences))
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.
G.K. Chesterton (What I Saw in America (Anthem Travel Classics))
Right," said Marisol. "So, I don't explain modern medicine to you, and then a medical emergency occurs to me. It could be solved with the application of a little first aid, but you don't know that, and so I die. I die at your feet. Is that what you want, Jon?" "No," said Jon. "What's first aid? Is there a ... second aid?
Cassandra Clare (Born to Endless Night (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #9))
The significance of the vast Islamic scientific tradition for Muslims and especially for young Muslims today is not only that it gives them a sense of pride in their own civilization because of the prestige that science fhas in the present day world. It is furthermore a testament to the way Islam was able to cultivate various sciences extensively without becoming alienated from the Islamic world view and without creating a science whose application would destroy the world of nature and the harmony that must exist between man and the natural environment.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World)
Listen to yourself speak, saying, “The knowledge of God has no practical application.” Do you know why all your Christian bookstores are filled up with self-help books, and five ways to do this or that, and six ways to be godly, and 10 ways not to fall?—because people don’t know God! And so they have to be given all sorts of trivial little devices of the flesh to keep them walking as sheep ought to walk! “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame” (1Co 15:34). Why the rampant sinning even among God’s people? It is a lack of the knowledge of God!
Paul David Washer (Ten Indictments against the Modern Church)
The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years after Snow’s death: genetics, evolutionary theory, environmental science. Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow’s day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic position, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. The results of the working out of the agnostic principle will vary according to individual knowledge and capacity, and according to the general condition of science. That which is unproved today may be proved, by the help of new discoveries, tomorrow. The only negative fixed points will be those negations which flow from the demonstrable limitation of our faculties. And the only obligation accepted is to have the mind always open to conviction. That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (Great Minds))
Even a perfect makeup application can’t change everything. You have to like yourself. You have to understand that a blue eyeshadow won’t shave off fifty pounds. Brighter undereyes won’t fix your dark childhood. But a good red lip will get you laid at your high school reunion and that is proof enough that makeup is God.
Trixie Mattel (Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood)
All the parenting books, eighteen-century and modern, warn against appearing to take your children's irrational anxieties too seriously. I have, myself, yet to experience a fear assuaged by the brisk application of common sense.
Sarah Moss (Night Waking)
The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.
Edward O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth)
Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential... Modernity has turned 'more stuff' into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism through Third World authoritarianism down to a failed marriage... Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting.
A.C. Grayling (What is Good?)
Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow’s day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It’s also a threat to national security.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
Software engineering is the application of an empirical, scientific approach to finding efficient, economic solutions to practical problems in software.
David Farley (Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster)
Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
As the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has put it, what modern science seems to show is not that we live in a world governed by a single systematic set of natural laws that apply at all times and in all places, but rather that we live in a ‘dappled world’ in which pockets of order emerge, or can be made to emerge, using a patchwork of different scientific theories (from physics, to biology, to economics), none of which is applicable across all domains.
Thomas Dixon (Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 189))
To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genodice is morally superior to random murder.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult. To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.
Joseph Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
It is therefore obvious that as late as the fifteenth century there was by no means a scholarly consensus on the status of Qur’an 2:256 and that the most influential commentators of the pre-modern period continued to maintain the normative applicability of this verse.
Asma Afsaruddin (The First Muslims: History and Memory)
It is observable, that, as the old ROMANS, by applying themselves solely to war, were almost the only uncivilized people that ever possessed military discipline; so the modern ITALIANS are the only civilized people, among EUROPEANS, that ever wanted courage and a martial spirit. Those who would ascribe this effeminacy of the ITALIANS to their luxury, or politeness, or application to the arts, need but consider the FRENCH and ENGLISH, whose bravery is as uncontestable, as their love for the arts, and their assiduity in commerce. The ITALIAN historians give us a more satisfactory reason for this degeneracy of their countrymen. They shew us how the sword was dropped at once by all the ITALIAN sovereigns; while the VENETIAN aristocracy was jealous of its subjects, the FLORENTINE democracy applied itself entirely to commerce; ROME was governed by priests, and NAPLES by women. War then became the business of soldiers of fortune, who spared one another, and to the astonishment of the world, could engage a whole day in what they called a battle, and return at night to their camp, without the least bloodshed. What
David Hume (Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (NONE))
In regard to hatha yoga, one of the first applications of this instrument concerns one's own body. The goal is to gradually acquire a subtle perception of it and of the forces acting in it. One of the misunderstandings that the yoga practiced in the West has generated is to believe in the existence of physical methods leading to spiritual realizations. This is absolutely preposterous; when the Hindu texts speak about the physique, they are actually referring to something very different from what our contemporaries, especially modern Europeans, mean by that term.
Julius Evola (The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way)
To get products approved, firms had to create applications to prove that medicines were ‘”safe and effective”, meaning more effective than doing nothing at all. That standard was never refined to include the more modern question: Is the product more effective than the dozens of other treatments for a particular conditions that are already on the market? Equally important, the FDA yardstick for approval did not include any consideration of price of cost-effectiveness – a metric that virtually all other countries now use as they consider admitting new drugs to their formula.
Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
Alas, my child,’ he said, ‘human knowledge is very limited and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history and the three or four modern languages that I speak, you will know everything that I know; and it will take me scarcely two years to transfer all this knowledge from my mind to yours.’ ‘Two years!’ said Dantès. ‘Do you think I could learn all this in two years?’ ‘In their application, no; but the principles, yes. Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
But Jesus issued a warning too, stating that “whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26).34 Notice that Jesus associates being ashamed of Him with being ashamed of His words, and when we downplay His words, negate the relevance of His words, and even mock the applicability of His words, at some level we are being ashamed of His words. Let us rather embrace everything He taught, bringing us to our knees in utter dependence on Him. That is the place of grace.
Michael L. Brown (Hyper-Grace: Exposing the Dangers of the Modern Grace Message)
Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.
Robert B. Marks (The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (World Social Change))
For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on.
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
Schiller places the responsibility for this decline of the modern individual on culture, that is, on the differentiation of functions. He next points out how, in art and learning, the intuitive and the speculative minds have become estranged, and how each has jealously excluded the other from its respective field of application:
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter. That may be because we are too many. Architecture and application form, modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as it individual differences do not exist. Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do.
Richard Hugo (The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing)
The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn’t attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn’t attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated
Jeffrey Robbins (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman)
Nineteenth-century inventors of the steam engine used a physical theory which today is considered as scientifically false . In fact most of the inventors up to very recent times have been, for the most part, ignorant of the science of their day and have applied theories that have proved to be false. Moreover, even today a physical or chemical theory can change while its application continues untouched. The success of applied science, therefore, is no reason for accepting the infallibility of the scientific theories involved. There should be an intelligent and conscious criticism of science and its implications, both for those involved in the sciences, and most of all for those who are the recipients of the popularized versions of scientific theories. The philosophy of science has in certain cases tried to point to the lack of logical consistency in some scientific definitions and methods. But having surrendered itself to the fruits of the experimental and analytical methods, it cannot itself be an independent judge of modern science.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man)
Like Plato, Kant believed that human beings have a dual nature: part animal and part rational. The animal part of us follows the laws of nature, just as does a falling rock or a lion killing its prey. There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules. What might those rules be? Here Kant devised the cleverest trick in all moral philosophy. He reasoned that for moral rules to be laws, they had to be universally applicable. If gravity worked differently for men and women, or for Italians and Egyptians, we could not speak of it as a law. But rather than searching for rules to which all people would in fact agree (a difficult task, likely to produce only a few bland generalities), Kant turned the problem around and said that people should think about whether the rules guiding their own actions could reasonably be proposed as universal laws. If you are planning to break a promise that has become inconvenient, can you really propose a universal rule that states people ought to break promises that have become inconvenient? Endorsing such a rule would render all promises meaningless. Nor could you consistently will that people cheat, lie, steal, or in any other way deprive other people of their rights or their property, for such evils would surely come back to visit you. This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. It offered to make ethics a branch of applied logic, thereby giving it the sort of certainty that secular ethics, without recourse to a sacred book, had always found elusive.
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
The Mongols made culture portable. It was not enough to merely exchange goods, because whole systems of knowledge had to also be transported in order to use many of the new products. Drugs, for example, were not profitable items of trade unless there was adequate knowledge of how to use them. Toward this objective, the Mongol court imported Persian and Arab doctors into China, and they exported Chinese doctors to the Middle East. Every form of knowledge carried new possibilities for merchandising. It became apparent that the Chinese operated with a superior knowledge of pharmacology and of unusual forms of treatment such as acupuncture, the insertion of needles at key points in the body, and moxibustion, the application of fire or heat to similar areas. Muslims doctors, however, possessed a much more sophisticated knowledge of surgery, but, based on their dissection of executed criminals, the Chinese had a detailed knowledge of internal organs and the circulatory system. To encourage a fuller exchange of medical knowledge, the Mongols created hospitals and training centers in China using doctors from India and the Middle East as well as Chinese healers.
Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World)
Careful in what and how you are learning. Professors specialize in “teaching” knowledge – They do not specialize in organization and application of knowledge. This is often why modern education includes “job placement” for real-world understanding and immersion of what you learn. Listen, you can grow up in Saudi Arabia, or in Kenya, or Bolivia – and study every book available on-line about hockey. But that will NEVER, by itself, lead you to become an adept hockey player or Hockey Coach. Yet, this is exactly the kind of thing going on all across the Fitness Industry, with ‘weekend certifications’ and the like. Knowledge is more than information gathering– and knowledge is NOT power in and of itself. Knowledge and access to it, is merely the “potential for proper and expert application.
Scott Abel
Under Coolidge, the federal debt fell. Under Coolidge, the top income tax rate came down by half, to 25 percent. Under Coolidge, the federal budget was always in surplus. Under Coolidge, unemployment was 5 percent or even 3 percent. Under Coolidge, Americans wired their homes for electricity and bought their first cars or household appliances on credit. Under Coolidge, the economy grew strongly, even as the federal government shrank. Under Coolidge, the rates of patent applications and patents granted increased dramatically. Under Coolidge, there came no federal antilynching law, but lynchings themselves became less frequent and Ku Klux Klan membership dropped by millions. Under Coolidge, a man from a town without a railroad station, Americans moved from the road into the air. Under Coolidge, religious faith found its modern context: the first great White House Christmas tree was lit, an ingenious use for the new technology, electricity. Under Coolidge, the number of local telephone calls went up by a quarter. In Silent Cal’s time, Americans learned to chatter. Under Coolidge, wages rose and interest rates came down so that the poor might borrow more easily. Under Coolidge, the rich came to pay a greater share of the income tax.
Amity Shlaes (Coolidge)
Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion--which Hume already saw and from which he fled into the comfort of "common sense" and conventional life, and which the multitudes sense today without possessing any such secure refuge--the conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end. The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. The despotism of science over practical life is contemporaneous with the advent of a whole series of pseudo-religious "revelations"; the two are correlative symptoms of the same malady: the abandonment of truth.
Seraphim Rose (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age)
The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Because of the almost irresistible pull toward conformity in modern society, what we shall call ‘existential individuality’ is an achievement, and not a permanent one at that. We are born biological beings but we must become existential individuals by accepting responsibility for our actions. This is an application of Nietzsche’s advice to ‘become what you are’. Many people never do acknowledge such responsibility but rather flee their existential individuality into the comfort of the faceless crowd. As
Thomas R. Flynn (Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
It is the dull and elementary parts of applied mathematics, as it is the dull and elementary parts of pure mathematics, that work for good or ill. Time may change all this. No one foresaw the applications of matrices and groups and other purely mathematical theories to modern physics, and it may be that some of the 'highbrow' applied mathematics will become 'useful' in as unexpected a way; but the evidence so far points to the conclusion that, in one subject as in the other, it is what is commonplace and dull that counts for practical life.
G.H. Hardy (A Mathematician's Apology)
If thereof I designate as the most dangerous characteristic of the political present the application of revolutionary thought to the service of a selfish stateless gold-aristocracy; if I conceive of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern financial affairs fallen into strange hands, and if I imagine all the evils of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to have either germinated from that root or grown together along with it, one will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a paean on war.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays (English and German Edition))
To get products approved, firms had to create applications to prove that medicines were "safe and effective”, meaning more effective than doing nothing at all. That standard was never refined to include the more modern question: Is the product more effective than the dozens of other treatments for a particular conditions that are already on the market? Equally important, the FDA yardstick for approval did not include any consideration of price of cost-effectiveness – a metric that virtually all other countries now use as they consider admitting new drugs to their formula.
Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.
P.W. Singer (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))
Cet objectif a été atteint par une méthode occidentale : l’application d’une taxe foncière nationale de 3 %. Les agriculteurs japonais étaient mécontents et se sont révoltés périodiquement du fait qu’ils devaient payer comptant cette taxe chaque année, et ce, quel que soit le volume de la récolte. Mais s’ils avaient eu connaissance des taux d’imposition occidentaux modernes, ils auraient pu s’estimer heureux… Dans l’État où je vis, la Californie, par exemple, nous payons un impôt foncier de 1 %, plus un impôt d’État sur le revenu qui peut atteindre 12 %, plus un impôt national sur le revenu qui va chercher actuellement dans les 44 %.
Jared Diamond (Bouleversement: Les nations face aux crises et au changement)
But why can't we just order what we need? Or buy it?" Myrnin flicked the silver ring on his right hand into the bars of his cell, setting up a metallic ringing. "None of that. Modern children are fools, slaves to the work of others, dependent for everything. Not you. You will learn how to build your tools as well as use them." "You want me to be an engineer?" "Is it not a useful thing for one who studies physics to understand such practical applications?" She stared at him doubtfully. "You're not going to make me get an anvil and make my own screwdrivers or anything, are you?" Myrnin smiled slowly. "What a good idea! I'll consider it.
Rachel Caine (Midnight Alley (The Morganville Vampires, #3))
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)
Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they “needed” it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first…and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like—what?—an ecology—a fellfield—or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds…life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3))
As long as they are carnivorous and/or humanoid, the monster's form matters little. Whether it is Tyrannosaurus rex, saber toothed tiger, grizzly bear, werewolf, bogeyman, vampire, Wendigo, Rangda, Grendel, Moby-Dick, Joseph Stalin, the Devil, or any other manifestation of the Beast, all are objects of dark fascination, in large part because of their capacity to consciously, willfully destroy us. What unites these creatures--ancient or modern, real or imagined, beautiful or repulsive, animal, human, or god--is their superhuman strength, malevolent cunning, and, above all, their capricious, often vengeful appetite--for us. This, in fact, is our expectation of them; it's a kind of contract we have. In this capacity, the seemingly inexhaustible power of predators to fascinate us--to "capture attention"--fulfills a need far beyond morbid titillation. It has a practical application. Over time, these creatures or, more specifically, the dangers they represent, have found their way into our consciousness and taken up permanent residence there. In return, we have shown extraordinary loyalty to them--to the point that we re-create them over and over in every medium, through every era and culture, tuning and adapting them to suit changing times and needs. It seems they are a key ingredient in the glue that binds us to ourselves and to each other.
John Vaillant (The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival)
It is in the intellectual realm that are to be found the principles from which everything else derives, either consequentially or by way of application; [...] that knowledge of principles is essential knowledge, or metaphysical knowledge, in the true sense of the word, and is as universal as are the principles themselves; it is therefore entirely independent of all individual contingencies, [...] a true understanding can come only from above and not from below; and this should be taken in a twofold sense: the work must begin from what is highest, that is, from principles, and descend gradually to the various orders of application, always keeping rigorously to the hierarchical dependence that exists between them.
René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
Philosophy does not profess to be a particularized science, with a place alongside other such sciences and a restricted domain of its own for investigation; it comes after the particular sciences and ranks above them, dealing in an ultimate fashion with their respective objects, inquiring into their connections and the relations of these connections, until finally it arrives at notions so simple that they defy analysis and so general that there is no limit to their application. So understood, philosophy will exist as long as there are men endowed with the ability and energy to push the inquiry of reason to its furthest limit. So understood, it is a living fact, and it has a history of more than two thousand years.
Désiré-Joseph Mercier (A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy)
The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained. The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . . The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizing a positive role for limited government, they refuse to join the libertarians.
Noel B. Reynolds
As for me, I could not do without Michelet for anything in the world. It is true the Bible is eternal and everlasting, but Michelet gives such very practical and clear hints, so directly applicable to this hurried and feverish modern life in which you and I find ourselves, that he helps us to progress rapidly; we cannot do without him. The Bible consists of different parts and there is growth from one to the next; for instance, there is a difference between Moses and Noah on the one hand, and Jesus and Paul on the other. Now take Michelet and Beecher Stowe: they don’t tell you the Gospel is no longer of any value but they show how it may be applied in our time, in this our life, by you and me, for instance. Michelet even expresses completely and aloud things which the Gospel whispers only the germ of.
Vincent van Gogh
If, then, we wish to make large-scale reforms which will not stultify themselves in the process of application, we must choose our measures in such a way that no violence or, at the worst, very little violence will be needed to enforce them. (It is worth noting in this context that reforms carried out under the stimulus of the fear of violence from foreign neighbours and with the aim of using violence more efficiently in future international wars are just as likely to be self-stultifying in the long run as reforms which cannot be enforced except by a domestic terror. The dictators have made many large-scale changes in the structure of societies they govern without having had to resort to terrorism. The population gave consent to these changes because it had been persuaded by means of intensive propaganda that they were necessary to make the country safe against "foreign aggression." Some of these changes have been in the nature of desirable reforms; but in so far as they were calculated to make the country more efficient as a war-machine, they tended to provoke other countries to increase their military efficiency and so to make the coming of war more profitable. But the nature of modern was is such that it is unlikely that any desirable reform will survive the catastrophe. Thus it will be seen that intrinsically desirable reforms, accepted without opposition, may yet be self-stultifying if the community is persuaded to accept them by means of propaganda that plays upon its fear of future violence on the part of others, or stresses the glory of future violence on the part of others, or stresses the glory of future violence when successfully used by itself.) Returning to our main theme, which is the need for avoiding domestic violence during the application of reforms, we see that a reform may be intrinsically desirable, but so irrelevant to the existing historical circumstances as to be practically useless. This does not mean that we should make the enormous mistake committed by Hegel and gleefully repeated by every modern tyrant with crimes to justify and follies to rationalize-the mistake that consists in affirming that the real is the rational, that the historical is the same as the ideal. The real is not the rational; and whatever is, is not right. At any given moment of history, the real, as we know it, contains certain elements of the rational, laboriously incorporated into its structure by patient human effort; among the things that are, some are righter than others.
Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means)
Let’s say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal. Alternatively, let’s say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits.
Tyler Cowen (The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy)
The first, and more traditional, involved the ingestion of mercury as well as the topical application of this liquid metal to chancres and lesions. The second, more modern theory favored other metals and chemicals—gold, silver, copper, bromine, iodine, and nitric acid—to be taken internally or applied in ointments. Both approaches were hazardous to patients’ health. Of these two methods, Gothenburg’s Kurhuset appears to have favored non-mercurial cures. Elisabeth, during her stay, was treated internally with hydroiodic acid, the main components of which are iodine and hydrogen; her genital warts would have been dehydrated with a cream or cut off. After receiving this cure for seventeen days, Elisabeth went into premature labor. On April 21, while under lock and key at the Kurhuset, she gave birth to a stillborn seven-month-old girl.* She did not cite the father’s name on the birth certificate.
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
In the 1990s, a set of renegade researchers set aside many of the earlier era’s assumptions, shifting their focus to machine learning. While machine learning dated to the 1950s, new advances enabled practical applications. The methods that have worked best in practice extract patterns from large datasets using neural networks. In philosophical terms, AI’s pioneers had turned from the early Enlightenment’s focus on reducing the world to mechanistic rules to constructing approximations of reality. To identify an image of a cat, they realized, a machine had to “learn” a range of visual representations of cats by observing the animal in various contexts. To enable machine learning, what mattered was the overlap between various representations of a thing, not its ideal—in philosophical terms, Wittgenstein, not Plato. The modern field of machine learning—of programs that learn through experience—was born.
Henry Kissinger (The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future)
It is the antagonism of the dogmatic world, and the apathy of the rest, that is the cause of the mental progress of the world's not keeping pace with the material progress. Better still, the universal application of the material progress has been far in advance of the universal acceptance of mental achievement. The automobile, the gigantic ocean liner, the talking machine, the electric fan, the elevator, the telephone and the other marvelous achievements of man are being used by the greater portion of the people, whose mental status belongs to the wheelbarrow, the simple chair, the ox cart and the tallow candle. Slight is the realization by the users and beneficiaries of science's modern methods, of the heroic struggles and battles that the great men and women of the past suffered to make possible these accomplishments. Oh, how many suffered torture and death at the hands of the very people they were striving to benefit!
Joseph Lewis (The Tyranny of God)
In England, it becomes every day more and more the custom to send young people to travel in foreign countries immediately upon their leaving school, and without sending them to any university. Our young people, it is said, generally return home much improved by their travels. A young man, who goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen, and returns home at one-and-twenty, returns three or four years older than he was when he went abroad; and at that age it is very difficult not to improve a good deal in three or four years. In the course of his travels, he generally acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects, he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of my serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most previous years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and control of his parents and relations, every useful habit, which the earlier parts of his education might have had some tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted and confirmed, is almost necessarily either weakened or effaced. Nothing but the discredit into which the universities are allowing themselves to fall, could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice as that of travelling at this early period of life. By sending his son abroad, a father delivers himself, at least for some time, from so disagreeable an object as that of a son unemployed, neglected, and going to ruin before his eyes. Such have been the effects of some of the modern institutions for education. Different plans and different institutions for education seem to have taken place in other ages and nations.
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)
The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
Sous ce rapport aussi, la même chose se produit dans l’ordre scientifique : c’est la recherche pour la recherche, beaucoup plus encore que pour les résultats partiels et fragmentaires auxquels elle aboutit ; c’est la succession de plus en plus rapide de théories et d’hypothèses sans fondement, qui, à peine édifiées, s’écroulent pour être remplacées par d’autres qui dureront moins encore, véritable chaos au milieu duquel il serait vain de chercher quelques éléments définitivement acquis, si ce n’est une monstrueuse accumulation de faits et de détails qui ne peuvent rien prouver ni rien signifier. Nous parlons ici, bien entendu, de ce qui concerne le point de vue spéculatif, dans la mesure où il subsiste encore ; pour ce qui est des applications pratiques, il y a au contraire des résultats incontestables, et cela se comprend sans peine, puisque ces applications se rapportent immédiatement au domaine matériel, et que ce domaine est précisément le seul où l’homme moderne puisse se vanter d’une réelle supériorité.
René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
As with Dalton and the atom, neither Bateson nor Johannsen had any understanding of what a gene was. They could not fathom its material form, its physical or chemical structure, its location within the body or inside the cell, or even its mechanism of action. The word was created to mark a function; it was an abstraction. A gene was defined by what a gene does: it was a carrier of hereditary information. “Language is not only our servant,” Johannsen wrote, “[but] it may also be our master. It is desirable to create new terminology in all cases where new and revised conceptions are being developed. Therefore, I have proposed the word ‘gene.’ The ‘gene’ is nothing but a very applicable little word. It may be useful as an expression for the ‘unit factors’ . . . demonstrated by modern Mendelian researchers.” “The word ‘gene’ is completely free of any hypothesis,” Johannsen remarked. “It expresses only the evident fact that . . . many characteristics of the organism are specified . . . in unique, separate and thereby independent ways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.
Christopher Michael Langan
Nowadays, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one form or another of advanced technology and we have got to make it work safely and efficiently: this involves, among other things, the intelligent application of structural theory. However, man does not live by safety and efficiency alone, and we have to face the fact that, visually, the world is becoming an increasingly depressing place. It is not, perhaps, so much the occurrence of what might be described as 'active ugliness' as the prevalence of the dull and the commonplace. Far too seldom is the heart rejoiced or does one feel any better or happier for looking at the works of modern man. Yet most of the artefacts of the eighteenth century, even quite humble and trivial ones, seem to many of us to be at least pleasing and sometimes incomparably beautiful. To that extent people—all people—in the eighteenth century lived richer lives than most of us do today. This is reflected in the prices we pay nowadays for period houses and antiques. A society which was more creative and self-confident would not feel quite so strong a nostalgia for its great-grandfathers' buildings and household looks.
J.E. Gordon (Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down)
The flourishing of historical and political legends came to a rather abrupt end with the birth of Christianity. Its interpretation of history, from the days of Adam to the Last Judgment, as one single road to redemption and salvation, offered the most powerful and all-inclusive legendary explanation of human destiny. Only after the spiritual unity of Christian peoples gave way to the plurality of nations, when the road to salvation became an uncertain article of individual faith rather than a universal theory applicable to all happenings, did new kinds of historical explanations emerge. The nineteenth century has offered us the curious spectacle of an almost simultaneous birth of the most varying and contradictory ideologies, each of which claimed to know the hidden truth about otherwise incomprehensible facts. Legends, however, are not ideologies; they do not aim at universal explanation but are always concerned with concrete facts. It seems rather significant that the growth of national bodies was nowhere accompanied by a foundation legend, and that a first unique attempt in modern times was made precisely when the decline of the national body had become obvious and imperialism seemed to take the place of old-fashioned nationalism.
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.
Justin Kyle McFarlane Beau
One-sidedness in the exercise of powers, it is true, inevitably leads the individual into error, but the race to truth,”6 says Schiller. The privileged position of the superior function is as detrimental to the individual as it is valuable to society. This detrimental effect has reached such a pitch that the mass organizations of our present-day culture actually strive for the complete extinction of the individual, since their very existence depends on a mechanized application of the privileged functions of individual human beings. It is not man who counts, but his one differentiated function. Man no longer appears as man in our collective culture: he is merely represented by a function, what is more he identifies himself completely with this function and denies the relevance of the other inferior functions. Thus modern man is debased to a mere function, because it is this that represents a collective value and alone guarantees a possible livelihood. But, as Schiller clearly sees, a differentiation of function could have come in no other way: There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of man than by placing them in opposition to each other. This antagonism of powers is the great instrument of culture, but it is only the instrument; for as long as it persists, we are only on the way towards culture.7
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6: Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
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A.S. Bhalla
This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).
David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss)
This presentation is dealing the question of the modern relevance of God's Law today. What I propose to do is defended the notion of the applicability of God's Law; when the law is properly interpreted according to its Old Testament setting, and adapted to new covenantal conditions. -Theological Bootcamp II, The Intention of God's Law
Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.
Nothing has been as instructive in exploring the notion of authenticity as relearning the work of the great philosophers Aristotle and Plato. We are struck by their applicability to our work as we help companies and people develop their brands. Why do these early philosophers have so much to say that is helpful to modern marketers? We believe it is because they were focused on the fundamental issues of authenticity that we all face: Who are we? Why are we? How should we behave? Asking these questions encourages us to deepen our self-awareness. In particular, this issue of “who are we?” is critical. Knowing who we are is the key to elevating our capacities and performance.
Tom Hayes
Modern Operating Systems Andrew S. Taunenbaum The Design of the UNIX Operating System Andrew S. Taunenbaum Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications Booch Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Gamma
Michael Gitabaum
The very fact that there was not within Christianity a detailed instruction about social structure and economic practices led, with a weakening of Christianity in the West, through economic practices and applications of technology to an amassment of wealth which knows no bounds and limits. It has also led to the creation of a modem civilization which has spread to other continents and has brought about political and military situations in which the choice has often had to be made between annihilation and the sacrifice of those values which give dignity to human life.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man)
that pure science searches for the truth without worrying about its practical application,
Luba Vikhanski (Immunity: How Elie Metchnikoff Changed the Course of Modern Medicine)
Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names. Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms. When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain. And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar. Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation. The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks. [...] It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities. Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them. In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be
Wong Kiew Kit
One must bear in mind, that those who have the true modern spirit need not modernise, just as those who are truly brave are not braggarts. Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans; or in the hideous structures, where their children are interned when they take their lessons; or in the square houses with flat straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of windows, where these people are caged in their lifetime; certainly modernism is not in their ladies' bonnets, carrying on them loads of incongruities. These are not modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science, but not its wrong application in life,—a mere imitation of our science teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly invoking its aid for all impossible purposes. Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies the whole region of life, has its fascination. It looks so powerful because of its superficiality,—as does a hippopotamus which is very little else but physical. Science speaks of the struggle for existence, but forgets that man's existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly exists in the ideal of perfection, whose depth and height are not yet measured. Life based upon science is attractive to some men, because it has all the characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound. When you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and scientific. Because, therefore, a sportsman is only a superficial man,—his fullness of humanity not being there to hamper him,—he is successful in killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of science is that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But even science cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful; and those whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition, that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsman, will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls.
Rabindranath Tagore (The Spirit of Japan)
We next read;—“The rib which the Lord God had taken from man made He a woman.” But the last words are by no means an adequate rendering of the original, which should be translated “builded He into a woman.” And there is a remarkable coincidence in the use of such a term, and the frequent application of the words “build “ and “edify” to the Church in the New Testament.
G.H. Pember (Earth's Earliest Ages and Their Connection with Modern Spiritualism and Theosophy)
By the time Columbus discovered America, the Indians were already using beads for decoration. Beads were made from shells, bones, claws, stones, and minerals. The Algonquin and Iroquois tribes of the eastern coast made beads from clam, conch, periwinkle, and other seashells. These beads were used as a medium of exchange by the early Dutch and English colonists. They were called “wampum,” a contraction of the Algonquin “wampumpeak” or “wamponeage,” meaning string of shell beads. The purple beads had twice the value of the white ones. The explorer, followed by the trader, missionary and settler, soon discovered that he had a very good trade item in glass beads brought from Europe. The early beads that were used were about 1/8 inch in diameter, nearly twice as large as beads in the mid-1800’s. They were called pony beads and were quite irregular in shape and size. The colors most commonly used were sky-blue, white, and black. Other less widely used colors were deep bluff, light red, dark red, and dark blue. The small, round seed beads, as they are called, are the most generally used for sewed beadwork. They come in a variety of colors. Those most commonly used by the Indians are red, orange, yellow, light blue, dark blue, green, lavender, and black. The missionaries’ floral embroidered vestments influenced the Woodland tribes of the Great Lakes to apply beads in flower designs. Many other tribes, however, are now using flower designs. There are four main design styles used in the modern period. Three of the styles are largely restricted to particular tribes. The fourth style is common to all groups. It is very simple in pattern. The motifs generally used are solid triangles, hourglasses, crosses, and oblongs. This style is usually used in narrow strips on leggings, robes, or blankets. Sioux beadwork usually is quite open with a solid background in a light color. White is used almost exclusively, although medium or light blue is sometimes seen. The design colors are dominated by red and blue with yellow and green used sparingly. The lazy stitch is used as an application. The Crow and Shoshoni usually beaded on red trade or blanket cloth, using the cloth itself for a background. White was rarely used, except as a thin line outlining other design elements. The most common colors used for designs are pale lavender, pale blue, green, and yellow. On rare occasions, dark blue was used. Red beads were not used very often because they blended with the background color of the cloth and could not be seen. The applique stitch was used. Blackfoot beadwork can be identified by the myriad of little squares or oblongs massed together to make up a larger unit of design such as triangles, squares, diamonds, terraces, and crosses. The large figure is usually of one color and the little units edging it of many colors. The background color is usually white, although other light colors such as light blue and green have been used. The smallness of the pattern in Blackfoot designs would indicate this style is quite modern, as pony trading beads would be too large to work into these designs. Beadwork made in this style seems to imitate the designs of the woven quill work of some of the northwestern tribes with whom the Blackfoot came in contact.
W. Ben Hunt (Indian Crafts & Lore)
Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place, for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere.
Alastair Bonnett (Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies)
B L Agriculture is one of the top and leading Agriculture Equipments Manufacturer in Jaipur. They are providing the most revolutionary and impactful applications of modern technology for the purpose of planning, cultivating and harvesting of crops. They have some of the latest and most modern models of equipments in their stock.
BL Agriculture
There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the beginning of the industrial age, when in reality he did not possess the means for a world in which the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war and exploitation, in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new science and of its application to technique and to production--nevertheless man at the beginning of modern development was full of hope. Four hundred years later, when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was four hundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it.
Erich Fromm (1984)
From its ancient roots to its modern application, the practical utility of the Enneagram has been appropriated by the CIA to profile world leaders, written about in The Paris Review, Newsweek, Forbes, and CNN.com, and taught in graduate courses at several academic institutions, including Stanford University. The Enneagram is even used to explain leadership styles and decision making styles in the workplace.
Christopher L. Heuertz (The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth)
Jon,” she was saying to the boy across the table from her. “I am in so much pain from stubbing my toe! I need aspirin.” “What’s aspirin?” asked the boy, sounding panicked. He was obviously Nephilim, through and through and through. Magnus could tell without seeing his runes. In fact, he was prepared to bet the boy was a Cartwright. Magnus had known several Cartwrights through the centuries. The Cartwrights all had such distressingly thick necks. “You buy it in a pharmacy,” said the girl. “No, don’t tell me, you don’t know what a pharmacy is either. Have you ever left Idris in your whole life?” “Yes!” said Jon, possibly Cartwright. “On many demon-hunting missions. And once Mama and Papa took me to the beach in France!” “Amazing,” said the girl. “I mean that. I’m going to explain all of modern medicine to you.” “Please don’t do that, Marisol,” said Jon. “I did not feel good after you explained appendectomies. I couldn’t eat.” Marisol made a face at her plate. “So what you’re saying is, I did you a huge favor.” “I like to eat,” said Jon sadly. “Right,” said Marisol. “So, I don’t explain modern medicine to you, and then a medical emergency occurs to me. It could be solved with the application of a little first aid, but you don’t know that, and so I die. I die at your feet. Is that what you want, Jon?” “No,” said Jon. “What’s first aid? Is there a . . . second aid?” “I can’t believe you’re going to let me die when my death could so easily be avoided, if you had just listened,” Marisol went on mercilessly. “Okay, okay! I’ll listen.” “Great. Get me some juice, because I’ll be talking for a while. I’m still very hurt that you even considered letting me die,” Marisol added as Jon scrambled up and made for the side of the room where the unappetizing food and potentially poisonous drinks were laid out. “I thought Shadowhunters had a mandate to protect mundanes!” Marisol shouted after him. “Not orange juice. I want apple juice!
Cassandra Clare (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy)
// Fetch cars by brand and sort by year List<
Juha Hinkula (Hands-On Full Stack Development with Spring Boot 2 and React: Build modern and scalable full stack applications using Spring Framework 5 and React with Hooks, 2nd Edition)
Page 71-72: Many Chinese business men adopt Thai personal and family names, particularly when dealings with the government are anticipated—an application for an export permit, say, signed with a Chinese name may be rejected out of hand, or inordinately delayed, while the same application with a Thai name will receive better treatment. The new surnames adopted ordinarily incorporate the Chinese family name, thus ‘Chang’ becomes ‘Changtrakul’, and ‘Hoon’ becomes ‘Hoonthrarasmi’, but this fact is no handicap to their use for all official purposes. The changes cited above that occur in names seldom reach as far as the home. Thai personal and family names by which individuals may be officially known are not used within the family group or even among close Chinese friends.
Richard J. Coughlin (Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand)
For twenty-six years my mother worked for the State Department as a consular officer in the Foreign Service, interviewing visa applicants, quickly determining whether they were lying about their plans, whether they would stay illegally.
Daniel Jones (Modern Love, Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption)
This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.
Tomislav Milinović
At its core, town government is the closest government to the people and, accordingly, you truly get a flavor for the residents of the town by watching their best-and-brightest elected leaders reviewing rezoning applications peacefully during one meeting and cussing one another out at the next. Oftentimes, members conduct themselves just as professionally mundane as in any other form of government, but when they do flare up, it’s the sort of rocket launch that occasionally gets the cops and/or the courts involved, as I covered multiple times in Haymarket. (My favorite, of course, involved a town council member being found guilty of “using abusive language” following a dispute about what synonym for testicle he told the mayor to suck during a parade.) After all, nothing exemplifies former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous observation that “All politics is local” like town government, especially with the more modern take that “All politics is personal.
Danica Roem (Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change)
Few diseases have had an impact on human evolution, culture and society on par with malaria. It is one of the oldest documented infectious diseases. Indeed, it has been hypothesised that the protective effect bestowed by a heterozygous sickle cell allele explains its survival to the modern day. As such, malaria has left its footprint on human evolution in a profound way few other diseases have. Yet its true origins were the matter of considerable controversy. The clue is in the name – the prevailing theory until Ross's discovery was that malaria resulted from 'mala aria', that is, 'bad air'. It took the advent of modern evidence-based medical science to challenge this 'miasma theory'. Ross's elucidation of the role of mosquitoes in the lifecycle of malaria has opened up a new subject for epidemiological consideration: the vector-borne disease.
Chris von Csefalvay (Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python)
The word 'vaccination' comes from vacca, the Latin word for 'cow'. This is a poignant recapitulation of the history of vaccines. The first vaccine properly so called had, as its active ingredient, the cowpox virus, a close relative of smallpox that however was much less likely to cause severe, disfiguring or lethal disease. Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids, who were often exposed to cowpox, suffered a relatively mild disease, but would be immune to the much more serious smallpox. In an experiment that would unlikely pass muster in the modern world, he infected James Phipps, then an 8-year-old, with cowpox. He suffered a mild and transient illness, but when he was later exposed to scabs from a smallpox patient, he proved immune. Unlike the earlier practice of variolation, which has been practised in late Song dynasty China that sought to induce the cutaneous form of smallpox, variola minor, to protect against the more severe forms of smallpox (variola major), Jenner's vaccination used a less pathogenic virus. He relied on what would later be called 'antigenic similarity', but which was at the time hardly understood.
Chris von Csefalvay (Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python)
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” - F.A. Hayek You may want to read this one several times to let it sink in. In a free society, the collective knowledge of all the individuals in it is at use—it is not suppressed, it has distributive powers, and its applications are monumental and miraculous. The conscious decision to replace the power of that collective knowledge expressed in a free and open marketplace with the limited, broken, misapplied, and misaligned knowledge of a central planner is one of the great mysteries of modern times, and one of its great iniquities.
David L. Bahnsen (There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths)
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.” - F.A. Hayek You may want to read this one several times to let it sink in. In a free society, the collective knowledge of all the individuals in it is at use—it is not suppressed, it has distributive powers, and its applications are monumental and miraculous. The conscious decision to replace the power of that collective knowledge expressed in a free and open marketplace with the limited, broken, misapplied, and misaligned knowledge of a central planner is one of the great mysteries of modern times, and one of its great iniquities. “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” - Thomas Sowell This is, indeed, the question. Defenders of free enterprise do not believe in a perfect administration under a market economy. Rather, we do not believe in the possibility of such. To the extent imperfect decision-making is accepted, we then seek to solve for who has the best chance of answering the question correctly, he with local knowledge or he without? He who will reap the consequences of his decision, or he who will not? Better decisions that are imperfect are superior to worse ones that are also imperfect. And accountability where a decision is made is better than no accountability where a decision is also made. One simply must abandon belief in the omnipotent disinterested third party (which no one explicitly believes in but too many implicitly do). Once we have accepted the inevitability of imperfect decision-making, choosing who decides is the easy part.
David L. Bahnsen (There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths)
Spiritual exploration embraces and celebrates humanity’s journey. It teaches us that our journey can be at once remembered and renewed by this generation. It can help us walk this challenging road toward union together. Spiritual and mystical traditions show us how, as a people, we have reached for that which seemed beyond all understanding. We can learn from traditions that, in today’s world, can be reclaimed with modern application. Their absence has left us feeling disconnected and lacking meaning or purpose in our actions.
Dax Dasilva (Age of Union: Igniting the Changemaker)
Anyone who was, say, sixty years old in Manchester, England, would have witnessed in his or her lifetime a revolution in the manufacturing of cotton and wool textiles, the growth of the factory system, the application of steam power and other astounding new mechanical devices to production, remarkable breakthroughs in metallurgy and transportation (especially railroads), and the appearance of cheap mass-produced commodities. Given the stunning advances in chemistry, physics, medicine, math, and engineering, anyone even slightly attentive to the world of science would have almost come to expect a continuing stream of new marvels (such as the internal combustion engine and electricity). The unprecedented transformations of the nineteenth century may have impoverished and marginalized many, but even the victims recognized that something revolutionary was afoot. All this sounds rather naive today, when we are far more sober about the limits and costs of technological progress and have acquired a postmodern skepticism about any totalizing discourse. Still, this new sensibility ignores both the degree to which modernist assumptions prevail in our lives and, especially, the great enthusiasm and revolutionary hubris that were part and parcel of high modernism.
James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks))
For instance, John Calvin, a leading Reformer, relates in a footnote in his commentary notes on Psalm 63:9–11:22 Under the Hebrew word שׂועל‎, shual, here rendered fox, was comprehended, in common language, the jackal, or Vulpes aureus, golden wolf, so called in Latin because its color is a bright yellow; and in this sense שׂועל‎, shual, has been generally interpreted here, because the jackal is found in Palestine, and feeds on carrion. Both of these circumstances are, however, also applicable to the fox, and, moreover, Bochart has made it probable that the specific name of the jackal (the θως of the Greeks) in Hebrew was אי‎, aye, the howler, being so called from the howling cry which he makes particularly at night. The term occurs in Isa 13:22, 34:14; and Jer 50:39; where איים‎, ayim, is rendered, in our version, “the wild beasts of the islands,” an appellation very vague and indeterminate. At the same time, it is highly probable that shual generally refers to the jackal. Several of the modern oriental names of this animal, as the Turkish chical, and the Persian sciagal, sciachal, or schachal — whence the English jackal — from their resemblance to the Hebrew word shual, favor this supposition; and Dr Shaw, and other travelers, inform us, that while jackals are very numerous in Palestine, the common fox is rarely to be met with. We shall, therefore, be more correct, under these circumstances, in admitting that the jackal of the East is the Hebrew shual.
Bodie Hodge (Dinosaurs, Dragons, and the Bible)
Modern university education practically prepares one to acquire a doggish mentality with which to accept the service of a greater master. After finishing a so-called education, the so-called educated persons move like dogs from door to door with applications for some service, and mostly they are driven away, informed of no vacancy. As dogs are negligible animals and serve the master faithfully for bits of bread, a man serves a master faithfully without sufficient rewards
A.C. Prabhupāda (Srimad-Bhagavatam, Second Canto)
Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.
Martin Heidegger
Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern [89] natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the [90] seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.
Martin Heidegger
This technique now finds application in the field of therapeutics. For example, if one steadily holds the image of oneself as being healthy and well, it favourably affects the physical processes and mental activities in the direction of wellness. Here is a testimony of its effectiveness from one of the most eminent yogis of modern times: Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the first swamis to come to the US from India, used this technique to reduce his weight. He mentions in his famous book, Autobiography of a Yogi, that when he began his spiritual charitable work in America, he realised he was overweight and needed to lose a few pounds. He held a slimmer image of himself in his mind, along with the thought that he wished to reduce his weight, and soon the body responded by becoming trimmer.
Swami Mukundananda (The Science of Mind Management)