Bulb Change Quotes

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[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.
Slavoj Žižek
Step up to red alert." Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb." - Rimmer & Kryten, "Red Dwarf
Rob Grant
I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.
Henry Rollins
how many miserable young people does it take to change a light bulb. please, i am serious, i have been sitting in the dark for 2 weeks
Alice Oseman (Radio Silence)
You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you’re changing a patio light bulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you’ll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you’ll be dead.
Chuck Palahniuk
How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel? We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.
Peter F. Hamilton (Great North Road)
[Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change.
John E. Douglas (Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit)
Relationships are a lot like houses: without a good foundation, they’ll crumble. When a light bulb goes out, you don’t buy a new house, you change the bulb. When the faucet drips, you don’t start mopping the floor before you fix the leak. In other words, no matter how much digging it takes, it’s important to get to the root of a problem.
Christina Lauren (The Honey-Don't List)
How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.
Arika Okrent (In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language)
I've been wondering. . . I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something." Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness)
And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?" "You get to be obsessed and angry," Tom said. "And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world.
Anne Lamott (Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son)
How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clustered around the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father had said, that men were given to know just a little of what paradise was like, so that they might yearn for it with all their soul,and strive during their time on earth to be worthy of going there.
Paul Bowles (The Spider's House)
How many social workers does it take to change a light bulb? Thirteen. One to find the bulb, and the other twelve to hold a meeting to discuss how best to change it.
Cathy Glass (Damaged: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Forgotten Child)
How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Are you kidding? That's a hardware problem!
Various (101 Best Jokes)
The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs’s heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What’s that? and decide, Only a woodchuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
As the joke goes, ‘How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.’6
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
I take the precaution of wearing proper, decent clothes when changing a light bulb in case I get zapped and die.
Joyce Rachelle
Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Only one, but the light bulb has to WANT to change.
David John Allan (Funny and Clever Clean Jokes for Kids)
Q. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? A. Only one, if the bulb really wants to change.
Gerald M. Weinberg (Becoming a Technical Leader)
How many politicians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Four. One to change it and the other three to deny it.
Various (Best Jokes 2014)
The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day—for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism—namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth.
Clark Strand (Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion)
That’s the problem today. It ain’t the kids’ faults. It’s the parents who don’t trust ‘em enough to teach ‘em to fend for their own. Now I ain’t never been the best shooter, never raised me a prize steer, and there were a hundred guys around here who could fix a roof faster than I could change a light bulb. But the point is I learned how to do lots of different things that parents don’t teach kids anymore.” “My
Dan Padavona (Dark Vanishings (Dark Vanishings #1))
Uncle Ben: [changing a light bulb] And the Lord said, "Let there be light." And voilà! There is light. Forty soft, glowing watts of it. Aunt May: Good boy. God will be thrilled, just don't fall on your ass.
Uncle Ben
Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path. The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.
Sara Baume (Spill Simmer Falter Wither)
Most of us accept that when we flip the light switch, the bulb will light up the darkness. When we turn on the tap, crystalline water will pour deliciously into our glass. When we are hungry, there will be something to eat. We also accept that others do not deserve the same. In the cities, we walk by the homeless each and every day. On the nightly news, we glorify hatred and rage. In entertainment, we celebrate the discomfort of others. We have learned to accept the unacceptable. It is a tragedy. Changing the world seems an impossible task. And not one among us can do it. Only when we each commit to small steps forward will we turn it all around.
Melissa Hellstern (How to be Lovely: The Audrey Hepburn Way of Life)
I've been wondering... I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something." Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants. "I'll tell you if I can, Buddy." "Do you think there's something in me that drives women crazy?
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
Do you know a way out of here?” I ask Ben. Sammy’s more trusting than I am, but the idea’s worth exploring. Finding the escape pods—if they even exist—has always been the weakest part of my getaway plan. He nods. “Do you?” “I know a way—I just don’t know the way to the way.” “The way to the way? Okay.” He grins. He looks like hell, but the smile hasn’t changed a bit. It lights up the tunnel like a thousand-watt bulb. “I know the way and the way to the way.
Rick Yancey (The 5th Wave (The 5th Wave, #1))
grant yourself permission to be led by the knowledge of a grown woman’s mind. When you find that you are walking down a familiar, darkened tunnel, do not force yourself toward the light, but instead, turn around and change the bulb.
Dina Redmon (Chasing Circumstance)
Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency. The image caused, in other words, a derangement of scale, from which you people still suffer. As your anxiety about the disastrous effects of your behavior on the biosphere grows, you console yourself with the thought that by changing a light bulb or recycling a bottle or choosing paper instead of plastic, you can save the planet.
Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)
We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time, perhaps even a lot of it – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a light bulb.
Alain de Botton (How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life))
The electric bulb cannot give light without electricity. Likewise, you cannot change yourself if today you are cut off from Christ. If there be any change or difference in you, it is not because you yourself have changed, for all is in Christ. Such is the way of God’s salvation.[2]
Watchman Nee (The Secret of Christian Living)
I just want you to want what has always been yours to have. The way is never shut if the light you seek is bright enough. If you are feeling a little dark, you can always change the bulb. Never let the limits of your understanding dictate how far you can go. We can be better. We can just be. Trust me- it's as simple as that.
Corey Taylor
Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it.
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Would you change that bulb, then?" He held out a fresh bulb from the drawer beside him. It was a perfect glass bubble with a tangle of fine wire inside. Thaniel took it and felt unqualified to be doing anything with it. "Why can't you?" "I'd have to stand on the desk." He shifted. "I'm afraid of heights." "And you can't even stand on a desk?" "Shall we not dwell on it?" Mori said, at a slightly higher pitch then usual.
Natasha Pulley (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, #1))
J’habite une blessure sacrée j’habite des ancêtres imaginaires j’habite un vouloir obscur j’habite un long silence j’habite une soif irrémédiable j’habite un voyage de mille ans j’habite une guerre de trois cent ans j’habite un culte désaffecté entre bulbe et caïeu j’habite l’espace inexploité j’habite du basalte non une coulée mais de la lave le mascaret qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure et brûle toutes les mosquées je m’accommode de mon mieux de cet avatar d’une version du paradis absurdement ratée -c’est bien pire qu’un enfer- j’habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies chaque minute je change d’appartement et toute paix m’effraie tourbillon de feu ascidie comme nulle autre pour poussières de mondes égarés ayant crachés volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets j’habite donc une vaste pensée mais le plus souvent je préfère me confiner dans la plus petite de mes idées
Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan Poetry Series))
her legs growing tired. She feels a twinge in her left ankle, the one she sprained last fall when she was knocked over by someone’s Labrador on the village green. That injury was just the latest insult: the thumb jammed by a heavy carton of books, the rotator cuff torn while changing a light bulb, the plantar fasciitis in both feet just because, the compressed disk in her neck for the same unfair nothing of a reason. “What can I tell you?” the chiropractor said. “Welcome to middle age.
Chris Pavone (Two Nights in Lisbon)
Zet and Lottie swam into New York City from the skies—that was how it felt in the Pacemaker, rushing along the Hudson at sunrise. First many blue twigs overhanging the water, than a rosy color, and then the heavy flashing of the river under the morning sun. They were in the dining car, their eyes were heavy. They were drained by a night of broken sleep in the day coach, and they were dazzled. They drank coffee from cups as heavy as soapstone, and poured from New York Central pewter. They were in the East, where everything was better, where objects were different. Here there was deeper meaning in the air. After changing at Harmon to an electric locomotive, they began a more quick and eager ride. Trees, water, sky, and the sky raced off, floating, and there came bridges, structures, and at last the tunnel, where the air breaks gasped and the streamliner was checked. There were yellow bulbs in wire mesh, and subterranean air came through the vents. The doors opened, the passengers, pulling their clothing straight, flowed out and got their luggage, and Zet and Lottie, reaching Forty-second Street, refugees from arid and inhibited Chicago, from Emptyland, embraced at the curb and kissed each other repeatedly on the mouth. They had come to the World City, where all behavior was deeper and more resonant, where they could freely be themselves, as demonstrative as they liked. Intellect, art, the transcendent, needed no excuses here. Any cabdriver understood, Zet believed.
Saul Bellow (Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories)
course, among the interesting things about Edison is that he did not invent either the light bulb or the motion picture camera. In both cases, Edison worked with collaborators to build upon existing inventions, which is one of the human superpowers. What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it. But who wants to hear a story about slow progress made through iterative change over many decades? Well, you, hopefully.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed)
She could not tell Jenny that she stands and looks out the window of her kitchen in the morning and the tasks of the day unfurl themselves before her like a roll of celluloid and she thinks, Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper and get oil changed in car one and order food for the dog and wax bikini and make pasta with butternut squash and ricotta and wait do we have a fucking dog and get sixty-watt bulbs for the bar and restock Grey Goose and get clothes out of dryer and pluck single black hair from chin and clean car two before extended family comes and bring garbage bins inside and get new plunger and fuck my husband and walk the dog if we have one.
Lisa Taddeo (Three Women)
I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic.
Joe Dunthorne (The Truth About Cats & Dogs)
I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn’t move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don’t see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature . . . I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow. What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they’d think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me - 1953- The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. Can admire with two eyes the mountain, actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. Can make black-eyed peas and collards. Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding. Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question. The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised. I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something. Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. Today, I woke without answer. The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend don't despair of this falling world, not yet didn't it give you the asking
Jane Hirshfield
Why reinvent the light bulb Did you have a problem with the burning light? Thanks to Thomas Edison’s effort, we don’t need to invent a flashlight, we just go to the store or our closet and pull one out and fuck in. I’m sure you realize that Thomas Edison took many attempts before the lamp was mastered by someone who once asked him if he discouraged his failure and said, “Cut, I haven’t failed yet, I’ve discovered another way not to make a light lamp. You see, there’s nothing like failure, there’s just results. Someone once said that defining madness is doing something over and over and getting the same results. To do our lives right, we have to change the things we do. Just like light can burn, so we can. Life can become dark and depressed and we feel no light, no hope of sight. This picture is certainly not clear. Let me highlight this situation (intentional). When we feel down and deep in the hole, that’s when we need light to see our way through. Some of us are lucky enough to have some light on our hands, others have to come out and get it back. Many people try to invent light for themselves by thinking about positive ideas, but so far it takes them. It just gives a lot of light and there’s more light available, but people at a secondary level are about how to get it. We must not be like Thomas Edison, continue to look at the problem and think of ways to solve it. For every problem, there’s a solution. How do we find a solution? We can try, as we have said, to try to figure it out ourselves, or we can find someone who has already crossed this obstacle and do what they did. There are many books on the market today that can help us understand how to overcome obstacles in our lives. We have to read and learn from the failure of others, they’ve been through it before, and they can help teach us how to go through it. We all need more light in our lives and sometimes we can’t see light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s always hope and assistance. You know how others overcome their challenges and keep this education in you even when you feel weak and life seems bad. Don’t try to reinvent the light lamp. Learn how to carry light in yourself.
Er Ramesh Marmit
How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb?" "Two. One to screw the bulb almost all the way in, and one to give a surprising twist at the end.
Jokes About Writers - Writers Jokes
The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
He tapped his fingers against the glass, wiping his drawing away with a swipe of leather. Turning, he surveyed the room. So empty. So dark. Ghosts lurked in the murky recesses. The shadows were growing, threatening. Breath coming short, he snapped on the desk lamp. He gasped, drawing air into his lungs as deeply as he could, the panic stripped away by a fluorescent bulb. The light was feeble in the cavernous space, but it was illumination. Some things never change. After all these years, still afraid of the dark. The
J.T. Ellison (14 (Taylor Jackson, #2))
His manly duties covered the gardening, the bulb-changing and general maintenance, the woman did the washing, ironing, cleaning.
Milly Johnson (The Queen of Wishful Thinking)
As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters, often solving fictitious problems… I believe that mankind has looked at climate change in that same way — as if it were a fiction, as if pretending that climate change wasn't real would somehow make it go away… To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car; this disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make… None of this is rhetoric, none of it is hysteria — it is a fact... This is now about our industries and our governments around the world taking decisive and large-scale action.
Emilio Iodice (When Courage was the Essence of Leadership: Lessons from History, New Edition)
Last year changed its seasons subtly, stripped its sultry winds for the reds of dying leaves, let gelid drips of winter ice melt onto a warming earth and urged the dormant bulbs to brave the pain of spring. We, loving, above the whim of time, did not notice. Alone. I remember now.
Maya Angelou (The Complete Collected Poems)
Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.) Once through the plate, the axons connect to two projections from the brain called the olfactory bulbs. There, in blobs of neurons called glomeruli, is where the bulk of the computation gets done. Mice, known for their acute sense of smell, have just about 1,800 glomeruli—but 1,000 genes that code for olfactory receptors. That’s a lot of perceivable smells. Humans have a seemingly pathetic 370 genes for receptors, but we have 5,500 glomeruli per bulb. That’s a lot of processing power. It must be doing something. The part of the brain that integrates all this information, the olfactory cortex, also gets inputs from the limbic region and other areas that deal with emotion—the amygdala and hypothalamus, among others. Processing of smells in the brain, then, is tied to not only the chemical perception of a molecule but also how we feel about it, and how we feel in general. Every other sense in the body is, in a way, indirect. In vision, light impinges on the retina, a sheet of cells at the back of the eye that makes pigments and connects to the optic nerve. In hearing, sound (which is really just waves of changing air pressure) pushes the eardrum in and out at particular frequencies, which translate via a series of tiny bones to nerves. Touch and taste are the same. Some cell, built to do the hard work of reception, gets between the stimulus and the nerves that lead to the brain for processing. Some physical effect—air pressure, reflected photons, whatever—gets between the stimulus and the perception. It’s all a first-order derivative. Not smell, though. When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.
Adam Rogers (Proof: The Science of Booze)
Circadian lighting might seem complicated if you've never heard of it before, but it can be done in a number of easy ways. At its simplest, try using a string of very warm white, or orange, LEDS in the evening when you are relaxing before bedtime. In overhead or side lights, use circadian light bulbs, which can be set to different colors of light, controlled by a dimmer switch. Use color-changing LED light strips or bulbs with their own color remote controller. Consider buying color-changing lighting products, such as stand-alone table or floor lamps. Use a wake-up light alarm clock to wake you gently with color-changing lights in the morning, and relax you with soft lighting in warm tones at bedtime.
Oliver Heath (Design A Healthy Home: 100 ways to transform your space for physical and mental wellbeing)
IT was autumn in London, that blessed season between  the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer;  a trustful season when one buys bulbs and sees to the  registration of one's vote, believing perpetually in  spring and a change of Government.
Saki (Classic British Fiction: 7 books by Saki (H.H. Munro) in a single file, with active toc)
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one. But the light bulb has really got to want to change.
Stephen Arnott (Man Walks into a Bar: Over 6,000 of the Most Hilarious Jokes, Funniest Insults and Gut-Busting One-Liners)
Q: How many politicians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Four.
Various (Best Jokes 2014)
How many sociopaths does it take to change a lightbulb? One. He holds the bulb while the world revolves around him.
A.J. Rich (The Hand That Feeds You)
It’s highly possible that before success comes, there may be some obstacles in your path. If your plans don’t work out see it as a temporary defeat, and not as a permanent failure. Come up with a new plan and try again. If the new plan doesn’t work out either, change it, adapt it until it works. This is the point at which most people give up: They lack patience and persistence in working out new plans! But watch out. Don’t confuse this with persistently pursuing a plan that doesn’t work! If something doesn’t work…change it! Persistence means persistence toward achieving your goal. When you encounter obstacles - have patience. When you experience setback - have patience. When things are not happening - have patience. Don’t throw your goal away at the first sign of misfortune or opposition. Think of Thomas Edison and his ten thousand attempts to make the light bulb. Fail towards success like he did! Persistence is a state of mind. Cultivate it. If you fall down, get up, shake off the dust, and keep on moving towards your goal.
Marc Reklau (30 Days - Change your habits, Change your life: A couple of simple steps every day to create the life you want)
And yet how surprised we are to find ourselves faced today with widespread pollution, overpopulation, and global warming. The only surprise is that we find this surprising. Still, until very recently, we could probably have avoided the worst of it. Because in the late nineteenth century something happened that greatly accelerated our decline. Conservative social critics have sometimes lamented the loss of a religious consciousness in the age of TV, Twitter, and the Internet. But they are coming into the argument far too late in the game. That loss was already inevitable once the incandescent light bulb came into common use. That was the real tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the twentieth century—from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams. For all these spring directly from the overflow of human consciousness, for which the flood of light is both the metaphor and the means.
Clark Strand (Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age)
How many church members does it take to change a lightbulb?” Answer: “Ten. One to change it and nine to say how much better they liked the old bulb.” Soon
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2017: A Spirit-Lifting Devotional)
The paradox is that although most shopping trips are Quick Trips, these shoppers are not coming to the store for the same products each time. In fact, we found that the average CPG category is purchased on a Quick Trip just 38 percent of the time. Quick Trip shopping must be composed of a very broad and changing variety of CPG categories. In a single week, a household might make a Quick Trip for milk, chips, and beer on one day, whereas a day or two later they might take another Quick Trip seeking light bulbs and paper towels.
Herb Sorensen (Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing)
If it is energy services that we really want, why not measure and regulate utilities in these units rather than kilowatt-hours? Suppose, for example, that instead of setting a maximum rate utilities could charge per kilowatt-hour we allowed them a maximum rate per lumen of light delivered, including the cost of the bulb and fixture along with its input power? Under this approach, if a more efficient light source came along, so that the bulb and input power were cheaper for the utility to provide together than the existing, less-efficient combination, the utility would automatically have the incentive to install the more efficient technology.
Peter Fox-Penner (Smart Power Anniversary Edition: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities)
Real innovation changes the course of industries or even society. The light bulb, the microwave oven, the fax machine, iTunes. These are true innovations that changed how we conduct business, altered how we live our lives, and, in the case of iTunes, challenged an industry to completely reevaluate its business model. Adding a camera to a mobile phone, for example, is not an innovation—a great feature, for sure, but not industry-altering.
Simon Sinek (Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
In 2009 the staid British journal New Scientist published an article with the provocative title “Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds from Catastrophe,” which opens with the following lines: It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power. A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event—a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the Sun. It sounds ridiculous. Surely the Sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) . . . claims it could do just that. (Brooks 2009; see also National Research Council 2008 for the NAS report that New Scientist is referring to) In fact, this scenario is not so ridiculous at all, as the New Scientist article goes on to relate (see also International Business Times 2011b; Lovett 2011; National Research Council 2008). Indeed, if things do not change, it may be inevitable.
Robert M. Schoch (Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future)
Q: How many Java programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: One, to generate a “ChangeLightBulb” event to the socket. Q: How many C++ programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: You’re still thinking procedurally. A well-designed lightbulb object would inherit a change method from a generic lightbulb class. Q: How many Windows programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Three. One to write WinGetLightBulbHandle, one to write WinQueryStatusLightBulb, and one to write WinGetLight-SwitchHandle. Q: How many database programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Three. One to write the lightbulb removal program, one to write the lightbulb insertion program, and one to act as a lightbulb administrator to make sure nobody else tries to change the light-bulb at the same time. Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. That’s a hardware problem. Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. They will redefine darkness as an industry standard.
Scott McNeely (Ultimate Book of Jokes: The Essential Collection of More Than 1,500 Jokes)
In those years when their mother disappeared into herself, and old Mrs Jeffrey next door turned into Frannie, their honorary grandmother, Alice also taught herself how to change light bulbs, fix running toilets and cook chops and veggies while Elisabeth learned how to demand refunds, pay bills, fill in forms and talk to strangers.
Liane Moriarty (What Alice Forgot)
She changed her position, contemplated a row od apple shrubs that she had put in last autumn at the bottom of the terrace, and slowly filled up again with comfortable thoughts. Things wee coming to a head. Her inner life, her restless inner life, was still and lay asleep. She was at liberty now to think of material things; positions of wardrobes and chests-of-drawers; lists of books to be piled by her bed; dressing jackets; white wooly vests and pants. It was not often she could thus play dolls and doll-houses without feeling she ought to be doing something else; that life was short; that she was threatened by the melancholy of life itself whose vapors sometimes reached her with overpowering strength. from her present sea-deep content two things were absent now - the horror of the ultimate departure, and the need to express herself before the end. The baby seemed to swim and strike like a dolphin. "it is a mystery," she said. "Women bearing children, bulbs becoming hyacinths, acorns … sheep… lambs. Feet that never touched the earth… I shall become two people." She stared between the apple trees; hypnotized, drugged by that sea-deep peace; wonder drifting weedily in and out. She was a vase, a container, a plot oak for a gnome to live in, a split oak, a hollow elm.
Enid Bagnold
Bright Lights Q. How many White House advisors does it take to change a light bulb? A. None.  They’re supposed to keep the President in the dark.
mad comedy (World's Dumbest President: A Compendium of the Funniest Jokes about America’s Worst President (World's Greatest Jokes Book 5))
If the word offers insecurity and lack of certainty, each one of us has a special kind of unconscious anchor centering less on language than on a bit of the body, be it a voice, a glance or something else. A particular element will be privileged and will form a part of the framework which makes us interested in some things and not in others. It is this relation to an object which is so particular; even if the object itself might seem to be the same. When we ask ‘How many hippies, Sloane rangers, psychoanalysts . . .does it take to change a lightbulb?’, it is exactly this dimension that is made clear: a lightbulb might forever be a light-bulb, but our relations to it are profoundly different, and indeed, our individuality is defined, in a sense, by how were late to it.
Darian Leader (Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late)
My Home HandyMan is a Calgary based handyman service. We specialize in small and medium-sized jobs that other contractors aren’t interested in. We’ll do anything from changing light bulbs to completely re-modelling your house. We are known for doing quality jobs at a great price—Guaranteed. We stand behind every job that we do.
My Home Handyman
is dead. ‘You’re on your own now, baby,’ he informed me more than once and gleefully from his hospital bed. I miss the discipline they all imposed on my days and I find it hard to structure life around myself, despite the necessary impositions of work. This perhaps will come with practice. But from this new freedom I have learned a great deal about what I do and don’t need; I have also learned to be careful about wishes, for they often come true. And I realise now that this is a fine time. I don’t care about being young or old or whatever. I am past the anxieties of earlier days, no longer concerned about image or identity or A-levels, no longer fearful of shop assistants or doctors’ receptionists. I can admit, without giving a damn, to being a slut, liking salad cream, holding certain politically incorrect views. I can still change and grow, mentally and physically. At this interesting point in life, one may be whoever and whatever age one chooses. One may drink all night, smash bones in hunting accidents, travel the spinning globe. One may teach one’s grandchildren rude rhymes and Greek myths. One may also move very slowly round the garden in a shapeless coat, planting drifts of narcissus bulbs for latter springs.
Elspeth Barker (Notes from the Henhouse)
But…how can I be completely happy as a captive? Don’t you want me to choose you? To not need you, but want you? I’ve lived my own life, I have my own place, my own business. I earn my own money and pay my bills and buy the shit I want. I’m not rich, but I’m comfortable. I learned to change bulbs, to mow the fucking grass, to change a goddamn tire. To build furniture, to travel and be alone. In all that, I learned I didn’t need a man to be with me, to do things for me, I could do it for myself. Nothing is too difficult, you can always find a way. But that means, when I’m with someone…when I choose someone, it’s because I want them. Not because I need them for something, because I have to be with them, but because I can be with them. Don’t you want that?
K.A. Knight (Den of Vipers)
Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All
T.R. Reid (The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution)
When they’re told that some people or ideas are wrong, hateful, or offensive, a light bulb should go off in their heads. That is the moment their curiosity should be piqued to find out for themselves whether it is indeed a “bad” thing. Adopting an attitude of critical thinking is most crucial in learning anything. Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
want to beat the alarm? 1 leave the curtains open overnight to allow daylight into your bedroom as early as possible; sensors in the back of the eye detect the dawn through your eyelids, priming the body clock for morning. 2 set the central heating to come on at least half an hour before you wake, to mimic the temperature change as the sun rises. 3 rig a time switch to your bedside lamp and fit a “daylight” bulb; set it for half an hour before the alarm to jumpstart the cortisol surge.
Stuart Farrimond (The Science of Living: 219 reasons to rethink your daily routine)
I’ve lived my own life, I have my own place, my own business. I earn my own money and pay my bills and buy the shit I want. I’m not rich, but I’m comfortable. I learned to change bulbs, to mow the fucking grass, to change a goddamn tire. To build furniture, to travel and be alone. In all that, I learned I didn’t need a man to be with me, to do things for me, I could do it for myself. Nothing is too difficult, you can always find a way.
K.A. Knight (Den of Vipers)
They were independent women – self-sufficient, autonomous. They could change their own light bulbs and the batteries in their smoke alarms, refill their own windscreen wash bottles in their cars, put out their own bins,
Fiona Collins (A Year of Being Single)
Lives are like light bulbs; they’re not as hard to change as people think.
Alice Feeney (His & Hers)
Thoughts are like blossoms on a flower—there’s a stem and then a whole root system beneath them. Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming. In this case, lasting change requires digging up the roots of one flower and planting a new bulb to grow the other. These new bulbs are embodied experiences; the soil is the context that supports our blooming.
Hillary L. McBride (The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living)
True change has to subvert the system that produces these people. Joseph Campbell has a lovely analogy to help us understand mortality. He explains that a school janitor in charge of minor repairs, on discovering a lightbulb has broken, doesn’t collapse into a quivering puddle of grief, warbling, “That was my favorite lightbulb, and now it’s gone.” The janitor, if he’s any good, knows that the bulb is just an expression of the electricity that illuminates it and simply unscrews the dead, useless bulb, tosses it away, and pops in a new one. Here I will use Campbell’s maintenance fable to deliver two points: 1) we human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain but is approaching in its fledgling understanding of the harmony and transcendent principles of the quantum world, and 2) all political figures are the expression of a refined systemic energy and cannot therefore ever convey a significantly different ideology—it’s not their fault; they’re just not plugged into it.
Russell Brand (Revolution)
[...] and the tasks of the day unfurl themselves before her like a roll of celluloid and she thinks. Okay, tick spray and change of clothes and skating lesson and refill the toilet paper and need milk, onions, lemons and order more printer paper and get oil changed in car one and order food for the dog and wax bikini and make pasta with butter nut squash and ricotta and wait do we have a fucking dog and get sixty-watt bulbs for the bar and restock Grey Goose and get clothes out of the dryer and pluck single black hair from chin and clean car two before extended family comes and bring garbage bins inside and get new plunger and fuck my husband and walk the dog if we have one.
Lisa Taddeo (Three Women)
The light bulb has to want to change.
Nathan Lowell (Home Run (A Smuggler's Tale, #3))
Love is like a daffodil bloom. Commitment is like the bulb. Sometimes the blooms are so beautiful, nobody thinks about the bulb. Until the weather changes, and the flowers die back, and the bulb is the only thing left, buried under the dirt.
Leya Delray (Where Daffodils Bloom: Based on a True Story of Courage and Commitment During WWII)
There’s snow in my head, too. Wide blizzards of bad news blowing sideways. My few hopes are desperate ones. One key fantasy on the porch—no kidding—is winning the magazine sweepstakes I’ve never entered. I habitually filch sweepstakes forms from doctor’s-office magazines or shopping circulars. Sitting outside by flashlight—have to change that overhead porch bulb—I meticulously fill them out, imagining the limo pulling up with balloons and champagne. Such a good story we’ll be: two poets win a jackpot….
Mary Karr (Lit)
Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seek, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . .
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
The Moon is not an electric light bulb that you can change with another!
Avijeet Das
Then the woman who couldn't sleep for the ache inside her ear, who lit every bulb in her house until the glare outside was bright enough to change the weather in her neighbor's dream, who reached up and pulled down a bulb each time the glass of one she laid against her ear grew cold emptied of its light, and who waited until she had drained each one - the day changed back to night behind her neighbor's eyes - for the deep ache to leave, couldn't sleep for the tips of her fingers burning.
Mario Chard (Land of Fire: Poems)
In 1900, Max Planck, a critic of Boltzmann’s science for nearly two decades, published papers that hinted at a change of heart. Even more unexpectedly he seemed to be saying that Boltzmann’s statistical methods might have relevance far beyond thermodynamics. This reluctant conversion was forced upon Planck by the advent of a new technology—the electric light bulb. In these electric current flows through a filament, warming it and making it glow. This focused scientific minds on investigating the precise relationship between heat and light.
Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
It's just past eleven o'clock at night, so finally fully dark out, which means it's the perfect time to see the light installations in St. Andrew Square. As they cross the tram tracks and enter the square, Susan gasps, "Will you look at that?" The entire square is softly aglow from hundreds of spherical bulbs planted on stiff stems, like luminescent poppy seed heads. They cover every last inch of grass in the square, and the lights slowly change from white to blue, to green, and back to white, the change staggered by section, so the square seems alive with rippling bands of light, like a tiny aurora borealis come down to earth.
Brianne Moore (All Stirred Up)
How many evil scientists does it take to change a light-bulb? Two. One to actually do the job and the other to laugh menacingly while it's being done.
Nikhil Pradhan (Cold Truth)
How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Are you kidding? That's a hardware problem! " ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦
Various (101 Best Jokes)
Think about all the things that we can’t imagine not having that were invented or discovered in just the last 150 years. Before we had them, nobody could have imagined them—e.g., the telephone (1876), the electric light bulb (1879), the internal combustion powered vehicle (1885), the radio (1895), movies (1895), the airplane (1903), television (1926), antibiotics (1928), the computer (1939), nuclear weapons (1945), nuclear power plants (1951), GPS (1973), digital cameras (1975), online shopping (1979), the
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)