“
The weapon gave a rusty croak. ‘I don’t normally do weather reports anymore,’ the gun informed him politely.
‘Why is that?’
‘Ever since the demise of the old metropolis, there has been no control of the weather systems. Anyone who would have appreciated a weather forecast perished an awful long time ago. Besides, every time I started to inform my potential victims of the current cloud formations, or wind velocity, or barometric pressure, or potential precipitation, they simply ran away.
”
”
A.R. Merrydew (Our Blue Orange (Godfrey Davis, #1))
“
Aren't the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton... I could just lie here all day, and watch them drift by... If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations... What do you think you see, Linus?"
"Well, those clouds up there look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean... That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor... And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen... I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side..."
"Uh huh... That's very good... What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?"
"Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind!
”
”
Charles M. Schulz (The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 5: 1959-1960)
“
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are fort, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
“
A sudden cloud formation of birds was swallowed up by the moon, and he was just as suddenly penned in by four walls—the demons’ pen.
”
”
Mo Yan (The Garlic Ballads)
“
Situations produce vibrations. Negative, potentially harmful situations emit slow vibrations. Positive, potentially life-enhancing situations emit quick vibrations. As these vibrations impact on your energy field they produce either resonance or dissonance in your lower and middle tantiens (psychic power stations) depending on your own vibratory rate at the time. When you psychic field force is strong and your vibratory rate is fast, therefore, you will draw only positive situations to you. When you mind is quiet enough and your attention is on the moment, you will literally hear the dissonance in your belly and chest like an alarm bell going off, urging you from deep within your body to move in such and such a direction. Always follow it. At times these urges may come to you in the form of internally spoken dialogue with your higher self, spirit guide, guardian angel, alien intelligence, however you see the owner of the “still, small voice within.” This form of dialogue can be entertaining and reassuring but is best not overindulged in as, in the extreme; it tends to lead to the loony bin. At times you may receive your messages from “Indian signs”, such as slogans on passing trucks or cloud formations in the sky. This is also best kept in moderation, to avoid seeing signs in everything and becoming terribly confused. Just let it happen when it happens and don’t try looking for it.
”
”
Stephen Russell (Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior)
“
How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn't see her, as he sometimes hadn't seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.
”
”
Patricia Highsmith (The Price of Salt)
“
Each day I deceived myself, unlike you who could never deceive yourself. Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of.
”
”
Osamu Dazai (パンドラの匣)
“
How indifferent he was to Carol after, all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.
”
”
Patricia Highsmith (The Price of Salt)
“
The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.
”
”
Michael Chabon (The Final Solution)
“
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
”
”
James Joyce (Ulysses)
“
Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice.
”
”
John Connolly (The Gates (Samuel Johnson, #1))
“
It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, "Don't waste your time on life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.
Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)
“
Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.
What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward, and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been still they would have covered the bay like a white cloud, head to head, body packed to body. Only the east wind, whipping the sea to breakers, hid them from the shore.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (The Birds)
“
When he turns inland he sees two moving white columns in the sky. At first glance he thinks they are emissions of smoke. The two encroaching formations ripple into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he realises he is witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds. The abstract shapes they form are flawless. He stands with his hands in his pockets as the birds taper into a long undulating line, which gently vanishes behind the surface of things. The same thing has happened to his father. He has vanished behind the surface of things.
”
”
Glenn Haybittle (The Way Back to Florence)
“
The most pleasurable things we do
Are not always priced so high
Like listening to a young child laugh
Or looking at the sky
”
”
Margaret H. Oliver (A Woman's Place: The Complete Poetry Collection of Margaret Oliver)
“
she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them,
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides
“
How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him. He
”
”
Claire Morgan (The Price of Salt, or Carol)
“
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (My Struggle: Book 1)
“
The hills below crouched on all fours under the weight of the rainforest where liana grew and soldier ants marched in formation. Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do - the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced. When they are needed, it is deliberately done by the queen who surmises, by some four-million-year-old magic she is heiress to, that it is time. So she urges a sperm from the private womb where they were placed when she had her one, first and last copulation. Once in life, this little Amazon trembled in the air waiting for a male to mount her. And when he did, when he joined a cloud of others one evening just before a summer storm, joined colonies from all over the world gathered fro the marriage flight, he knew at last what his wings were for. Frenzied, he flied into the humming cloud to fight gravity and time in order to do, just once, the single thing he was born for. Then he drops dead, having emptied his sperm into his lady-love. Sperm which she keeps in a special place to use at her own discretion when there is need for another dark and singing cloud of ant folk mating in the air. Once the lady has collected the sperm, she too falls to the ground, but unless she breaks her back or neck or is eaten by one of a thousand things, she staggers to her legs and looks for a stone to rub on, cracking and shedding the wings she will never need again. Then she begins her journey searching for a suitable place to build her kingdom. She crawls into the hollow of a tree, examines its walls and corners. She seals herself off from all society and eats her own wing muscles until she bears her eggs. When the first larvae appear, there is nothing to feed them, so she gives them their unhatched sisters until they are old enough and strong enough to hunt and bring their prey back to the kingdom. That is all. Bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying. No time for dreaming, although sometimes, late in life, somewhere between the thirtieth and fortieth generation she might get wind of a summer storm one day. The scent of it will invade her palace and she will recall the rush of wind on her belly - the stretch of fresh wings, the blinding anticipation and herself, there, airborne, suspended, open, trusting, frightened, determined, vulnerable - girlish, even, for and entire second and then another and another. She may lift her head then, and point her wands toward the place where the summer storm is entering her palace and in the weariness that ruling queens alone know, she may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish? And if so, if there was a bit of time left, did he think how mean the world was, or did he fill that space of time thinking of her? But soldier ants do not have time for dreaming. They are women and have much to do. Still it would be hard. So very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star.
”
”
Toni Morrison (Tar baby)
“
I wanted to board the plane with you, to show our boarding passes to the flight attendant together, sit side by side and talk until I put my head on your shoulder as you read and slept, and then wake up to together and listen to music, watch a movie, go to the bathroom… Maybe we’d fall asleep again then wake up to another meal only slightly more appetising than the first and watch the shifting cloud formations outside the window together, and hear the captain announcing that we were about to land in Hong Kong, about to land in Malaysia, about to land in Paris…
Do I think too much? All I really want is to fly with you.
”
”
Qiu Miaojin (Last Words from Montmartre)
“
Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1))
“
Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.
”
”
David Mitchell
“
Because of that, the buzz and whisper is different. Both more hushed and more thrilled, like a formation of Oprah Winfreys are about to parachute down through the clouds, giving cars out to you, and you, and also you.
”
”
Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1))
“
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...
reminded one more of great Atlantic rollers than human formations. Clouds of cavalry, avalanches of field-guns and—at that time a novelty—squadrons of motor-cars (private and military) completed the array. For five hours the immense defilade continued. Yet this was only a twentieth of the armed strength of the regular German Army before mobilization.
Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
All original thinking is done in pictures or images; the imagination is therefore so necessary an instrument of thinking, and minds without imagination will never achieve anything great, unless it be in mathematics. On the other hand, merely abstract ideas, which have no kernel of perception, are like cloud formations without reality. Even writing and speaking, whether didactic or poetical, have as their ultimate aim the guidance of the reader to that knowledge of perception from which the author started; if they do not have this aim, they are bad.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“
When we encounter tiny groups of atoms, interesting questions and special rules come into play. Take water, for instance: what is the smallest possible ice cube? It has been discovered that you need at least 275 water molecules in a cluster before it can show ice-like properties, with about 475 molecules before it becomes truly ice. That is a cube with about eight H2O molecules along each edge. The importance of this kind of knowledge is that it helps us model the process of cloud formation in the atmosphere as well as understand how liquids freeze.
”
”
Peter Atkins (Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
The water cycle consists of three phenomena – evaporation, precipitation, and collection- which are the three phenomena that make up what is known as “the water cycle.” Evaporation, the first of these phenomena, is the process of water turning into vapor and eventually forming clouds, such as those found in cloudy skies, or on cloudy days, or even cloudy nights. These clouds are formed by a phenomenon known as “evaporation,” which is the first of three phenomena that make up the water cycle. Evaporation, the first of these three, is simply a term for a process by which water turns into vapor and eventually forms clouds. Clouds can be recognized by their appearance, usually on cloudy days or nights, when they can be seen in cloudy skies. The name for the process by which clouds are formed – by water, which turns into vapor and becomes part of the formation known as “clouds” – is “evaporation,” the first phenomenon in the three phenomena that make up the cycle of water, otherwise known as “the water cycle,” and surely you must be asleep by now and so can be spared the horrifying details of the Baudelaires' journey.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #11))
“
As your prospective of the world increases, not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules or atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large such as cloud formations, river deltas, cloud formations, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
“
They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads? However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (My Struggle: Book 1)
“
Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it.
Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos....
The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them....
Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space.
This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.
”
”
Tom McLeish (Faith and Wisdom in Science)
“
Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and sisters share some environments — usually the less important ones — but they rarely share the one single environment that has the most powerful impact on personality formation. They may live in the same house, eat the same kinds of food, partake in many of the same activities. These are environments of secondary importance. Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development.
The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. These, too, can vary significantly from the birth of one child to the arrival of another. Psychological tension in the parents’ lives during the child’s infancy is, I am convinced, a major and universal influence on the subsequent emergence of ADD.
A hidden factor of great importance is a parent’s unconscious attitude toward a child: what, or whom, on the deepest level, the child represents for the parents; the degree to which the parents see themselves in the child; the needs parents may have that they subliminally hope the child will meet. For the infant there exists no abstract, “out-there” reality. The emotional milieu with which we surround the child is the world as he experiences it. In the words of the child psychiatrist and researcher Margaret Mahler, for the newborn, the parent is “the principal representative of the world.”
To the infant and toddler, the world reveals itself in the image of the parent: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day-today joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child. Whatever a parent’s intention, these are the means by which the child receives his or her most formative communications. Although they will be of paramount importance for development of the child’s personality, these subtle and often unconscious influences will be missed on psychological questionnaires or observations of parents in clinical settings.
There is no way to measure a softening or an edge of anxiety in the voice, the warmth of a smile or the depth of furrows on a brow. We have no instruments to gauge the tension in a father’s body as he holds his infant or to record whether a mother’s gaze is clouded by worry or clear with calm anticipation. It may be said that no two children have exactly the same parents, in that the parenting they each receive may vary in highly significant ways. Whatever the hopes, wishes or intentions of the parent, the child does not experience the parent directly: the child experiences the parenting.
I have known two siblings to disagree vehemently about their father’s personality during their childhood. Neither has to be wrong if we understand that they did not receive the same fathering, which is what formed their experience of the father. I have even seen subtly but significantly different mothering given to a pair of identical twins.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
In St. Patrick Town, we find the stubborn, sprightly residents all awake--the leprechaun I spoke to days before still in search of his lost pot of gold in the glen, rain clouds heavy in the distance, and rainbows gleaming above the treetops.
In Valentine's Town, Queen Ruby is bustling through the streets, making sure the chocolatiers are busy crafting their confections of black velvet truffles and cherry macaroons, trying to make up for lost time, while her cupids still flock through town, wild and restless.
The rabbits have resumed painting their pastel eggs in Easter Town. The townsfolk in Fourth of July Town are testing new rainbow sparklers and fireworks that explode in the formation of a queen's crown, in honor of the Pumpkin Queen who saved them all from a life of dreamless sleep. In Thanksgiving Town, everyone is preparing for the feast in the coming season, and the elves in Christmas Town have resumed assembling presents and baking powdered-sugar gingerbread cookies.
And in Halloween Town, we have just enough time to finish preparations for the holiday: cobwebs woven together, pumpkins carved, and black tar-wax candles lit.
”
”
Shea Ernshaw (Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas)
“
Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine Internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. The data just doesn’t exist. When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle. My generation was the last in America and perhaps even in world history for which this is true—the last undigitized generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.
”
”
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
“
One find in Western Australia turned up zircon crystals dated to 4.4 billion years ago, just a couple of hundred million years after the earth and the solar system formed. By analyzing their detailed composition, researchers have suggested that ancient conditions may have been far more agreeable than previously thought. Early earth may have been a relatively calm water world, with small landmasses dotting a surface mostly covered by ocean.15 That’s not to say that earth’s history didn’t have its moments of flaming drama. Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.
”
”
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
“
The Dark Depths of the Seas And Internal Waves
Or [the unbelievers' state] are like the darkness of a fathomless sea
which is covered by waves above which are waves above which are
clouds, layers of darkness, one upon the other. If he puts out his hand,
he can scarcely see it. Those Allah gives no light to, they have no light.
(Qur'an, 24:40)
In deep seas and oceans, the darkness is found at a depth of 200
meters (660 feet) and deeper. At this depth, there is almost no light, and
below a depth of 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) there is no light at all.65
Today, we know about the general formation of the sea, the characteristics
of the living things in it, its salinity, as well as the amount of
water it contains, and its surface area and depth. Submarines and special
equipment, developed with modern technology, have enabled scientists
to obtain such information.
Human beings are not able to dive to a depth of more than 70
meters (230 feet) without the aid of special equipment. They cannot
survive unaided in the dark depths of the oceans, such as at a depth of
200 meters (660 feet). For these reasons, scientists have only recently
been able to discover detailed information about the seas. However,
that the depth of the sea is dark was revealed in the Qur'an 1,400 years
ago. It is certainly one of the miracles of the Qur'an that such information
was given at a time where no equipment to enable man to dive into
the depths of the oceans was available.
In addition, the statement in Surat an-Nur 40 "…like the darkness
of a fathomless sea which is covered by waves above which are
waves above which are clouds…" draws our attention to another miracle
of the Qur'an.
Scientists have only recently discovered that there are sub-surface
waves, which "occur on density interfaces between layers of different
densities." These internal waves cover the deep waters of seas and
oceans because deep water has a higher density than the water above
it. Internal waves act like surface waves. They can break, just like surface
waves. Internal waves cannot be discerned by the human eye, but
they can be detected by studying temperature or salinity changes at a
given location.66
The statements in the Qur'an run parallel precisely the above
explanation. Certainly, this fact, which scientists has discovered very
recently, shows once again that the Qur'an is the word of Allah.
”
”
Harun Yahya (Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an)
“
You can use user data scripts and cloud-init directives or AWS OpsWorks lifecycle events to automatically set up new EC2 instances.[6] You can use simple scripts, configuration management tools like Chef or Puppet. AWS OpsWorks natively supports Chef recipes or Bash/PowerShell scripts. In addition, through custom scripts and the AWS APIs, or through the use of AWS CloudFormation support for AWS Lambda-backed custom resources
”
”
Amazon We Services (Architecting for the AWS Cloud: Best Practices (AWS Whitepaper))
“
However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or thought.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
“
Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants—and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Plinian eruption is now defined as an almighty, explosive eruption that all but destroys the entire volcano from which it emanates. And the most devastating Plinian event of the modern era occurred 1,804 years, almost to the day, after Pliny the Elder’s death: at Krakatoa.)
”
”
Simon Winchester (Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883)
“
As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length, we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty...Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.
”
”
Karl Ove Knausgård
“
Working was a matter of pride and we did it because we wanted to, not because we had to. During our infrequent breaks, the reward was going to the small store we called a “geedunk.” Getting to it required a climb up the long ladder or wooden stairs from the dock area.
The geedunk was owned by Ma & Pa McCloud and, although it wasn’t anything to write home about, it was a safe haven for underclassmen and had everything from lobster rolls to hot dogs and hamburgers. Having an old-fashioned soda fountain, some tables and booths, it was a place where we could sit and shoot the breeze, without being hassled by the upperclassmen. Although the Academy fed us well, I was at an age when I was always hungry and if I got some slack time from Bo’sun Haskell or Bill Cooms, and had the money, I’d climb the back ladder for some chow. Sometimes I’d even be able to afford a lobster roll, but they were few and far between. I always tried to stretch the break into at least twenty minutes. Our respite never seemed long enough, but just by looking at my hands you could tell that the work was hard and the day was long. Finally, when the working day was behind us, we usually just dragged ourselves back up the steep hill, forgetting the idea of marching in formation. Time was always a factor, so it was imperative that I get cleaned up and into the uniform of the day before the chow line closed.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Crows lined the crumbling and contaminated road that led to Stonewall. As Rachel Wheeler approached, they lifted one by one against the hazy October sky. A muted lime-green aurora shimmered behind the clouds as if the black birds were swimming against a frothy tide. The hardwood trees on the surrounding Appalachian slopes were gone to gold and scarlet, and the strange light hinted at the gray winter waiting ahead. One of the crows turned, and its eyes flashed with fire. A blood-chilling caw cracked the brittle air. Rachel slid her machete from its canvas sheath, but the crow veered wildly and then rejoined the broken formation heading south toward the distant city of mutants.
”
”
Scott Nicholson (Afterburn (Next, #1))
“
The reason ordinary matter lies in a disk and not a small ball is the matter’s net rotation, which it inherited from the gas clouds that acquired angular momentum (momentum of rotation) in their formation. Cooling lowers resistance to collapse in one direction, but collapse in the two others is prevented or at least lessened by the centrifugal force of the rotation of the gas it contains. Without friction or some other force acting on it, a marble that you set in motion around a circular track will keep rolling forever. Similarly, once matter is rotating, it will keep its angular momentum until some torque acts on it or it can dissipate angular momentum along with energy. Because angular momentum is conserved, gaseous regions cannot collapse as efficiently in the radial direction (as defined by rotation) as in the vertical one. Though matter might collapse in the direction parallel to the axis of rotation, it won’t collapse in the radial direction unless angular momentum is somehow removed. This differential collapse is what gives rise to the relatively flat disk of the Milky Way, which we observe stretching across the sky. It is also what gives rise to the disks of most spiral galaxies.
”
”
Lisa Randall (Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe)
“
He stood up and stayed there for a minute, silent, and then he left, and I thought about what it meant to still be alive, and then huge walls of earth began rising in formation inside me, spewing clouds of dust as they rose, right angles like dominos leaning against one another but refusing to fall, six or seven layers of ground beneath each rail buckling until they hit bedrock with a long, rolling, decisive thud, a chain reaction rippling out with great percussive power, the mud walls banding together for miles into a structure gigantic enough to be seen from space, a star-shaped beacon in the gray distance.
”
”
John Darnielle (Wolf in White Van)
“
NEW BIBLIOGRAPHIC FRAMEWORK To sustain broader partnerships—and to be seen in the non-library specific realm of the Internet—metadata in future library systems will undoubtedly take on new and varied forms. It is essential that future library metadata be understood and open to general formats and technology standards that are used universally. Libraries should still define what data is gathered and what is essential for resource use, keeping in mind the specific needs of information access and discovery. However, the means of storage and structure for this metadata must not be proprietary to library systems. Use of the MARC standard format has locked down library bibliographic information. The format was useful in stand-alone systems for retrieval of holdings in separate libraries, but future library systems will employ non-library-specific formats enabling the discovery of library information by any other system desiring to access the information. We can expect library systems to ingest non-MARC formats such as Dublin Core; likewise, we can expect library discovery interfaces to expose metadata in formats such as Microdata and other Semantic Web formats that can be indexed by search engines. Adoption of open cloud-based systems will allow library data and metadata to be accessible to non-library entities without special arrangements. Libraries spent decades creating and storing information that was only accessible, for the most part, to others within the same profession. Libraries have begun to make partnerships with other non-library entities to share metadata in formats that can be useful to those entities. OCLC has worked on partnerships with Google for programs such as Google Books, where provided library metadata can direct users back to libraries. ONIX for Books, the international standard for electronic distribution of publisher bibliographic data, has opened the exchange of metadata between publishers and libraries for the enhancements of records on both sides of the partnership. To have a presence in the web of information available on the Internet is the only means by which any data organization will survive in the future. Information access is increasingly done online, whether via computer, tablet, or mobile device. If library metadata does not exist where users are—on the Internet—then libraries do not exist to those users. Exchanging metadata with non-library entities on the Internet will allow libraries to be seen and used. In addition to adopting open systems, libraries will be able to collectively work on implementation of a planned new bibliographic framework when using library platforms. This new framework will be based on standards relevant to the web of linked data rather than standards proprietary to libraries
”
”
Kenneth J. Varnum (The Top Technologies Every Librarian Needs to Know: A LITA Guide)
“
When Li Bai turned back to poetry, the clouds rose in formation to see him off, the river stood as witness, and the monkeys cheered for him. The landscape itself stood aside to make way for his passage. His increasingly weighty ship of life was transformed back to a light skiff.
”
”
Yu Qiuyu
“
We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.
Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.
The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.
”
”
Alain de Botton (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
“
I’ve used an activity in my classrooms before, where I tell my class that we’re going to spend three minutes in complete silence. Nobody can close their eyes and sleep through the three minutes, nor can they busy themselves by reading or scrolling. Instead, we simply sit in silence together for a full three minutes. You should see their eyes when I announce this. I may as well announce that our guest speaker for the day is a greasy, stank-ass hillbilly with a chainsaw and a mask made from the skin of his prior victims. In fact, such a guest “lecture” may be preferable for many. During this time, people behave predictably. The first 30 seconds are the easiest. From 30-45 seconds, everyone contracts a case of the giggles, and students try to stifle themselves. After the one-minute mark, eyes wander, desperately seeking something to occupy their attention. Some count ceiling tiles, others stare out the window at cloud formations, and many discover solace in examining feet. From 90 seconds to the two-minute mark, students visibly squirm in their seats like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, but once we get into the second minute, something remarkable happens. People chill the fuck out. They no longer avoid eye contact with me or one another. They smile quaint little grins. The squirming subsides, they sit up a bit straighter, and the tension hanging heavy in the air like leaded fog dissipates. When the timer on my phone goes off at three minutes, one might assume that someone in the room would shout and break the uncomfortable silence like they’d been holding their breath the whole time, but they don’t. I never rush our entrance back into dialogue; rather, I wait and allow students to speak first. What’s crazy is that, generally speaking, most students go nearly another minute or so before saying anything.
”
”
Josh Misner (Put the F**king Phone Down: Life. Can't Wait.)
“
The thoughts from a finite mind can at times be very similar to the clouds that move about over the surface of the earth. Both can cover a lot of ground, and can either disperse or increase in formation. Likewise—both are heavily influenced by the surrounding climate. Furthermore—a hard wind increases a fire’s spread, thunder proceeds a lightning strike, and when atmospheric water vapor accumulates, it produces clouds. Then, after an abundance of water has been condensed, the clouds will at some point release moisture; the rain/precipitation amount will range from the degree of abundance condensed.
Similarly: an abundance of thoughts can also accumulate—eventually resulting in an overflow of emotion. The overflow can either be positive or negative—the determining factor relying on the characterization of the thoughts—whether they be positive or negative.
”
”
Calvin W. Allison (Strong Love Church)
“
Star paused, surveying the impressive sight of his herd. “Let’s look for a moment.” Bumblewind gave a hearty sigh and pawed the ground. “I’m hungry.” “Just for a moment,” Star promised. He enjoyed watching sunsets, pretty birds, rainbows, cloud formations—whatever caught his eye, but his friends had little patience for those things.
”
”
Jennifer Lynn Alvarez (Starfire (The Guardian Herd #1))
“
You can achieve enlightenment by simply spending time contemplating nature: the formation of clouds, the beauty of the forest, and the lifecycle of the beings that dwell within.
”
”
Loren Mayshark (Death: An Exploration: Learning To Embrace Life's Most Feared Mystery)
“
Personal Thinking Blockchains More speculatively for the farther future, the notion of blockchain technology as the automated accounting ledger, the quantized-level tracking device, could be extensible to yet another category of record keeping and administration. There could be “personal thinking chains” as a life-logging storage and backup mechanism. The concept is “blockchain technology + in vivo personal connectome” to encode and make useful in a standardized compressed data format all of a person’s thinking. The data could be captured via intracortical recordings, consumer EEGs, brain/computer interfaces, cognitive nanorobots, and other methodologies. Thus, thinking could be instantiated in a blockchain — and really all of an individual’s subjective experience, possibly eventually consciousness, especially if it’s more precisely defined. After they’re on the blockchain, the various components could be administered and transacted — for example, in the case of a post-stroke memory restoration. Just as there has not been a good model with the appropriate privacy and reward systems that the blockchain offers for the public sharing of health data and quantified-self-tracking data, likewise there has not been a model or means of sharing mental performance data. In the case of mental performance data, there is even more stigma attached to sharing personal data, but these kinds of “life-streaming + blockchain technology” models could facilitate a number of ways to share data privately, safely, and remuneratively. As mentioned, in the vein of life logging, there could be personal thinking blockchains to capture and safely encode all of an individual’s mental performance, emotions, and subjective experiences onto the blockchain, at minimum for backup and to pass on to one’s heirs as a historical record. Personal mindfile blockchains could be like a next generation of Fitbit or Apple’s iHealth on the iPhone 6, which now automatically captures 200+ health metrics and sends them to the cloud for data aggregation and imputation into actionable recommendations. Similarly, personal thinking blockchains could be easily and securely recorded (assuming all of the usual privacy concerns with blockchain technology are addressed) and mental performance recommendations made to individuals through services such as Siri or Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, perhaps piped seamlessly through personal brain/computer interfaces and delivered as both conscious and unconscious suggestions. Again perhaps speculatively verging on science fiction, ultimately the whole of a society’s history might include not just a public records and document repository, and an Internet archive of all digital activity, but also the mindfiles of individuals. Mindfiles could include the recording of every “transaction” in the sense of capturing every thought and emotion of every entity, human and machine, encoding and archiving this activity into life-logging blockchains.
”
”
Melanie Swan (Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy)
“
Nazism, fascism, and communism were belief systems adopted passionately by millions of well-educated men and women. Taken together, all of the totalitarian ideologies were self-contained and delivered through a one-way flow of propaganda that prevented the people who were enmeshed in the ideology from actively participating in challenging its lack of human values. Unfortunately, the legacy of the twentieth century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. In an age of propaganda, education itself can become suspect. When ideology is so often woven into the “facts” that are delivered in fully formed and self-contained packages, people naturally begin to develop some cynicism about what they are being told. When people are subjected to ubiquitous and unrelenting mass advertising, reason and logic often begin to seem like they are no more than handmaidens for the sophisticated sales force. And now that these same techniques dominate the political messages sent by candidates to voters, the integrity of our democracy has been placed under the same cloud of suspicion. Many advocacy organizations—progressive as well as conservative—often give the impression that they already have exclusive possession of the truth and merely have to “educate” others about what they already know. Resentment toward this attitude is also one of the many reasons for a resurgence of the traditional anti-intellectual strain in America. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience, and share with one another in a robust and dynamic dialogue that enriches what the “experts” are telling them with the wisdom of the groups as a whole, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best. If well-educated citizens have no effective way to communicate their ideas to others and no realistic prospect of catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas, then their education is for naught where the vitality of our democracy is concerned.
”
”
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
“
Pescatore marveled at the seascape. It gave him vertigo. The wind deployed cloud formations. The sun seared the Moroccan coastline. He had read a line once about "the lion-colored hills of Africa." Were they lion-colored? What color was a lion exactly?
”
”
Sebastian Rotella
“
Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called The Great Learning. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own. “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each of which has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful—each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound. “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to regulate themselves; the idea of a self-regulating system was at the very heart of cybernetics. Another appealing facet of “Paragraph 7” for Eno was that it was both process and product—an elegant and endlessly beguiling process that yielded a lush, calming result. Some of Cage’s pieces, and other process-driven pieces by other avant-gardists, embraced process to the point of extreme fetishism, and the resulting product could be jarring or painful to listen to. “Paragraph 7,” meanwhile, was easier on the ears—a shimmering cloud of sonics. In an essay titled “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,” published in Studio International in 1976, a 28-year-old Eno connected his interest in “Paragraph 7” to his interest in cybernetics. He attempted to analyze how the design of the score’s few instructions naturally reduced the “variety” of possible inputs, leading to a remarkably consistent output. In the essay, Eno also wrote about algorithms—a cutting-edge concept for an electronic-music composer to be writing about, in an era when typewriters, not computers, were still en vogue. (In 1976, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were busy building a primitive personal computer in a garage that they called the Apple I.) Eno also talked about the related concept of a “heuristic,” using managerial-cybernetics champion Stafford Beer’s definition. “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer’s concept of a “heuristic” to music. Brecht’s Fluxus scores, for instance, could be described as heuristics.
”
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Geeta Dayal (Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3 Book 67))
“
Ethyl Formate, the chemical that gives raspberries their flavour, has been found emanating from dust clouds in space
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”
Tasnim Essack (223 Amazing Science Facts, Tidbits and Quotes)
“
Giving students more ownership does not mean that teachers give up their responsibility to direct student learning. Many apps and tools, such as wikis and blogs, allow teachers to access student work and monitor their progress. Formative assessment also provides information that teachers can use to recommend goals and strategies. Cloud applications, like calendars, can also be shared so teachers can make sure students meet standards while building critical self-direction skills.
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Peggy Grant (Personalized Learning: A Guide to Engaging Students with Technology)
“
While not supported currently, it is also possible that other container formats like Rocket could allow you to use Magnum without Docker at all
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John Belamaric (OpenStack Cloud Application Development)
“
According to the nebular hypothesis, the Solar System came about as the result of a large cloud of gas, or nebula collapsing. This cloud is said to have been about the size of the Sun, and essentially led to the formation of the Sun. As
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I.P. Factly (101 Facts... Solar System (101 Space Facts for Kids Book 4))
“
In another experiment Guericke connects a small glass sphere that's filled with air with a larger evacuated one. As he opens the valve between the two, air from the small sphere penetrates the large, empty volume; in the process, water droplets appear and sink to the bottom. This effect- the formation of droplets during rapid expansion has been used routinely in our century as a detection method for elementary particle tracks in an instrument called a cloud chamber.
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Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
“
This cloud is said to have been about the size of the Sun, and essentially led to the formation of the Sun.
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”
I.P. Factly (101 Facts... Solar System (101 Space Facts for Kids Book 4))
“
FROM HEAD TO TOE
The smooth stones that dream by that peaceful stream have been made in the likeness of her smooth body that moves like the water, shaping my love for her by the natural method of Mother Earth. Warm shades of yellow and scarlet seem to cast themselves before me even from beneath the cool of a clouded day. Feeling her lips nuzzled against me gives me refuge in such a way that I have never before encountered. I am enchanted by the closeness of her. I have become curious as to that course of nature and what I do believe it will decide. The deep brown embers glowing from inside the richness of her eyes reveal to me just how irresistible I have become to her. She reaches out to kiss me as the stars from heaven thrust themselves to the earth in a glittery glow, encircling these two hearts in a bird-like formation that delivers our love from this cultural hindrance. The curves of her lips gyrate duly over mine for a duration of fitting ecstasy that adduces her unyielding conviction in me evermore. Fermented in the pulp of her demulcent lips our kisses contort within this impassioned expressiveness that defines the candor of our love. My declared state of awareness brings me to bow to our allegiance deduced by the serum secreting from her chamomile kiss. Her fine glacé lips bear the splendid petimezi of all hidden vineyards. Her touch is as still as the mist that warms a cool forest as she feels for me from head to toe.
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Luccini Shurod
“
His reputation is based largely on his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, an immense masterpiece in which, among countless other delights, is the first use of the word from which we derive today’s encyclopedia. It was during the late summer of A.D. 79, while pursuing his official task of investigating piracy in the Bay of Naples, that Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants—and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Plinian eruption is now defined as an almighty, explosive eruption that all but destroys the entire volcano from which it emanates. And the most devastating Plinian event of the modern era occurred 1,804 years, almost to the day, after Pliny the Elder’s death: at Krakatoa.) Pepper has a confused reputation.
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Simon Winchester (Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883)
“
A day Is a rollercoaster of emotions hopes and dreams, While the sun is racing upwards to meet the midday point, You have already produced thousands of thoughts that have come and gone from you, the tender thought towards that someone we hold close to our hearts, I wonder of nature and the dazzling unexplained mystery of life, the day can break you or make you, misunderstanding and betrayals, like invisible ghost lay in wait, in the corridors of life to come alive and attack you, like cloud formations that gather become grey and then we hear the roar of thunder and the flash of lightning, everything under the sky suffers, humanity animals and nature in the confusion of all this suffering instead of finding ways and means to ease the pain of humanity and animals alike, man make it worse, through laws and greed and lack of understanding, the greatest danger and the greatest enemy is man towards man and humanity alike, but the greatest of all the dangers is the danger to the individual from themselves through their thoughts and actions, we have lawmakers breaking the law, we have lunatics running countries as leaders, the innocent eyes of children that see all this makes them feel ashamed to what kind of a world they have come into, and the old people who have lived with this betrayal all their life are tired instead of producing peace they produce problems poverty and wars, although technology has moved forward that we can even use the word advance loosely, the real thinking of man is still the mind set of that caveman that lived thousands of years ago,
As sad as it is, the reality is also real, and the reality is heading towards the destruction of humanity and civilization as we know it, instead of healing individual’s communities countries, protecting animals in their natural habitat, and easing the burden of nature through planting more trees instead of cutting them down, investing more on peace in the world instead of war, it is only through collective consciousness we will achieve this, but they have the power they have the armies and they practice divide and rule, while humanity weeps in silence, they want to do this in the name of a country where the country had no name in the beginning, they want to do this in the name of their language, where the language was made up in the beginning, we spin in space among the heavenly bodies that are in harmony with the sun and the moon, but not with the human race, we like little glowing stars in the distant galaxies must all come together in our thoughts and change the world in harmony
Kenan Hudaverdi 19.10.2019
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Kenan Hudaverdi
“
Dangling over the edge of the near cliff, so large he mistook them for earthen formations, were the enormous upturned fingers of a left hand. Now that he saw them he could not fathom how he had missed them before: alabaster and smooth as stone, they might have been mistaken for a statue were it not for the damage they had taken: a pink wound, like an incision, along the meat of the thumb, from which some dark-rooted trees seemed to have sprung; and the snapped digits of the first and second fingers, the latter broken so thoroughly that splintered bone—a dingy yellow in comparison with the pale flesh—jutted into the air like cracked wood. The hand seemed luminescent against the dark flow of clouds overhead. Martin found himself short of breath. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, and concentrated on the work of his lungs. “What is it?” said Gully, cowed with awe. Alice said, “I daresay it is an angel’s corpse, Mr. Gully.
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Nathan Ballingrud (Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell)
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He understood the hills, and all about them. He read furtive rustlings in the brush as understandingly as residents of Stauffer read their newspapers. He knew the winter’s den from which the she-bear, walking lean from her winter’s hibernation, took her cubs to meet the world. He could interpret the cries of the hawk, the screams of the jay. The pitch and tone of the wind, the sound of the rain, the formation of the clouds, the actions of birds, all told him secrets hidden from most men.
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Jim Kjelgaard (Two Dogs and a Horse)
“
The simplest explanation for motion graphics is an animation that incorporates text. A motion graphics animated video offers a brilliant way for brands to communicate with their viewers and add depth to their stories. They’re perceived as far more attractive than simple ads or text formats and require half the time and money needed for complex animations. For example, motion graphic animations are great for displaying products to customers in a fun, entertaining, and engaging way that may potentially increase sales.
Hire a motion graphic artist or designer from Cloud Animations to deliver your brand message. The motion graphic design can be displayed interchangeably amongst a variety of formats and may also be shared on social media and other digital mediums to extend the reach of the content further.
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CLD Animation
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I think that is why we were so unprepared. You’d think it would be the opposite, right? That a gradual formation of clouds would give us time to plan, prepare, brainstorm ideas as to how to survive, but the gradualness gave us time to procrastinate.
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Brad Manuel (Dark)
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Most natural inanimate objects are symmetrical only by chance. Think of the uncommon delight in finding a perfectly shaped skipping stone or an evenly balanced cloud formation. Symmetrical forms and patterns that emerge from pure physical principles—crystals, tides, snowflakes—feel like miracles and are often held up as evidence of the divine.
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Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
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After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.
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Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
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It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock. With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man)
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And hosts of other memories would have followed, crowding: a thousand skyscapes, day and night, the gay or sombre garments of the blue; the way the earth looked, falling; the wonder at first coming out above the clouds; the rush of engines starting; swallowing to stop deafness in a dive; the scream of wires; shadows of clouds on hills; rain, sweeping like veils over the sea, far off; sunlight; stars between wings; friends, close in formation, swaying, hand on throttle, as they rode ten feet away a mile above the earth. And many others: grass blown down when engines were run up; the smell of dope, and castor oil, and varnish in new cockpits; moonlight shining on struts; sunset clouds, gold-braided; the gasp before the dive; machine-guns; chasing wild duck; the feel of bumps, and all the mastery over movement, pride in skill.
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Cecil Lewis (Sagittarius Rising)
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Since the ancient Hawaiians were exposed to many interactions between winds, water, rain, and waves, they drew mythical and meteorological connections between phenomena like waterspouts, mountain springs, and cloud formations. These things were considered to be under the purview of the god Lono.
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Captivating History (History of Hawaii: A Captivating Guide to Hawaiian History (U.S. States))
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Surveying the daybreak sky, I spot a flock of birds flying low in the milky clouds, wings extended in perfect formation, mimicking each other’s flight pattern, a silent communication amongst them along the wind. The sight of it makes me envious. This. This is what was missing in the order back home. Frères du Corbeau (Brothers of the Raven) was my stepfather’s pipe dream. A dream to lead the revolt against the greedy leaders of corporate America—namely Roman Horner—to fight for the good of the common man.
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Kate Stewart (The Finish Line (The Ravenhood, #3))
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THE
PRACTICE & SCIENCE
OF
DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED Associé de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, &c. With 93 Illustrations & Diagrams LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
1913 Superior Formatting Publishing If you want more well formatted, classic books which have been formatted specifically for the Kindle platform then just search Amazon for "Superior Formatting Publishing". You can also browse and purchase our entire inventory at our website: SuperiorFormatting.com All of our books are priced as low as possible, feature a linked table of contents, cover art, and superior formatting. Our formatting techniques insures that all page breaks, indents, spacing and quotes are properly displayed on your Kindle device. Plate I. FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF SAME MONOCHROME PAINTING IN DIFFERENT STAGES ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF STUDYING MASS DRAWING WITH THE BRUSH PREFACE Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding "wrinkles" on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted.
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Harold Speed (The Practice and Science of Drawing (Fully Illustrated and Formatted for Kindle))
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Just then, the snow geese, a wide band of glittering white on the cerulean water, took off. The sky sprang to life with dazzling wings tinged with black. The birds hovered above us and drifted into a cloud formation, dense and massive like Kalidasa's cloud messenger-- who carried messages of love between two separated lovers-- showering us with cosmic blessings as we left our refuge.
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Priyanka Kumar (Conversations with Birds)
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air, within the full view of every person on the ground, distinctly the Ariel began “writing.” “A-R-I-E-L”–in small letter script; every curve and letter formation could be traced.
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Roy Rockwood (Dave Dashaway, Air Champion: Or Wizard-Work in the Clouds)
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Most natural inanimate objects are symmetrical only by chance. Think of the uncommon delight in finding a perfectly shaped skipping stone or an evenly balanced cloud formation. Symmetrical forms and patterns that emerge from pure physical principles—crystals, tides, snowflakes—feel like miracles and are often held up as evidence of the divine. Order suggests the presence of an animate force, one that sequences molecules, assembles cell walls, circulates nutrients, and channels energy into growth and propagation.
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Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
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You’ve got to accept all the different cloud formations that come and go and may do so for some time yet.
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Jane Riley (The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock)
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You’ve got to accept all the different cloud formations that come and go and may do so for some time yet. They’re all part of the process, Oliver. Do not berate yourself for the clouds, do not worry if they hang around, do not fret if they bring storms; let them. Let them wash you, cleanse you, refresh you.
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Jane Riley (The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock)
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Key: The primary source of warmth is the sun Solar wind was discovered as a driving force in Earth’s climate by Henrik Svensmark and others. The more active is the sun, the more solar wind it emits, and this pushes against the cosmic rays bombarding the solar system from distant stars (supernovae). When there is more solar wind, there are fewer cosmic rays that make it to Earth, and fewer clouds formed from the nucleation process (cloud chamber effect). When there are fewer clouds, the Earth becomes warmer, because more sunlight makes it down to the surface. When the sun is relatively inactive, producing less solar wind, more cosmic rays make it to Earth’s atmosphere, stimulating the formation of more clouds, reflecting more sunlight and cooling down the planet. This one effect has been shown to produce a far greater correlation with global temperature than most other factors. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, shows virtually no correlation with temperature on nearly every time scale. On the one time scale with a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature, temperature drives CO2 abundance; not the other way around. Carbon dioxide is such a weak influence on temperature that, though CO2 continued to increase in the paleoclimate record, temperatures fell despite the increasing carbon dioxide levels. Temperatures
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Rod Martin Jr. (Climate Basics: Nothing to Fear)
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Introduction "30 Interactive Brain teasers to Warm Up your Brain" is a mini edition by Puzzleland, containing 30 easy brain teasers to get your mind warmed up for the day! This little fun book is ideal for teens and adults who look for some creative ways to spend their free time, entertain their mind or simply keep themselves busy while waiting in public locations! Difficulty Level The difficulty level of the brainteasers in this mini collection is appropriate for beginner teens or adults, and even for smart kids. Navigation between questions, clues and answers. This book is specially formatted to provide clues, simply with a click, before providing the answer! You can ask for a clue before seeing the answer which is really great and makes the game a lot more fun! For each question, click on “Give me a Clue” to get a little bit of help, and if you are certain about the answer, ignore this and go straight to “Show Answer”. Then you can “Go to the Next Brainteaser”. Settings for a better reading experience For a better reading experience, please adjust reading settings of your Kindle device or Cloud Reader with the Aa button:
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Puzzleland (30 Interactive Brainteasers to Warm up your Brain)
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Both magnetic and optical storage formats—videotape, digital discs, and drives—decay much faster than commercial film stock. Despite living in the cloud, there is no heaven for digital data. And in fifty years, even if our CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and YouTube accounts retain their contents, which is unlikely, there will be no devices or software with which to read them. Skip even one generation of technological change and the precious photos, videos, or letters on the floppy disks in the closet become inaccessible or illegible.
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Glenn Kurtz (Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film)
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Somewhere a scholar is preparing a manuscript on the poetry of Lucille Clifton while his child happily plays under the watch of a childcare provider, the cost of whose labor is paid without worry but the cost of whose living is a source of ongoing anxiety. Somewhere a Frantz Fanon scholar is spending grant money on addressing the built-in obsolescence of their laptop, the rare earth in the guts of which have been plundered from the ground in the new scramble for Africa; the toxic skeletal remains of which will be shipped away out of sight, out of mind, to be dismantled by dispossessed, non-white hands in sacrifice zones for digital capitalism. Somewhere a theorist of settler colonial economic formations is falling asleep on the train en route to a precarious adjunct gig an hour and a half from home, the text of the conference proposal in their lap blurring like the landscape outside, their eyelids heavy from last night's shift at the cafe at which the hourly pay is more or less equivalent to that which they receive for teaching. Somewhere a mid-career scholar is arriving on campus for office hours more relaxed than they have been in years, buoyed by a mixture of validation and excitement after having read an article on white supremacy in classrooms led by non-white faculty, text on page relaxing muscles, jaw, and gut, thinning the dense cloud of alienation in a department in which indicate phrases like "playing the race card" and "all lives matter" are replaced with more professional ones--like "you may be overreacting" and "try to adopt a student-centered approach." Scholarship, no matter how abstract its subject matter, is always already a material practice, a lived experience with complex, far-reaching physical entanglements.
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David James Hudson
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The cloud of unknowing prayer is apophatic and very simple. Imagine a cloud above you. Place your sense of conscious awareness in a location floating just below the cloud. The cloud represents God. It is called the cloud of unknowing because we acknowledge that no image is sufficient to depict God. Since you cannot know God fully through image or reason, you undertake the opposite—unknowing. All things pale in comparison to God’s infinite reality. For that reason, you give yourself a diffuse object to which to direct your attention—a cloud. Then, knowing that distractions inevitably will come, you are counseled to imagine a “cloud of forgetting” hovering beneath you. Whenever you notice that you are distracted, gently, without struggle, see the distraction drift beneath the cloud of forgetting. Then, return your attention back to the cloud of unknowing. But there is one more thing: You do not pay attention just to the cloud. In addition, you “direct your naked longing” to the cloud above you. As you direct your naked (unabashed, unhidden, vulnerable, humble, unhindered, unashamed) longing and need, you will feel a humbling and an opening of your heart. Eventually, you may begin to feel the radiance that is recognized as the energy of God. When you do, rest there and fill up your being with the rivers of living water.63 It truly satisfies. Notice that this is like the Prayer Therapy group in the study, Prayer Can Change Your Life. They reported, “We listen and wait for a sense of victory, a feeling of Presence that tells us, ‘I AM here. All is well.
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Troy Caldwell (Adventures in Soulmaking: Stories and Principles of Spiritual Formation and Depth Psychology)
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Scientists are currently exploring whether Brain Dumps are more effective if written by hand versus typed; include structure (organize as you go along) vs. no structure; or include prompts (“describe how clouds are made”) versus no prompts. So far, there are no hard-hitting winners when it comes to optimal structures compared to a simple “write down what you can remember” approach.7 We encourage you to do what's practical for you and your classroom and focus on retrieval, not format.
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Pooja K. Agarwal (Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning)
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We can consider the water cycle to start as a gas or vapor in clouds. It starts the cycle as pure H2O (a.k.a. dihydrogen monoxide, or oxidane), but not for long. As it condenses to form water droplets, it absorbs carbon dioxide and other gases from the air. The atmosphere is also full of dust particles and tiny mineral crystals, such as sand and sodium chloride. All of these substances help water droplets to condense, but they also contaminate the water during formation. The droplets agglomerate and fall to the earth as precipitation (rain or snow).
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John Palmer (Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Brewing Elements))
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Where have the years gone? Why, into the usual vices of the romantic realist: into sloth and melancholy, each feeding upon and reinforcing the other, into love and marriage and the begetting of children, into the strenuous maneuvers of earning a living without living to earn, into travel and play and music and drink and talk and laughter, into saving the world—but saving the world was only a hobby. Into watching cloud formations float across our planetary skies. But mostly into sloth and melancholy and I don’t regret a moment of it.
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Edward Abbey (The Best of Edward Abbey)
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Not all human influences are warming. Aerosols are fine particles in the atmosphere such as those produced by the burning of low-quality coal. They cause severe health problems, contributing to millions of deaths per year. But they also make the globe more reflective both by directly reflecting sunlight and by inducing the formation of reflective clouds. Human-caused aerosols, together with changes in land use like deforestation (pasture is more reflective than forest), increase the albedo and so exert a net cooling influence that cancels about half of the warming influence of human-caused greenhouse gases.
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Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
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As for me, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington. Bo also gave me an added excuse to put off my evening paperwork and join my family on meandering after-dinner walks around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as the dog bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase, Malia eventually catching up to us to interrogate me about things like birds’ nests or cloud formations while Sasha wrapped herself around one of my legs to see how far I could carry her along—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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High above the Yangtze River Basin, the Chinese government is deploying a different kind of technology to impact the environment. The effort, known as the Tianhe (Sky River) Project, involves installing machines that produce silver iodide particles, which artificially induce the formation of clouds and rain. Early estimates suggest that this cloud-seeding process for manipulating the weather eventually could generate as much as 7 percent of China’s overall annual water consumption, a huge boon for the country’s 1.4 billion people.
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Rohit Bhargava (Non Obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future (Non-Obvious Trends Series))
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The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.
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Steve Brusatte (The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World)