Axis Team Quotes

Let us not, however, exaggerate our power. Whatever man does, the great lines of creation persist; the supreme mass does not depend on man. He has power over the detail, not over the whole. And it is right that this should be so. The Whole is providential. Its laws pass over our head. What we do goes no farther than the surface. Man clothes or unclothes the earth; clearing a forest is like taking off a garment. But to slow down the rotation of the globe on its axis, to accelerate the course of the globe on its orbit, to add or subtract a fathom on he earth's daily journey of 718,000 leagues around the sun, to modify the precession of the equinoxes, to eliminate one drop of rain--never! What is on high remains on high. Man can change the climate, but not the seasons Just try and make the moon revolve anywhere but in the ecliptic! Dreamers, some of them illustrious, have dreamed of restoring perpetual spring to the earth. The extreme seasons, summer and winter, are produced by the excess of the inclination of the earth's axis over the place of the ecliptic of which we have just spoken. In order to eliminate the seasons it would be necessary only to straighten this axis. Nothing could be simpler. Just plant a stake on the Pole and drive it in to the center of the globe; attach a chain to it; find a base outside the earth; have 10 billion teams, each of 10 billion horses, and get them to pull. THe axis will straighten up, ad you will have your spring. As you can see, an easy task. We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are beter. Eden is moral, not material. To be free and just depends on ourselves.

The team also worked out how the microbes were affecting the brain. Their main suspect was the vagus nerve. It's a long branching nerve that carries signals between the brain and visceral organs like the gut-a physical embodiment of the gut-brain axis. The team severed it, and found that the mind-altering JB-1 lost all its influence.

Copulating Cats and Holy Men The Story of the Creation of the Book of Kells   In the year 791 A.D an Irish monk named Connachtach brought together a team of the finest calligraphers the world has ever seen, on the island of Iona, a sliver of limestone rock off the northwest coast of Scotland. They came from Northumbria in England, from Constantinople, from Italy and from Ireland. All of them had worked on other illuminated manuscripts. But Connachtach, eminent scribe and abbot of Iona, as he is described in contemporary annals, wanted from them the most richly ornamented book ever created by man’s hand. It was to be more beautiful than the great book of Lindisfarne: more beautiful than the gospel-books made at the court of Charlemagne: more beautiful than all the Korans of Persia. It would be known as the Book of Kells. Eighth century Europe was in a state of cultural meltdown. Since the end of the Pax Romana, three centuries earlier, warring tribes had decimated the continent. From the East the Ostrogoths had blundered into the spears of the Germanic tribes to be overrun, in their turn, by the Huns. Their western cousins, the Visigoths, plundered along a confident north- east, southwest axis from Spain to Cologne. The Vandals did what vandals do. As though that wasn't enough, a blunt-faced raggle-taggle band of pirates and pyromaniacs came looting and raping their way out of the freezing seas of the North. For a Viking there was no tomorrow, culture something you stuffed into a hemp sack; happiness, a warm sword. Wherever they went they extorted protection money: the Danegeld. Fighting drunk on a mixture of animist religion and aquavit they threatened to plunge the house of Europe into total darkness. The Book of Kells was to be a rainbow-bridge of light thrown across the abyss of the Dark Ages. Its colors were to burn until the end of time.   #

If you have trouble getting started, begin by brainstorming a list of events that might threaten your future—technology developments, customer activities, stakeholder actions, competitor actions, government actions, substitutions that might let new products or services supplant yours, and so on. Then plot each point on a chart where the x-axis is the “likelihood of occurrence” and the y-axis is the “importance to the business.” Once the points are plotted, select events that have high likelihood and high importance. Assign teams to put each event into a coherent story and describe how such a scenario could come about within two or three years. Have each team present its scenario to the other teams, generating discussion that identifies some signposts to watch for.

The man had no idea what it was like to love a woman more than he loved himself, to be bound to her body and soul, to see her in his children’s faces, to know down to his bones that she was the axis of his world.

Kelly, George, and several other agents were spread out all over the city. Haffenden had already had George rummaging through the trash of a dozen different buildings in Midtown Manhattan. The trash that George was looking at belonged to foreign consulates that were suspected of having friendly ties with Germany, Italy, or Japan. New York City had nearly sixty different consulates. While Axis nations didn’t have their consulates in the country anymore, some of these countries hadn’t officially declared their allegiance to the Allied cause. It was possible they could be spying for the enemy.

These increases in brain cholesterol and pituitary activity were clues that were rich in their implications, and in the late 1960’s a research team at the University of California at Berkeley began to look for specific differences in the neural structures of gentled and ungentled rats. They found that greater tactile stimulation resulted in the following differences: These animals’ brains were heavier, and in particular they had heavier and thicker cerebral cortexes. This heaviness was not due only to the presence of more cholesterol—that is, more myeline sheaths—but also to the fact that actual neural cell bodies and nuclei were larger. Associated with these larger cells were greater quantities of cholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase, two enzymes that support the chemical activities of nerve cells, and also a higher ratio of RNA to DNA within the cells. Increased amounts of these specific compounds indicates higher metabolic activity. Measurements of the synaptic junctions connecting nerve cells revealed that these junctions were 50% larger in cross-section in the gentled rats than in the isolated ones. The gentled rats’ adrenal glands were also markedly heavier, evidence that the pituitary-adrenal axis—the most important monitor of the body’s hormonal secretions—was indeed more active.34 Many other studies have confirmed and added to these findings. Laboratory animals who are given rich tactile experience in their infancy grow faster, have heavier brains, more highly developed myelin sheaths, bigger nerve cells, more advanced skeletal muscular growth, better coordination, better immunological resistance, more developed pituitary/adrenal activity, earlier puberties, and more active sex lives than their isolated genetic counterparts. Associated with these physiological advantages are a host of emotional and behavioral responses which indicate a stronger and much more successfully adapted organism. The gentled rats are much calmer and less excitable, yet they tend to be more dominant in social and sexual situations. They are more lively, more curious, more active problem solvers. They are more willing to explore new environments (ungentled animals usually withdraw fearfully from novel situations), and advance more quickly in all forms of conditioned learning exercises.35 Moreover, these felicitous changes are not to be observed only in infancy and early maturation; an enriched environment will produce exactly the same increases in brain and adrenal weights and the same behavioral changes in adult animals as well, even though the adults require a longer period of stimulation to show the maximum effect.36