Complementary Short Quotes

If one’s husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife’s died, the second wife was expected to engage in “complementary mourning”—a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner.

YOU ARE THE BOSS. Hosting is not democratic, just like design isn’t. Structure helps good parties, like restrictions help good design. Introduce people to each other A LOT. But take your time with it. Be generous. Very generous with food, wine, and with compliments/introductions. If you have a reception before people sit, make sure there are some snacks so blood sugar level is kept high and people are happy. ALWAYS do placement. Always. Placement MUST be boy/girl/boy/girl, etc. And no, it does not matter if someone is gay. Seat people next to people who do different things but that those things might be complementary. Or make sure they have something else in common; a passion or something rare is best. And tell people what they have in common. Within each table, people should introduce themselves, but it must be short. Name, plus something they like or what they did on the weekend or maybe something that can relate to the gathering. For dessert, people can switch, but best to have it organized: tell every other person at the table to move to another seat.

Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.

So far we have considered the effects of varying the type of illumination, so at this point we can sum up how one specimen can be imaged in four separate ways. In a conventional microscope with bright field illumination, contrast comes from absorbance of light by the sample (Figure 7a). Using dark field illumination, contrast is generated by light scattered from the sample (Figure 7b). In phase contrast, interference between different path lengths produces contrast (Figure 7c), and in polarizing microscopy it is the rotation of polarized light produced by the specimen between polarizer and analyser (Figure 7d). This is ‘converted’ into an image that has colour and a three dimensional appearance by the use of Wollaston prisms in differential interference microscopy. For virtually any specimen, hard or soft, isotropic or anisotropic, organic or inorganic, biological, metallurgical, or manufactured, there will be a variety of imaging modes that will produce complementary information. Some of the types of light microscopy we have looked at above have direct parallels in electron microscopy (Chapter 4).

In short, distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are tracking targets that move too fast for genetic evolution. In a stable phase, “as­ similative alleles”—genes that reduce the experience­dependence of a cognitive gadget’s development—may increase in frequency. But when the environment shifts, there will be selection against assimi­lative alleles because their bearers will be slower to adjust to the new conditions (Chater et al., 2009). Once again, let’s take imitation as an example. As long as gestural markers of group membership, bonding rituals, and technologies remain constant, alleles that privilege and accelerate learning of particular matching vertical associations could be targets of positive selection. For example, people who more readily associate matching trunk movements (for example, you lean forward, I lean forward) than complementary trunk movements (you lean forward, I lean back), might have higher reproductive fitness than people who learn matching and complementary trunk movements at the same rate. But when conventions or technologies change, those assimilative alleles would hamper the development of imitation mechanisms with a now more effective repertoire of matching vertical associations. The people who had once been such effective social op­erators would now be losing social capital by leaning in when they should be leaning back. This kind of problem could be avoided if mu­tation produced a universal imitation mechanism, like the cognitive instinct postulated by Meltzof and Moore (1997), which could copy the topography of any body movement. However, this would be stan­dard genetic evolution, not genetic assimilation, and, given that no one has worked out how such a mechanism could operate (Chapter 6), it is plausible that—like wheels (Dennett, 1984)—it lies outside the range of available genetic variation.

We can encode all of this into a phrase: history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. And trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time. Put that together, and it wipes out both the base-rater’s view that today’s order will remain basically stable over the short-term, and the complementary view of a long-term “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that 'reduces the work load' is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called 'division of labour' and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.' Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practised from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs. The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal: it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.