Circuit Class Quotes

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.

They're trying to breed a nation of techno-peasants. Educated just enough to keep things going, but not enough to ask tough questions. They encourage any meme that downplays thoughtful analysis or encourages docility or self indulgence or uniformity. In what other society do people use "smart" and "wise" as insults? We tell people "don't get smart." Those who try, those who really like to learn, we call "nerds." Look at television or the press or the trivia that passes for political debate. When a candidate DOES try to talk about the issues, the newspapers talk about his sex life. Look at Saturday morning cartoon shows. Peasants, whether they're tilling fields or stuffing circuit boards, are easier to manipulate. Don't question; just believe. Turn off your computer and Trust the Force. Or turn your computer on and treat it like the Oracle of Delphi. That's right. They've made education superficial and specialized. Science classes for art majors? Forget it! And how many business or engineering students get a really good grounding in the humanities? When did universities become little more than white collar vocational schools?

The formula for the circuit of capital: M-C...P...C'-M', is the self-evident form of the circuit of capital only on the basis of already developed capitalist production, because it presupposes the availability of the class of wage-labourers in sufficient numbers throughout society.

I have performed the following experiment in workshops for nearly 40 years now: Everybody in the class is asked to describe the hall they passed through to get to the classroom. I must have tried this several hundred times by now, and I have never encountered two people who agreed totally about what was or was not in the hall, the color of the walls, or any similar data. We do not walk through the “same” hall: we walk through a reality-tunnel constructed by our imprinted, conditioned and learned brain circuits. The same experiment works with hearing, and other senses, as well as with vision and memory. Try it with a half-dozen friends. Let somebody with a watch say “Go!” and then all of you be silent and listen for one full minute — 60 surprisingly long seconds. You will all hear some sounds nobody else hears and miss some sounds everybody else caught. From 'In Doubt We Trust: Cults, religions, and BS in general

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.

After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary. All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety.

It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn — creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date — including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the “undeclared civil war” of the predatory criminal class in every “civilized” nation — keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.

We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter life I knew, and many others knew, that our daily bread was itself a kind of scripture of our origins, a taste track of our lives. It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning, and humans for the most part despise meaningless food. In America, and especially the American South, 'race' endures alongside the sociopolitics of food; it is not a stretch to say that that race is both on and at the Southern table. But if it is on the table alone we have learned nothing; we continue to reduce each other to stereotypical essences. It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be 'just human' at the table. Complexity must come with us - in fact it will invite itself to the feast whether we like it or not. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow.

In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack. Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

This disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison, trapped by their second-class status, has been described by Loïc Wacquant as a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality.

3. Develop a personal learning style Having known your personal profile, you can pick the learning style that can give you the most benefits. There are three common types of learning styles; Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. By identifying the learning style that best suit your profile, you will be able to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. Visual Learning – If your dyslexia isn’t anything related to your visual processing or any visual dyslexia, this learning type may just suit you. Visual learners like to see things with the eyes. They likely think in pictures and uses different illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, videos and mind maps when they study. If you are a visual learner it will be useful to rewrite notes, put information on post-it notes and stick it everywhere, and to re-create images in the mind. Auditory Learning – Auditory learners, on the other hand, think in verbal words rather than in pictures. The best they can do to learn is to tape the information and replay it. It also helps if they discuss the materials that must be learned with others by participating in class discussions, asking questions to their teachers and even trying teaching others. It is also helpful to use audio books and read aloud when trying to memorize information. Kinesthetic Learning – Kinesthetic learners are those who are better to learn with direct exposure to the activity. They are the ‘hands-on’ people and learn best when they actually do something. For them, wiring a circuit board would be much more informative than listening to a lecture about circuits or reading a text book or about it. However, it may also help to underline important terms and meanings and highlight them with bright colors, write notes in the margin when learning from text and repeat information while walking. 4. Don’t force your mind Don’t force your mind to do something beyond your ability. Don’t force yourself to enter a library and finish reading a shelf of books in one day. Be patient on yourself. Take everything slowly and learn step by step. Do not also push yourself if you are not in the mood to read, it will just cause you unnecessary stress. 5.

By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours… Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.

elevating a candidate based on their identity can provide a progressive sheen to the status quo. A way to score all your good lefty points without having your own class interests, power structures, or cocktail circuit access threatened. A way to feel good about what a good person you are without actually having to commit to change a system that has allowed you to get yours.

labor power itself is the sole commodity—the “unique commodity,” as Marx calls it—that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production

This disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison, trapped by their second-class status, has been described by Loic Wacquant as a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality.” Hundreds of thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.

[Former Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards, then a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit], wrote in November 1965: 'Although local police forces generally regard themselves as public servants with the responsibility of maintaining law and order, they tend to minimize this attitude when they are patrolling areas that are heavily populated with Negro citizens. There, they tend to view each person on the streets as a potential criminal or enemy, and all too often this attitude is reciprocated. Indeed the hostility between Negro communities in our large cities and the police departments is the major problem in law enforcement in this decade.

The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill.

I was playing a lot of sports, and that actually changes dopamine signaling in the brain, which helps make life more enjoyable. And going to class not only altered the habit circuit in my brain, but it also meant that I had to spend some time out in the sun on my way to and from classes, which boosted my serotonin and regulated electrical activity in my brain during sleep.

Darius grunted irritably. “You let me in last time,” he reminded me in a low voice. “Why did you trust me then and not now?” I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “I didn’t trust you then either. I just had to push past my natural inclination to protect myself from sociopaths. You’ll have to give me a moment before I can easily do so again.” I bit my lip as his grip on my hands tightened and he tugged me closer again, our chests almost brushing as I looked up at him. “Stop power fucking her and start working on what Pyro wants,” Caleb called and I flinched, yanking my magic back again as I looked around at him and Darcy. “Are you afraid I’m going to steal her attention from you, Cal?” Darius asked Caleb with the hint of a smile playing around his lips. “Not likely,” Caleb replied dismissively but his eyes narrowed. “I’m still here,” I reminded them irritably. “And neither of you are interesting enough to keep my attention for long so there’s no point in you getting your panties in a twist over it. Maybe we should just get on with this class?” Darius smirked at Caleb tauntingly and I rolled my eyes at him. “Well I’m happy enough to practice without help if you wanna leave me to it?” Darcy suggested, not-so-subtly trying to tug her hand out of Caleb’s grip. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I promise to be gentle with you,” he said, ignoring her attempts to break free. My sister obviously had reservations about this activity and I couldn’t really blame her. She shot me a look which basically said she’d rather be pretty much anywhere else than holding Caleb’s hand and I glanced at Darius before raising an eyebrow at her as if to say ‘who’s got it worse?’. Darcy snorted a laugh and the two Heirs looked between us like they were trying to figure out what we’d just communicated to each other. “Come on, Roxy, let’s see what you’ve got,” Darius said, releasing one of my hands so that I could cast with it. He didn’t need any further encouragement and stepped forward to grip my waist like he had before. This time I didn’t press my body to his though and instead focused on harnessing my magic in the way I wanted. My frustration meant I threw more power at the task than I’d intended and I yanked on Darius’s magic too. A full sized motorbike materialised in the flames before me and with a surge of triumph, I sent it tearing across the arena. Pyro stopped what she was doing and actually applauded me and I grinned to myself as more than a few of my classmates joined in. I started making the bike weave between the students as it did a circuit of the arena and Darius leaned close to my ear as he maintained his grip on me. “Congratulations, Roxy. Looks like we’ve got a date Wednesday night then.” I ignored the flutter in my chest as he called it a date because it absolutely didn’t take place. “Maybe I’ve already got plans Wednesday,” I said. “Yeah, you do. With me.” He released his grip on my waist and my control over the magic faltered as the bike burst apart into a thousand flaming tendrils which burnt out quickly without anything to maintain them. (tory)

Can a class-eight artificial intelligence lie?” “Oh yeah, sure. I lie all the time. I’m lying right now.” My brain short-circuited a little. “But if you’re lying about lying…But if you’re telling the truth about lying…” “I just blew your mind, didn’t I, kid? Bwa-ha-ha!

The machine was self-programming, however, and in addition had a special ambition-amplifying mechanism with glory-seeking circuits, and very soon a great change took place. Its poems became difficult, ambiguous, so intricate and charged with meaning that they were totally incomprehensible. When the next group of poets came to mock and laugh, the machine replied with an improvisation that was so modern, it took their breath away, and the second poem seriously weakened a certain sonneteer who had two State awards to his name, not to mention a statue in the city park. After that, no poet could resist the fatal urge to cross lyrical swords with Trurl's electronic bard. They came from far and wide, carrying trunks and suitcases full of manuscripts. The machine would let each challenger recite, instantly grasp the algorithm of his verse, and use it to compose an answer in exactly the same style, only two hundred and twenty to three hundred and forty-seven times better. The machine quickly grew so adept at this, that it could cut down a first-class rhapsodist with no more than one or two quatrains. But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat. One of them, true, broke his leg when, on the way out, he tripped over an epic poem the machine had just completed, a prodigious work beginning with the words: Arms, and machines I sing, that, forc'd by fate, And haughty Homo's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Terran shore …

Only with economic sovereignty will we be able to short-circuit the robotic nurse that tranquilizes the jaded, and hypnotizes the class warriors

People who’ve spent time on high country trails know the heartbreak of a false summit. When all you want is for the incline to stop kicking your ass, it tricks you into thinking you’ve made it, only to reveal that you aren’t even close! But you don’t have to be a trail rat to know that feeling. In life, there are plenty of false summits. Maybe you think you’ve rocked an assignment at work or school, only to have your teacher or supervisor rip it to pieces or tell you to start over again. False summits can come in the gym when you’re doing a hard circuit workout and think you’ve hit the last set, only to hear from your coach or trainer—or from a quick glance at your own notes—that you have to go back through the entire circuit one last time. We all take a punch like that every once in a while, but those who tend to crane their necks looking for the crest of the mountain as they beg for their suffering to end are the ones who get smashed the most by any false summit. We have to learn to stop looking for a sign that the hard time will end. When the distance is unknown, it is even more critical that you stay locked in so the unknown factor doesn’t steal your focus. The end will come when it comes, and anticipation will only distract you from completing the task in front of you to the best of your ability. Remember, the struggle is the whole journey. That’s why you’re out there. It’s why you signed up for this race, or that class, or took the damn job. There is great beauty when you are involved in something that is so hard most people want it to end. When Hell Week ended, most of the guys who survived cheered, wept tears of joy, high-fived, or hugged one another. I got the Hell Week blues because I’d been immersed in the beauty of grinding through it and the personal growth that came with it.

The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities.

Joel could not help but ponder the possibilities should that fiancé turn out to be Tom Carter. If he saved Tom's life by steering him away from the Army, or even the war itself, he might meddle with his own existence. If Grandma Ginny does not meet and marry Grandpa Joe, there is no daughter Cindy or grandson Joel. Would he vanish into thin air like Marty McFly? Or continue on his merry way in a parallel universe? Joel knew now why people passed up philosophy classes. This stuff could fry your circuits. The grandfather paradox took on new relevance.

Think about it. Why would a company like Emerald want a robust intercity transit system? They don’t want workers to commute elsewhere—and they definitely don’t want it to be easy for tourists to leave and spend cash in La Ronge or Moundville.” As Misha spoke, Sulfur had a vivid image of their not-so-distant future. They could almost hear the words that Verdance would use to make its announcement. We made a good faith effort, they would say. We got transit started and now it’s up to each city to carry on, they would add. And then, because most of the wealthy owners had private transit, there would be endless debates over where to plant those ugly tracks that Cylindra had already rejected. Nobody would want them next to their nice neighborhoods. There would be excuses about how trains messed up the Pleistocene purity of Sasky, but really it would be about not wanting to deal with the class of person who took public transit. Sulfur imagined the tracks slowly softening into mulch while millions of people tried to get around by cobbling together circuitous routes from dozens of local transit systems that each charged a separate fare. And then rich commuters would deal with the problem by building Mounts who couldn’t say whether they consented to be used that way or not.

Maxwell’s equations apply to all electrical systems, not merely to a specialized and idealized class of electrical circuits.

And then there’s physical dependence. As defined in medical terms, physical dependence is manifested when a person stops taking a substance and, due to changes in the brain and body, she experiences withdrawal symptoms. Those temporary, drug-induced changes form the basis of physical dependence. Although a feature of drug addiction, a person’s physical dependence on a substance does not necessarily imply that he is addicted to it. The withdrawal syndrome is different for each class of drug — in the case of opiates such as morphine or heroin it includes nausea, diarrhea, sweats, aches and pains and weakness, as well as severe anxiety, agitation and depressed mood. But you don’t have to be addicted to experience withdrawal — you just have to have been taking a medication for an extended period of time. As many people have discovered to their chagrin, with abrupt cessation it’s quite possible to suffer highly unpleasant withdrawal symptoms from drugs that are not addictive: the antidepressants paroxetine (Paxil) and venlafaxine (Effexor) are but two examples. Withdrawal does not mean you were addicted; for addiction, there also needs to be craving and relapse. In fact, in the case of narcotics, it turns out that the addictive, “feel good” effect of these drugs seems to act in a different part of the brain than the effects that lead to physical dependence. When morphine is infused only into the “reward” circuits of a rat’s brain, addiction-like behaviour results, but there’s no physical dependence and no withdrawal. “Dependence” can also be understood as a powerful attachment to harmful substances or behaviours, and this definition gives us a clearer picture of addiction. The addict comes to depend on the substance or behaviour in order to make himself feel momentarily calmer or more excited or less dissatisfied with his life.

Good morning, class. Good morning, red of face and scowl of mouth. Good morning, starched of shirt and waved of hair. This morning we will speak of consciousness. Where does it come from? What does it do with itself? Does it connive? Does it seek advantages? How does it learn its ways—as billions of neurons self-conceiving in neural circuits, revise, adjust, reorganize, multiply responding behaviorally to outer-world creature experience—in a process of natural selection or neural Darwinism, according to Edelman? Does that include you, pretty-boy warmaker? Are you the culmination of this evolutionary brainwork? Crick, on the other hand, opts for the role of the claustrum or maybe the thalamus. Abjure claustrumphobia. Remember the thalamus! In any event you have no soul. But neither do Edelman or Crick. And neither does scowler here, though he will kill to prove that he has one. But that is the pretense of the brain. We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing. But don’t think about these things, because it won’t be you anyway doing the thinking. Just follow your star. Live in the presumptions of the socially constructed life. Abhor science. Sort of believe in God. Put your failings behind you. Present your self-justifications to the bathroom mirror.