Category Famous Quotes

Don’t be scared,” said a voice behind me. Those must certainly fall into the category of Famous Last Words, the sort that are the last thing you hear before your death. (Along with “it isn’t loaded” and “he only wants to play.”) Of course I was terrible scared.

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...] Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?" "Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!

Don Chrisantos Michael Wanzala "Don CM Wanzala" (born April 13), popularly known as Don Santo (stylized as DON SANTO) is a Kenyan singer, rapper, songwriter, arranger, actor, author, content producer, Photo-Videographer, Creative Director (Blame It On Don), entrepreneur, record executive and Leader of the Klassik Nation and chairman and president of Global Media Ltd, based in Nairobi City in Kenya. ​ The genius of DON SANTO rests in his willingness to break from traditional formula and constantly push the envelope. He flips the method of the moment with undeniable swagger and bold African sensibility. As a songwriter, Santo revisits simple, but profound aspects of the human experience – love, lust, desire, joy, and pain that define classical art and drama. He applies his concept to rich, full vocals that exude his intended effect. It is this uncanny ability to compose classics and deliver electrifying live performances that define everything that is essential DON SANTO. In 2015, Santo won the East Africa Music Awards in the Artist of the year Category while his song "Sina Makosa" won the Song of The year. A believer in GOD, FAMILY & GOOD LIFE (Klassikanity).

Now men, men never really see women at all. The more famous you are, the less they see you. That’s one thing I know. You can spend a lifetime around men without them ever really seeing you.” Carol was starting to get drunk, which was not a bad thing for an investigation or, I figured, her day. “What do they see?” I asked. “They see one of two things,” Carol said, with no malice. “They see someone who can solve all their problems—someone who can make their dick hard, make them rich, make them grow their hair back. Or they see the mean old lady standing in between them and all of that. The witch. That’s me. You don’t believe me now, but wait until you’re my age. You will. You’ll see how fast you change from one to the other. And Ann, Ann didn’t fit into either category, and that made people uncomfortable. And it made her very uncomfortable, too, I think—always being looked at, never being seen.

Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle’s statement are alive and well. Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43 What has come down to us is a set of pervasive ideas. One is that work is a necessary evil. The only good work, in this view, is work that helps make us money so that we can support our families and pay others to do menial work. Second, we believe that lower-status or lower-paying work is an assault on our dignity. One result of this belief is that many people take jobs that they are not suited for at all, choosing to aim for careers that do not fit their gifts but promise higher wages and prestige. Western societies are increasingly divided between the highly remunerated “knowledge classes” and the more poorly remunerated “service sector,” and most of us accept and perpetuate the value judgments that attach to these categories. Another result is that many people will choose to be unemployed rather than do work that they feel is beneath them, and most service and manual labor falls into this category. Often people who have made it into the knowledge classes show great disdain for the concierges, handymen, dry cleaners, cooks, gardeners, and others who hold service jobs.

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame. So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.

There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.

What is WordPress? WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today. Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress. WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. You can download and install a software script called WordPress from wordpress.org. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a servicecalled WordPress.com. WordPress users may install and switch between different themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Themes: WordPress is definitely the world’s most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like. WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install. It’s good choice for beginners. Plugins: WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available. Each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. WordPress menu management has extended functionalities that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc. If you like this post then please share and like this post. To learn more About website design in wordpress You can visit @ tririd.com Call us @ 8980010210

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

Let us assume that the reader shared my opinion, that the market over the next week had a 70% probability of going up and 30% probability of going down. However, let us say that it would go up by 1% on average, while it could go down by an average of 10%. What would the reader do? Is the reader bullish or bearish? Table 6.2 Event                             Probability                             Outcome                             Expectation Market goes up                             70%                             Up 1%                             0.7 Market goes down                             30%                             Down 10%                             -3.00                                                                                                                                             Total                             -2.3 Accordingly, bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts. It is a pure accounting fact that, aside from the commentators, very few people take home a check linked to how often they are right or wrong. What they get is a profit or loss. As to the commentators, their success is linked to how often they are right or wrong. This category includes the “chief strategists” of major investment banks the public can see on TV, who are nothing better than entertainers. They are famous, seem reasoned in their speech, plow you with numbers, but, functionally, they are there to entertain—for their predictions to have any validity they would need a statistical testing framework. Their frame is not the result of some elaborate test but rather the result of their presentation skills.

Interestingly, Jockey’s first attempt to enter India wasn’t with the Genomals. It was with Associated Apparels in 1962. Through the 1960s, many foreign innerwear brands were launched in India. Associated Apparels introduced the then world-famous Maidenform bras (owned today by Hanes) and tied up with Jockey to launch Jockey underwear in 1962. The international brand, Lovable, entered India in 1966 through a licensing deal and became a huge success. Along with it entered the brand Daisy Dee, through a subsidiary of Lovable, followed by Feelings. In 1971, Maxwell Industries launched VIP-branded innerwear for men in the economy segment, catching the attention of the discerning public with an advertisement featuring a Bollywood actor. In 1973, however, Jockey decided to leave India after the Indian government used the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) to force multinational companies to dilute their ownership in their Indian ventures to 40 per cent. After Jockey exited India, its competitors flourished. Associated Apparels continued to focus on mid-premium innerwear during the 1980s and was successful in establishing themselves as a dominant player in the mid-premium innerwear segment through Liberty (men) and Libertina (women). Maxwell Industries, during the 1980s, launched the brand, Frenchie, to cater to the mid-premium innerwear segment. In 1985, Rupa & Co. emerged in the innerwear market, offering products across categories, including men, women and kids, and became one of the biggest manufacturers and sellers of innerwear in India. The success of Rupa was followed by many other domestic brands in the 1980s and ’90s, including Amul, Lux Cozi and Dollar in the men’s category, while Neva, Bodycare, Softy, Lady Care, Little Lacy, Red Rose, Sonari, Feather Line, etc., were the key players in the lingerie market. Then came the liberalization of 1991. With the regulatory hurdles to enter India removed, Jockey decided to return to India. And this time, it chose the right partners.

When he died, much was made of how singular Steve Jobs had been. For comparisons, observers needed to reach back to the mythic inventors and showmen of earlier eras, particularly Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Jobs was singular, to be sure. But he also was of a type. He was what psychotherapist and business coach Michael Maccoby called a “productive narcissist.” In 2000, Maccoby published an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review that applies Freudian terminology to three categories of executives Maccoby had observed in corporate life. “Erotics” feel a need to be loved, value consensus, and as a result are not natural leaders. These are the people to whom a manager should assign tasks—and then heap praise for a job well done. “Obsessives” are by-the-books tacticians with a knack for making the trains run on time. An efficient head of logistics or bottom-line-oriented spreadsheet jockey is the classic obsessive. The greats of business history, however, are “productive narcissists,” visionary risk takers with a burning desire to “change the world.” Corporate narcissists are charismatic leaders willing to do whatever it takes to win and who couldn’t give a fig about being liked. Steve Jobs was the textbook example of a productive narcissist. An unimpressed Jobs was famous for calling other companies “bozos.” His own executives endured their rides on what one called the “bozo/hero rollercoaster,” often within the same marathon meeting.

Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved

I have always fancied myself as a fairly objective looker, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I do not miss whole categories of things. Let me give you an example of what I mean, Alicia. Some years ago the U.S. Information Service paid the expenses of a famous and fine Italian photographer to go to America and to take pictures of our country. It was thought that pictures by an Italian would be valuable to Italians because they would be of things of interest to Italy. I was living in Florence at the time and I saw the portfolio as soon as the pictures were printed. The man had traveled everywhere in America, and do you know what his pictures were? Italy, in every American city he had unconsciously sought and found Italy. The portraits—Italians; the countryside—Tuscany and the Po Valley and the Abruzzi. His eye looked for what was familiar to him and found it. . . . This man did not see the America which is not like Italy, and there is very much that isn’t. And I wonder what I have missed in the wonderful trip to the south that I have just completed. Did I see only America? I confess I caught myself at it. Traveling over those breathtaking mountains and looking down at the shimmering deserts . . . I found myself saying or agreeing—yes, that’s like the Texas panhandle— that could be Nevada, and that might be Death Valley. . . . [B]y identifying them with something I knew, was I not cutting myself off completely from the things I did not know, not seeing, not even recognizing, because I did not have the easy bridge of recognition . . . the shadings, the nuance, how many of those I must not have seen. (Newsday, 2 Apr. 1966)

When I talked about World War II, I only really knew about the Holocaust, Japanese internment, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and was certain that they were all equally bad. I could interrogate someone else’s privilege like a Spanish Inquisitor, but wash my hands of my own like Pontius Pilate. I knew exactly which side of the classroom I belonged in when the teacher of my social justice class (yes, this is a thing) divided us into “privileged” vs. “underprivileged” categories in twelfth grade. And perhaps most revealingly, I’d never had to read George Orwell’s 1984. He’d been shelved to make room for a local writer’s story of a poor Indian boy by the time I showed up. I realize now how poisonously deliberate this last omission was. Because in retrospect, what I was really being taught, more than this junk diet of useless knowledge, was a classic instance of what Orwell himself famously described as doublethink. That is, the act of believing two mutually exclusive things at once. In my case, I was being taught to believe that, first, I was special, unique, important, and great beyond words; second, that I was completely equal to everyone, which is to say average and mediocre. I was taught that diversity is unity. That to regress is to progress. That bullying was Hitler. That George W. Bush was doubleHitler. That British colonizers of Canada were doubleplusHitler. That we have always been at war with Hitler, however defined.

Although these were easily the darkest days in Alfred’s life, they also were to become the most famous. The stories of his persevering against the Vikings transformed King Alfred into Alfred the Great. The story falls into a category that the modern ear can easily recognize and appreciate. From the legends of Robin Hood hiding out with his band of merry men in Sherwood Forest to the tales of men fighting in the underground French resistance during World War II, the modern listener has been well trained to be moved by the courageous nobility of continuing a campaign of resistance long after being driven into hiding. The seeming despair of a life of defiant resistance, while being hunted in one’s homeland, captures the imagination and takes on a romantic hue. But this was not a category of story that the Anglo-Saxon ear was accustomed to hearing. To his contemporaries, Alfred’s plight was an unqualified tragedy, utterly devoid of romanticism

Before he could start writing Kilby’s application, though, Mosher had to resolve a fundamental tactical question. Anyone who applies for a patent has to decide whether he needs it for offensive or for defensive purposes—whether, to use lawyers’ favorite metaphor, he wants his patent to be a sword or a shield. The decision usually turns on the novelty of the invention. If somebody has a genuinely revolutionary idea, a breakthrough that his competitors are almost sure to copy, his lawyers will write a patent application they can use as a sword; they will describe the invention in such broad and encompassing terms that they can take it into court for an injunction against any competitor who tries to sell a product that is even remotely related. In contrast, an inventor whose idea is basically an extension of or an improvement on an earlier idea needs a patent application that will work as a shield—a defense against legal action by the sword wielders. Such a defensive patent is usually written in much narrower terms, emphasizing a specific improvement or a particular application of the idea that is not covered clearly in earlier patents. Probably the most famous sword in the history of the patent system was the sweeping application filed on February 14, 1876, by a teacher and part-time inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. That first telephone patent (No. 174,465) was so broad and inclusive that it became the cornerstone—after Bell and his partners had fought some 600 lawsuits against scores of competitors—of the largest corporate family in the world. In the nature of things, though, few inventions are so completely new that they don’t build on something from the past. The majority of patent applications, therefore, are written as shields—as improvements on some earlier invention. Some of the most important patents in American history fall into this category, including No. 586,193, “New and Useful Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses,” granted to Guglielmo Marconi in 1898; No. 621,195, “Improvements in and Relating to Navigable Balloons,” granted to Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1899; No. 686,046, “New and Useful Improvements in Motor Carriages,” granted to Henry Ford in 1901; and No. 821,393, “New and Useful Improvements in Flying Machines,” granted to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1906.

Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell. Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter.

The high school microcosm isn’t as sequestered as you might think. In order to assimilate as soon as possible, you have to morph into an easily digestible category. Because we don’t have enough experience to define our own social groups and expectations, these categories are extracted from what’s presented culturally, in movies and television—products of the adult world.

At the beginning of his famous TV series, Cosmos, the American astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. That is not a statement of science, to be put in the same category as, for example, the scientific statement that gravity obeys an inverse-square law. Sagan’s statement is simply an expression of his atheistic belief. The problem is, many people give to all statements by scientists the authority rightly due to science, simply because they are stated by a scientist.

My evening was a perfect demonstration of how hard it is for one side to really understand the other. I think Hollywood feels more comfortable welcoming directors who are convicted pedophiles, famous actresses who are also thieves, boxers who are convicted rapists, directors who push cocaine, rappers who sell heroin, singers who solicit prostitutes, and actors who beat up their woman than a Republican in their midst. In fact, the people who fit into those categories still enjoy the professional adoration of their peers in Hollywood, even amidst the suspicion and guilt. It's like the only that can really ruin your reputation as a celebrity is to come out as a Republican.

What is at issue here is not the familiar construct of formal mathematics, but a belief in the existence of ω (the set of natural numbers) prior to all mathematical constructions. What is the origin of this belief? The famous saying by Kronecker that God created the numbers, all the rest is the work of Man, presumably was not meant to be taken seriously. Nowhere in the Book of Genesis do we find the passage: And God said, let there be numbers, and there were numbers; odd and even created he them, and he said unto them be fruitful and multiply; and he commanded them to keep the laws of induction. No, the belief in ω stems from the speculations of Greek philosophy on the existence of ideal entities or the speculations of German philosophy on a priori categories of thought.

If everyone in your category is writing restaurant reviews as if they’re formal essays, something “unexpected” would be to write comedic restaurant reviews from the perspective of a part-time food blogger named Cindy who works for a failing restaurant magazine, and shows up to every restaurant pretending to be this hot insta-famous food-review writer but actually doesn’t know anything about food and gets too drunk at every tasting (and it shows in her writing). In the professional-restaurant-review category, this would be “unexpected.” And as a result, it would stand out.