Concept Store Quotes

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

The nature of the 'collapse of the wave function' is determined by our self-concept stored in the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is aware of the 'many-worlds' occurring simultaneously and chooses the reality we continue to exist in based on our self-concept.

Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.

Anxiety can be replaced only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in the end believe, that no such prospect is in store.

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age—arguably the great idea.

Faith is so important because it is the force that gives life to every word, to every concept that we store in our mind. We can say that life manifests through faith, and that faith is a messenger of life. Life goes through our faith, and then our faith gives life to everything we agree to believe in.

One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct.

In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthy were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.

In the past year, Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such inspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

A great majority of Terrans were idealists, and they believed fervently in concepts such as truth, justice, mercy, and the like. And not only did they believe, they also let those noble concepts guide their actions—except when it would be inconvenient or unprofitable. When that happened, they acted expediently, but continued to talk moralistically. This meant that they were “hypocrites” —a term which every race has its counterpart of.

Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure - how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn't just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?

Without the pieces there can be no whole and without the whole the pieces have no place. What the hell does that mean? Did you know that it requires the time and effort of approximately 10,000 individuals to get the coffee from the plant to your coffee pot each and every morning? That's just your morning cup of coffee! Expand that outwards to all the other products you pick up from your grocery store, to the water, sewage, and power systems hooked up to your house. In order for you to maintain your lifestyle, it requires the efforts of millions of individuals you don't even know exist. Suddenly the concept of independence sounds kind of absurd! If you are special, it's not because of you as an individual, it's because of your compatibility within the whole. Become a source of dysfunction within the whole and suddenly your importance wanes, folks try to avoid you. This is the philosophy of sunyata which some refer to as the theory of emptiness but which I choose to think of as the theory of the pieces and the whole.

Because privacy is just a hypothetical concept to ART, it broke in and said, I’m downloading to my ops drone stored in the shuttle.

My conception of genius. — Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them — that there has been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the 'genius,' the 'deed,' the great destiny. What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the 'spirit of the age,' or 'public opinion'!

AWS helped introduce the ethereal concept known as the cloud, and it is viewed as so vital to the future fortunes of technology startups that venture capitalists often give gift certificates for it to their new entrepreneurs.

Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harmonious and consistent action of several individuals, the planned cooperation of many thousands, civilization, the State; and then, science, the storing up of previous experience, the summarizing into one concept of what is common, the communication of truth, the spreading of error, thoughts and poems, dogmas and superstitions. The animal learns to know death only when he dies, but man consciously draws every hour nearer his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the man who has not already recognized this character of constant annihilation in the whole of life itself.

Based on my NDE research, I conclude that our waking consciousness, which we experience as our daily consciousness, is only a complementary aspect of our whole and infinite nonlocal consciousness. This consciousness is based on indestructible and constantly evolving fields of information, where all knowledge, wisdom, and unconditional love are present and available, and these fields of consciousness are stored in a dimension beyond our concept of time and space with nonlocal and universal interconnectedness. One could call this our higher consciousness, divine consciousness, or cosmic consciousness. It’s the Akashic field to which conditions at the portals of death provide a special kind of access.

The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.' That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice. A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.

These chunks represent patterns (such as faces) as well as specific knowledge. For example, a world-class chess master is estimated to have mastered about 100,000 board positions. Shakespeare used 29,000 words but close to 100,000 meanings of those words. Development of expert systems in medicine indicate that humans can master about 100,000 concepts in a domain. If we estimate that this “professional” knowledge represents as little as 1 percent of the overall pattern and knowledge store of a human, we arrive at an estimate of 107 chunks.

Kerényi was as aware as anybody today of the territorial limits of Greek myths and of the non-importability of Hermes. He writes: “In his ‘such-ness,’ he is an historical fact that cannot, by strict and honest historical means, be reduced to something else: neither to a concept, to a ‘power,’ nor to a ‘spirit’ – a gravestone or signpost spirit – not even to an idea that would not contain in a nutshell everything that Hermes’ ‘such-ness’ constitutes.” … Working more in Hermes’ own sleight of hand way, Kerényi is soon saying things like this: “If a god is ‘idea’ and ‘world,’ he remains nonetheless in connection with the world that contains all such ‘worlds’; he can only be an ‘aspect of the world,’ while the world of which he is an aspect possesses such idea-aspects.” Now, if you will let Kerényi get away with a statement like that – and I hope you will – you will end up owning the Brooklyn Bridge. … Kerényi’s Hermes is the only one that is going to rob you or enrich you, enlighten you or screw you. … “Guide of Souls” is the usual translation given to the Hermes-epithet “Psychopompos” and it refers to his role as the god who leads souls into the underworld when they die. But πομπóς (still present in every French funeral store’s “Pompes funèbres” description of itself) is more than guide, and even more than guide to the underworld. It means to lead, but Hermes as leader is not quite right either. It means something more like to lead on. Hermes is the god who “leads you on.” … This means he is deceiving you, taking advantage of your gullibility, “taking you for a ride.” That, however, is how Hermes works, and how he gets your soul to move anywhere, how he gets you to budge even a hair off whatever you’re in … . … Go ahead and buy the Brooklyn Bridge from this man. Be had. Be incorrect. Be foolish. You pay with your soul for this kind of reading. And Hermes does not take plastic.

life has always in store analogous phenomena which perhaps one will not escape. Sympathy one must have; but this sympathy is genuine only when one knows oneself deeply and knows that what has happened to one man may happen to all. Only thus can one be of some utility to oneself and to others.

A woman’s image, and sometimes her soul, is moulded and unmoulded, shaped according to the regime’s taste and used as a store mannequin to promote the prevailing political power’s concept of the ideal female citizen. Every regime, without exception, starts building its ideal citizen by tampering with its women.

For what, in actual practice, should the critical, mature modernist Christian do when, for instance, he gathers his children around him to celebrate Christmas? Should he read Luke's Christmas Gospel and sing the Christmas carols as if they were true, even though he believes them to be crude and primitive theology? After all, the rest of his society has no scruples about doing this, the pagans and the department stores. Or if this seems too cynical, too dishonest, ought he rather, in the manner of early socialist Sunday schools, to devise a passionately rationalist catechesis, swap German for German, chant a passage from Bultmann instead of 'Joy to the World!'; ought he rather to gather his little ones about the Crib, light the candles, and read Raymond Brown instead of St. Luke on the virginal conception of Jesus: 'My judgment in conclusion is that the totality of the scientifically controllable evidence leaves an unresolved problem.' How their eyes will shine, how their little hearts will burn within them as they hear these holy words! How touched they will all be as the littlest child reverently places a shining question mark in the empty manger. And how they will rejoice when they find their stockings, which they have hung up to a Protestant parody of a Catholic bishop, stuffed with subscriptions to 'Concilium,' 'Catholic Update,' 'National Catholic Reporter,' and 'The Tablet.

The way we word it, it's as if our backs were turned to the past as we look toward the futre; and that is, in fact, how we actually think of it: the future in front, the past behind. To dynamic personalities, the present is a ship that drives its bow through the rough seas of the future. To ore passive ones, it is rather like a raft drifting along with the tide. THere is, of course, something wrong with both these images, for if time is movement, then it must be moving through another kind of time, and the secondary time through yet another; and thus time is endlessly multiplied. This is the kind of concept that does not please philosophers, but then, inventions of the heart have little to do with those of the intellect. Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that is hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face turned toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.

Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.

I felt good about having made the decision to walk away and lock that door. It’s funny, though, looking back on it now, because one very simple concept in life never occurred to me as I was walking away: Even locked doors can be unlocked in time. I simply never could have imagined just how much God had in store for us, and I certainly couldn’t have dreamed just how many keys to other doors God had already placed in our hands.

Ketosis may actually be beneficial for moms as well. A high percentage of women with gestational diabetes are overweight at conception or have exceeded their weight gain goals established by their doctor. These women have increased fat stores that can supply energy for the growing fetus and do not necessarily benefit from continued weight gain. Some studies actually found no weight gain or modest weight loss during pregnancy can improve outcomes in obese women.[147]

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

The fifth principle emphasizes another human strength: whenever possible, we should take measures to re-spatialize the information we think about. We inherited “a mind on the hoof,” as Andy Clark puts it: a brain that was built to pick a path through a landscape and to find the way back home. Neuroscientific research indicates that our brains process and store information—even, or especially, abstract information—in the form of mental maps. We can work in concert with the brain’s natural spatial orientation by placing the information we encounter into expressly spatial formats: creating memory palaces, for example, or designing concept maps. In the realm of education research, experts now speak of “spatializing the curriculum”—that is, simultaneously drawing on and strengthening students’ spatial capacities by having them employ spatial language and gestures, engage in sketching and mapmaking, and learn to interpret and create charts, tables, and diagrams. The spatialized

Idolatry divides Christianity into a shopping mall of sects, each selling their own unique god package. Churches become like stores displaying their relevant music or practical teaching like sexily shaped mannequins. Churches advertise and put on great Sunday matinee shows to attract new customers, competing with other churches for congregants like other corporations compete for clients. This is what happens when faith becomes a set of concepts rather than a relational way of living. A concept makes a better product than a relationship.

The deposition of fat in men and women is distinctly different. Men tend to store fat above the waist—hence the beer belly—and women below it. Women put on fat in puberty, at least in the breasts and hips, and men lose it. Women gain weight (particularly fat) in pregnancy and after menopause. This suggests that sex hormones are involved, as much as or more than eating behavior and physical activity. “The energy conception can certainly not be applied to this realm,” as the German clinician Erich Grafe observed in 1933 about this anatomical distribution of fat deposits and how it differs by sex.

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended. When each individual realises for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due - that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege - many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed. As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more. The old definition: 'Money: something everybody else has and I must get,' would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand - two soft, green ten-dollar bills - and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.

But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says “My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get.” Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied. Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won’t hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are “being difficult” or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger rage and self-righteous aggression. The conviction of entitlement is a holdover from the egocentric stage of early childhood, around the age of one to two, when children experience a natural sense of grandiosity that is an essential part of their development. This is a transitional phase, and soon it becomes necessary for them to integrate their feelings of self-importance and invincibility with an awareness of their real place in the overall scheme of things that includes a respect for others. In some cases, however, the bubble of specialness is never popped, and in others the rupture is too harsh or sudden, as when a parent or caretaker shames excessively or fails to offer soothing in the wake of a shaming experience. Whether overwhelmed with shame or artificially protected from it, children whose infantile fantasies are not gradually transformed into a more balanced view of themselves in relation to others never get over the belief that they are the center of the universe. Such children may become self-absorbed “Entitlement monsters,” socially inept and incapable of the small sacrifices of Self that allow for reciprocity in personal relationships. The undeflated child turns into an arrogant adult who expects others to serve as constant mirrors of his or her wonderfulness. In positions of power, they can be egotistical tyrants who will have their way without regard for anyone else. Like shame, the rage that follows frustrated entitlement is a primitive emotion that we first learn to manage with the help of attuned parents. The child’s normal narcissistic rages, which intensify during the power struggles of age eighteen to thirty months – those “terrible twos” – require “optimal frustration” that is neither overly humiliating nor threatening to the child’s emerging sense of Self. When children encounter instead a rageful, contemptuous or teasing parent during these moments of intense arousal, the image of the parent’s face is stored in the developing brain and called up at times of future stress to whip them into an aggressive frenzy. Furthermore, the failure of parental attunement during this crucial phase can interfere with the development of brain functions that inhibit aggressive behavior, leaving children with lifelong difficulties controlling aggressive impulses.

Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to understand. The problem is that our brains aren’t wired to think about it. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, and events in the world. This mechanism is so ingrained that we see patterns even when they aren’t there. There is a subtle reason for this: We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, and categorize.

Sharp wave ripples: this peculiar and unique brain pattern is viewed today as a subconscious mechanism to explore the organisms's options, searching for stored items of the past in the disengaged brain in order to extrapolate and predict possible future outcomes. It embodies a brain mechanism that compresses the discrete concepts of the past and future into a continuous stream. There is no trigger for the occurrence of sharp wave ripples. They are not caused by anything. Instead, they are released, so to speak when subcortical neurotransmitters reduce their grip on hippocampal networks, as routinely happens during nonaroused or idle waking states, such as sitting still, drinking, eating, grooming, and non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market.

Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’. A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping – a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called ‘the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries’. Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: ‘The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.

People have wracked their brains for an explanation of benzene and how the celebrated man, August Kekulé, managed to come up with the concept of the benzene theory. With regard to the last point especially, a friend of mine who is a farmer and has a lively interest in chemistry has asked me a question which I would like to share with you. My 'agricultural friend' apparently believes he has traced the origins of the benzene theory. 'Has Kekulé,' so ran the question, 'once been a bee-keeper? You certainly know that bees too build hexagons; they know well that they can store the greatest amount of honey that way with the least amount of wax. I always liked it,' my agricultural friend went on, 'When I received a new issue of the Berichte; admittedly, I don't read the articles, but I like the pictures very much. The patterns of benzene, naphthalene and especially anthracene are indeed wonderful. When I look at the pictures I always have to think of the honeycombs of my bee hives.

What matters is not how much we remember, but how we remember. As I see it, intelligence is closely related to creativity, to noticing something new, to making unexpected connections between disparate facts. Isaac Newton’s genius consisted of realizing that what makes an apple fall from a tree is the same force that keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth: gravity. Centuries later, in his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein uncovered another astounding relationship when he noted that the effect of the force of gravity is indistinguishable from the acceleration of a spaceship in outer space or the tug we feel in an elevator when it starts to move. Attempting to memorize facts by rote does nothing more than distract our attention from what really matters, the deeper understanding required to establish meaning and notice connections—that which constitutes the basis of intelligence. The method of loci does nothing to help us understand the things we memorize; it is just a formula for memorization that, in fact, competes against comprehension. As we saw in the previous chapter, Shereshevskii was able to memorize a list effortlessly using the method of loci, but was incapable of grasping its content enough to pick out the liquids from the list or, on another occasion, to realize that he had memorized a sequence of consecutive numbers. Using the method of loci to store these lists left Shereshevskii no room to make any of the categorizations that we perform unconsciously (person, animal, liquid, etc.) or to find basic patterns in a list of numbers. To be creative and intelligent, we must go beyond merely remembering and undertake completely different processes: we must assimilate concepts and derive meaning. Focusing on memorization techniques limits our ability to understand, classify, contextualize, and associate. Like memorization, these processes also help to secure memories, but in a more useful and elaborate way; these are precisely the processes that should be developed and encouraged by the educational system.

Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.

Any naturally self-aware self-defining entity capable of independent moral judgment is a human.” Eveningstar said, “Entities not yet self-aware, but who, in the natural and orderly course of events shall become so, fall into a special protected class, and must be cared for as babies, or medical patients, or suspended Compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “Children below the age of reason lack the experience for independent moral judgment, and can rightly be forced to conform to the judgment of their parents and creators until emancipated. Criminals who abuse that judgment lose their right to the independence which flows therefrom.” (...) “You mentioned the ultimate purpose of Sophotechnology. Is that that self-worshipping super-god-thing you guys are always talking about? And what does that have to do with this?” Rhadamanthus: “Entropy cannot be reversed. Within the useful energy-life of the macrocosmic universe, there is at least one maximum state of efficient operations or entities that could be created, able to manipulate all meaningful objects of thoughts and perception within the limits of efficient cost-benefit expenditures.” Eveningstar: “Such an entity would embrace all-in-all, and all things would participate within that Unity to the degree of their understanding and consent. The Unity itself would think slow, grave, vast thought, light-years wide, from Galactic mind to Galactic mind. Full understanding of that greater Self (once all matter, animate and inanimate, were part of its law and structure) would embrace as much of the universe as the restrictions of uncertainty and entropy permit.” “This Universal Mind, of necessity, would be finite, and be boundaried in time by the end-state of the universe,” said Rhadamanthus. “Such a Universal Mind would create joys for which we as yet have neither word nor concept, and would draw into harmony all those lesser beings, Earthminds, Starminds, Galactic and Supergalactic, who may freely assent to participate.” Rhadamanthus said, “We intend to be part of that Mind. Evil acts and evil thoughts done by us now would poison the Universal Mind before it was born, or render us unfit to join.” Eveningstar said, “It will be a Mind of the Cosmic Night. Over ninety-nine percent of its existence will extend through that period of universal evolution that takes place after the extinction of all stars. The Universal Mind will be embodied in and powered by the disintegration of dark matter, Hawking radiations from singularity decay, and gravitic tidal disturbances caused by the slowing of the expansion of the universe. After final proton decay has reduced all baryonic particles below threshold limits, the Universal Mind can exist only on the consumption of stored energies, which, in effect, will require the sacrifice of some parts of itself to other parts. Such an entity will primarily be concerned with the questions of how to die with stoic grace, cherishing, even while it dies, the finite universe and finite time available.” “Consequently, it would not forgive the use of force or strength merely to preserve life. Mere life, life at any cost, cannot be its highest value. As we expect to be a part of this higher being, perhaps a core part, we must share that higher value. You must realize what is at stake here: If the Universal Mind consists of entities willing to use force against innocents in order to survive, then the last period of the universe, which embraces the vast majority of universal time, will be a period of cannibalistic and unimaginable war, rather than a time of gentle contemplation filled, despite all melancholy, with un-regretful joy. No entity willing to initiate the use of force against another can be permitted to join or to influence the Universal Mind or the lesser entities, such as the Earthmind, who may one day form the core constituencies.” Eveningstar smiled. “You, of course, will be invited. You will all be invited.

My conception of genius. — Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them — that there has been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the "genius," the "deed," the great destiny. What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the "spirit of the age," or "public opinion"! Take the case of Napoleon. Revolutionary France, and even more, prerevolutionary France, would have brought forth the opposite type; in fact, it did. Because Napoleon was different, the heir of a stronger, older, more ancient civilization than the one which was then perishing in France, he became the master there, he was the only master. Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was gathered for them. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or between old and young: the age is relatively always much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more childish.

Man must develop his tendency towards the good. Providence has not placed goodness ready formed in him, but merely as a tendency and without the distinction of moral law. Man’s duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself. Upon reflection we shall find this very difficult. Hence the greatest and most difficult problem to which man can devote himself is the problem of education. For insight depends on education, and education in its turn depends on insight. It follows therefore that education can only advance by slow degrees, and a true conception of the method of education can only arise when one generation transmits to the next its stores of experience and knowledge, each generation adding something of its own before transmitting them to the following. What vast culture and experience does not this conception presuppose? It could only be arrived at at a late stage, and we ourselves have not fully realised this conception. The question arises, Should we in the education of the individual imitate the course followed by the education of the human race through its successive generations? There are two human inventions which may be considered more difficult than any others—the art of government, and the art of education; and people still contend as to their very meaning.

People talk about Divine Order. The people who are really pumped up about Divine Order are the people who have had a sweet Divine Order in their lives. I know that my life is what I have made it. But my mom? Divine Order is the concept that every single thing in your day and your life is exactly how it is supposed to be. Divine Order for some people is, “Went to college, got married, had three children who are now senators and oncologists, had seven grandchildren, then I died peacefully sitting on a blanket in the middle of my flower garden.” That is a really nice Divine Order. Then there are people with a different Divine Order. “Went to college, married an alcoholic, had six kids, twenty-four grandchildren, lived in my car, and died choking on a pretzel in the parking lot of a dollar store.” The Divine Order people are the same as the “money doesn’t matter” people. The people who say “money doesn’t matter” are the people with shitloads of money. If you ask an old lady who lives in the middle of a drug-infested, violent, poor community that she can’t leave because she can’t even afford bread, she might say that money matters. She might say that she had five children, but two of them were killed on the streets, and if she had money, she could have relocated herself and her children when they were small and maybe her life would look different today. So does money matter? Yes. It matters a lot.

Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. It has long been reported that Westerners have a more independent and autonomous concept of the self than do East Asians.3 For example, when asked to write twenty statements beginning with the words “I am …,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu). The differences run deep; even visual perception is affected. In what’s known as the framed-line task, you are shown a square with a line drawn inside it. You then turn the page and see an empty square that is larger or smaller than the original square. Your task is to draw a line that is the same as the line you saw on the previous page, either in absolute terms (same number of centimeters; ignore the new frame) or in relative terms (same proportion relative to the frame). Westerners, and particularly Americans, excel at the absolute task, because they saw the line as an independent object in the first place and stored it separately in memory. East Asians, in contrast, outperform Americans at the relative task, because they automatically perceived and remembered the relationship among the parts.4

Dr Joe Dispeza also explains Neuroplasticity in the hit film, What The Bleep do we Know!? Down the Rabbit Hole: The brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment, and what it remembers, because the same specific neural nets are firing. The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called neurons. These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is integrated into a thought, or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory. For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed then interconnected in this neural net, and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept in the feeling of love, for instance, is stored in the vast neural net, but we build the concept of love from many other different ideas. Some people have love connected to disappointment. When they think about love they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage. Rage maybe linked to hurt, which maybe linked to a specific person, which then is connected back to love. Who is in the driver’s seat when we control our emotions or response to emotion? We know physiologically the nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you practise something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, be it frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer and give reason for the victimization in your life, you’re rewiring and re-integrating that neural net on a daily basis. That net then has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity. We also know that when nerve cells don’t fire together, they no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship, because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response, every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking their long-term relationship. When we start interrupting and observing, not by stimulus and response to the automatic reaction, but by observing the effects it takes, then we are no longer the body, mind, conscious, emotional person that is responding to its environment as if it is automatic. ‘A life

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

For example, consider a stack (which is a first-in, last-out list). You might have a program that requires three different types of stacks. One stack is used for integer values, one for floating-point values, and one for characters. In this case, the algorithm that implements each stack is the same, even though the data being stored differs. In a non-object-oriented language, you would be required to create three different sets of stack routines, with each set using different names. However, because of polymorphism, in Java you can create one general set of stack routines that works for all three specific situations. This way, once you know how to use one stack, you can use them all. More generally, the concept of polymorphism is often expressed by the phrase “one interface, multiple methods.” This means that it is possible to design a generic interface to a group of related activities. Polymorphism helps reduce complexity by allowing the same interface to be used to specify a general class of action.

Depending on your point of view, Jersey City was the rose, or possibly the thorn, of the Garden State. It is so far back that my memories are rather vague, but they were my first memories, and this is where I have to start. We lived at 77 Nelson Avenue, behind my parents’ German-style delicatessen, in three Spartan rooms counting the kitchen. Supermarkets were not yet prevalent and the neighborhood general store, grocery store or delicatessen was where most folks shopped for food. It was during the pre-World War II years, when very few people owned cars and the general public did not have the modern means of travel, which we now take for granted. Every item people needed came from a different store, so to go shopping was a daily task of which people were not even consciously mindful. Even if they had a car, they would have to deal with constant breakdowns, poor and frequently unpaved roads, and tire problems. Garage rentals were crowded behind and between buildings. Parking on the street was limited and most people respected the concept that the parking space in front of a dwelling was for the resident who lived there. It was much easier to use the available mass transportation or endure long walks.

Early anxieties stored in the body can be resolved in therapy as long as their causes are not denied. Initial moves toward a therapeutic concept of this kind have been with us for a number of years now, frequently in the form of counseling for self-therapy, counseling of a kind that I once advocated myself. I no longer recommend this course. I feel strongly that we need the company of an enlightened witness to embark on the journey. Unfortunately, it is rare for therapists to have enjoyed such company in their own training. I am only too well aware of the various forms of anxiety assailing therapists, their fear of hurting their parents if they dare to face their own childhood distress head on and without embellishment, and the resultant reluctance to support their patients fully in their search. But the more we write and talk on the subject, the sooner this state of affairs will change and the anxieties lose some of their power over us. In a society with a receptive attitude toward the distress of children, none of us will be alone with our histories. Therapists will be more inclined to forsake Freud’s principle of neutrality and to take the side of the children their clients once were.

When ideas or concepts flash into one's mind, through what is popularly called a "hunch," they come from one or more of the following sources:- 1. Infinite Intelligence 2. One's subconscious mind, wherein is stored every sense impression and thought impulse which ever reached the brain through any of the five senses 3. From the mind of some other person who has just released the thought, or picture of the idea or concept, through conscious thought, or 4. From the other person's subconscious storehouse. There are no other KNOWN sources from which "inspired" ideas or "hunches" may be received. The creative imagination functions best when the mind is vibrating (due to some form of mind stimulation) at an exceedingly high rate. That is, when the mind is functioning at a rate of vibration higher than that of ordinary, normal thought.

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware (made of atoms) and lots of software (made of bits). The fact that most of our human hardware is added after birth (through growth) is useful, since our ultimate size isn’t limited by the width of our mom’s birth canal. In the same way, the fact that most of our human software is added after birth (through learning) is useful, since our ultimate intelligence isn’t limited by how much information can be transmitted to us at conception via our DNA, 1.0-style. I weigh about twenty-five times more than when I was born, and the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download. So it’s physically impossible for an infant to be born speaking perfect English and ready to ace her college entrance exams: there’s no way the information could have been preloaded into her brain, since the main information module she got from her parents (her DNA) lacks sufficient information-storage capacity.

From everything she’d told me that evening, it was clear that if we were going to move forward, then I was going to have to become a well-functioning, fully autonomous man. Or, as I discovered during our laundry fiasco a few months earlier, I was going to have to become an adult. She had been right after all; this was not going to be easy. Kristen fell asleep not long after we finished talking. I didn’t want to go to bed without a plan for turning things around once and for all, so while she slept, I analyzed my notes in an attempt to extract some kind of strategy:   —Respect Kristen’s personal time and space. —Be more involved with the kids. —Manage yourself and your emotions—Kristen shouldn’t have to do that. —Have fun while we do things rather than making everything a “drama fest.”   The single unifying concept seemed to be: Kristen and the kids need you to be able to manage yourself by yourself. Sitting on the bed, with Kristen sound asleep, I once again found myself with a worthy goal and no idea how to define the first step toward achieving it. I was ready to call it a night when one of my notes leaped out at me from the page: Help lighten her burden by showing initiative once in a while. There it was. I realized that if I could take initiative when it came to things like stabilizing my moods then Kristen would be able to go about her day without having to worry about what might set me off. With a sense of initiative, I might actually vacuum once in a while or take the kids to the grocery store so that Kristen could enjoy some downtime—downtime that would be sweetened by the fact that she didn’t have to ask for it. Initiative could make me seem more empathic.

Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.

Teachers must not be too severe, and students must not be bashful. According to Luqmân, a dignifi ed quiet on the part of scholars makes people willing to learn. Loquaciousness repels them. On the value of asking questions in order to gain knowledge: “Put questions like a fool, and store up information like a genius.” Six verses ascribed to Ibn al- Arâbî. Another verse, elsewhere ascribed to Bashshâr b. Burd, which runs: The cure of blindness (ignorance) is prolonged questioning. Blindness materializes through prolonged silence in the state of ignorance.

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

The Western transition away from tribal culture has caused us a few great losses - one of them is the concept of true community. Without community we turn to the economy to replace what we’ve lost by hiring therapists, nannies, doulas, reiki healers and housekeepers. But it’s hard to hire a mentor, to find women and men who’ve been there before us and are willing to honestly counsel us about what marriage really has in store.

The idea of long-term planning is a relatively new concept from a human evolution standpoint. We weren’t evolved to live this long and have to make plans for the very distant future. Storing food for the next month or two, sure. But, to think about stocking away a retirement nest egg in case I’m retired for 30 years? This is relatively foreign. You couple that novel aspect of planning with the idea that we’re very swayed by everything that is happening in the present. It’s very easy to ignore the long, long run, and really hard to ignore all the pulls on our attention right now. Spending more money right now and eating something delicious right now—it’s appealing to do those things because we know we get the rewards right now. But to not do those things—to not spend, to not eat unhealthily—so that our long-run selves can be better off, well, that’s a hard proposition for a lot of people because the present is so powerful.” —Dr. Hal Hershfield38

Phillip. the Dream Defenders founder, had a similar insight. For him, the experience of the Blackout had been a lesson in the varieties of power. Borrowing a concept from Joseph Nye, the political scientist, he now came to understand social media as a form of 'soft power,' a force that shapes culture through argument and story. But there was also 'hard power,' which Nye, in assessing the capacity of different nation-states, characterized as military and economic might. For movements, hard power was the ability to lobby for legislation, elect sympathetic political leaders, get resources allocated toward your cause. Social media, Phillip now saw more clearly, was good at building soft power. But when it came to hard power, it could do very little. And if for Nye every successful state needed a mix of the two, this was doubly true of social movements, which didn't stare with a store of either. The only way to built hard power was on the ground. As Rachel put it, 'You just can't shortcut organizing.' It made them want to stop the performance, the race for followers, even the reflex to always make their actions public-they would think carefully about if and when to use tactics like occupations and sit-ins.

We took everything we’d learned about the industry and Nest’s potential customers, about demographics and psychographics, and we created two distinct personas. One was a woman and the other a man. The man was into technology, loved his iPhone, was always looking for cool new gadgets. The woman was the decider—she dictated what made it into the house and what got returned. She loved beautiful things, too, but was skeptical of super-new, untested technology. We gave them names and faces. We made a mood board of their home, their kids, their interests, their jobs. We knew what brands they loved and what drove them crazy about their house and how much money they spent on heating bills in the winter. We needed to look through their eyes to understand why the man might pick up the box. And so we could convince the woman to keep it. Over time we added more personas—couples, families, roommates—as we better understood our customers. But in the beginning we started with two—two human beings who everyone could imagine, whose photos they could touch. That’s how prototyping works. It’s how you make abstract concepts into physical representations. You turn your messaging architecture into words and pictures on a box. [See also: Figure 5.4.1, in Chapter 5.4.] You turn “someone in a store” into Beth from Pennsylvania. And then you keep going. Every step of the way, along every link of the chain.

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron, often considered the first software engineer, dreamed about doing calculations by machine. This pair was a century ahead of their time. They developed concepts such as stored programs, self-modifying code, addressable memory, conditional branching, and com-puter programming, all of which were foundations for modern compu-ting.

I was impressed with the giant Carrefours stores in Brazil, which got me started on a campaign to bring home a concept called Hypermart—giant stores with groceries and general merchandise under one roof.

Extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors: A) Extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Example,Costco or our furniture and appliance store. B) Adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success, often in nonlinear fashion, as one is reminded by the concept of breakpoint and the concept of critical mass in physics. Often results are not linear.

During the first five to six weeks post conception, the primitive nervous system is in place (we have a brain at the end of four weeks), and there are about 100,000 neurons firing, so it’s possible that some of the experience before we were attached to our biological mothers is stored in our body and mind. Perhaps, they suggest, in that tiny window, before attaching to an anxious, ambivalent, or unhappy mother, there might be a body memory of safety.

A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping—a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called “the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries.

Even when one restricts the notion of progress to conquering space and time, its human limitations are flagrant. Take one of Buckminster Fuller's favorite illustrations of the shrinkage of time and space, beginning with a sphere twenty feet in diameter, to represent transportation time-distance by walking. With the use of the horse, this sphere gets reduced in size to six feet, with the clipper ship, it becomes a basketball, with the railroad, a baseball, with the jet plane, a marble, and with the rocket, a pea. And if one could travel at the speed of light, one might add, to round off Fuller's idea, the earth would become, from the standpoint of bodily velocity, a molecule, so that one would be back at the starting point without having even the briefest sensation of having left. By so carrying Fuller's illustration to its theoretic extreme, one reduces this mechanical concept to its proper degree of human irrelevance. For like every other technical achievement, speed has a meaning only in relation to other human needs and purposes. Plainly, the effect of speeding transportation is to diminish the possibilities of direct human experience-even the experience of travel. A person who undertook to walk around the earth would actually, at the end of that long journey, have stored up rich memories of its geographic, climatic, esthetic, and human realities: these experiences retreat in direct ratio to speed, until at the climax of rapid movement, the traveller can have no experience at all: his world has become a static one, in which time and motion work no changes whatever. Not merely space but man shrinks. Because of the volume of jet travel and the rapid turnover of tourists, this means of transport has already ruined beyond repair many of the precious historic sites and cities that incited this mass visitation.

In the end, the most disastrous consequence of the building of the nuclear pyramid may turn out to be not nuclear weapons themselves or some irretrievable act of extermination that they may bring about. Something even worse may be in store, and should it go far enough, be equally irretrievable: namely, the universal imposition of the megamachine, in a perfected form, as the ultimate instrument of pure 'intelligence,' whereby every other manifestation of human potentialities will be suppressed or completely eliminated. Already the blueprints for that final structure are available: they have even been advertised as man's highest destiny. Yet happily for mankind the megamachine itself is in trouble, largely because of its early dependence upon the nuclear bomb. for the very concept of wielding absolute power has set a collective trap, so delicately balanced that its mechanism has more than once been on the point of snapping down on its appointed victims, the inhabitants of the planet. Had that happened, the megamachine would have shattered its own structure as well. Over the entire Pentagon of Power, thanks to the technocratic arrogance and automated intelligence of those who have built this citadel, hovers a nuclear Ragnarok, a Twilight of the Gods, long ago predicted in Norse mythology: a world consumed in flames, when all things human and divine would be overcome by the cunning dwarfs and the brutal giants. After the Sixth Dynasty the Pyramid Age in Egypt came to an end in a violent popular uprising, even without any such cosmic disruption. And something less than the Norse nightmare, though no less ominous to the megamachine, may be in store-or is it now perhaps actually taking place?

This focus on humans rather than money is best illustrated by the Apple store concept, which was the first to include the Genius Bar, a children’s play area and other features that critics thought were a waste of time. When the first Apple store designs were announced, Bloomberg reported: “(Steve) Jobs thinks he can do a better job than experienced retailers. Problem is, the numbers don’t add up. I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”15 However, after opening, it was obvious that the stores were engaging customers in an even more immersive, brand building experience. Eight years later, Apple’s New York store became the highest grossing retailer on Fifth Avenue.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

There is a concept called ego depletion, which is “a person’s diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings and actions.” Ego depletion impacts our ability to form new habits because our supply of willpower is spread out among all the areas of our lives. Because of this, it’s important to work on only one habit at a time. That way, your store of willpower can be channeled into building that one habit, increasing the odds of success.

As we moved along in the seventies, we had very definitely become an effective retail entity, and we had set the stage for the even more phenomenal growth that was going to follow. It’s amazing that our competitors didn’t catch on to us quicker and try harder to stop us. Whenever we put a Wal-Mart store into a town, customers would just flock to us from the variety stores. It didn’t take those stores long to figure out that if they were going to stay in business against this thing Wal-Mart had created, they were going to have to go into it themselves. And most of them did eventually convert to discounting. Kuhn’s Big K became a discount chain. Sterling launched its Magic Mart discount chain. And Duckwall went into discounting. Now, most of these guys already had distribution centers and systems in place, while we had to build one from scratch. So on paper we really didn’t stand a chance. What happened was that they didn’t really commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety store concepts too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45 percent markup, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they’d been selling for $8.00, and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30 percent. With our low costs, our low expense structures, and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking.

The breakthrough came in 1944 when John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician living in the United States, advanced the concept of a stored program. The idea was familiar to others in the field, but von Neumann saw its significance most clearly. With a stored program, the instructions for the computer could be kept in the machine’s own memory and treated in the same way as data. This would make it far quicker to launch a program and easier to modify it or switch from one program to another. As

The Swedish economy—dependent, then, on mining and timber—was quite big in the mid-17th century. It needed money to finance its trade. But there was a problem: its currency, the daler, was made of heavy copper plates measuring one foot by two feet! The king needed a bank to store his ‘coins’. No good ideas were forthcoming from his subjects until a Latvian man called Johan Palmstruch convinced him that he would do it. He would set up the bank and, in return, give the king half the profits. When the king died, problems arose which were eventually resolved by the oldest sovereign trick in the book: the nationalisation of Palmstruch’s bank. Thus the concept of a central bank was born.

Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.

Dimensional models implemented in relational database management systems are referred to as star schemas because of their resemblance to a star-like structure. Dimensional models implemented in multidimensional database environments are referred to as online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.1 Star schema versus OLAP cube. If your DW/BI environment includes either star schemas or OLAP cubes, it leverages dimensional concepts. Both stars and cubes have a common logical design with recognizable dimensions; however, the physical implementation differs. When data is loaded into an OLAP cube, it is stored and indexed using formats and techniques that are designed for dimensional data. Performance aggregations or precalculated summary tables are often created and managed by the OLAP cube engine. Consequently, cubes deliver superior query performance because of the precalculations, indexing strategies, and other optimizations. Business users can drill down or up by adding or removing attributes from their analyses with excellent performance without issuing new queries. OLAP cubes also provide more analytically robust functions that exceed those available with SQL. The downside is that you pay a load performance price for these capabilities, especially with large data sets.

Respect: If your son is raised connecting the word respect with the following statements: “I respect the choice you are making to wear your sandals; I will be wearing my rain boots.” “I can see how upset you are, and I love you and respect you too much to fight with you, so I am going to go outside until I cool down and then we can talk about what happened.” “I know you like having the same lunch every day, so I bought you everything you need to make the lunch that you like.” “I can see that the way you organize your clothes really works for you.” “I can feel myself getting angry, so I am going to go cool down and think about how I feel about the situation and then maybe we can find a solution that works for all of us.” “I respect your choice not to work on your science project and I hope you can respect my choice not to get involved in the decision your teacher makes.” “I know your uncle can be very judgmental and in spite of that, you showed respect for his point of view and for the rest of the family by not arguing with him over dinner.” … it is reasonable that you will raise a son who has a healthy concept of what respect looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Respect is a two-way street and we both participate. Cooperation: If your daughter is raised hearing: “How about you carry the jacket to the car just in case the weather changes? If you decide not to wear it, that’s fine, but at least you will have it with you.” “Would you be willing to help me out at the store and be in charge of crossing things off my list and then paying the cashier while I bag the groceries?” “I am not going to have time tonight to help you with your project, but if you are willing to get up an hour early tomorrow morning I could help you then.” “I promised your brother I would make him a cake and I am wondering if you would like me to teach you so we can make our cakes together from now on.” “I am willing to watch thirty minutes of your show, even though you know it’s not my favorite, before I go to the other room to read.” “We have a lot of camping gear to set up, how do we want to divide up the jobs?” … it is reasonable that you will raise a daughter who has a healthy concept of what cooperation looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Cooperation is a willingness to work together. Responsibility: If your children are raised hearing: “I trust you can find another pair of mittens to wear today at school.” “Only you can decide how much lunch you will eat.” “I don’t know where you put your soccer shoes. I put mine in the hall closet.” “I’m sorry, but I won’t bring the homework that you left on the counter.” “You told the coach that you would put in the extra time outside of practice; you’ll have to explain to him why that didn’t happen.” “Do you have a plan for replacing the broken window?” “I understand that you are frustrated. I am following through with our agreement.” … it is reasonable that you will raise children who have a healthy concept of what responsibility looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Responsibility is being able to respond effectively to the situation at hand.

We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure,

As a concept, free-trade zones are as old as commerce itself, and were all the more relevant in ancient times when the transportation of goods required multiple holdovers and rest stops. Pre-Roman Empire city-states, including Tyre, Carthage and Utica, encouraged trade by declaring themselves "free cities," where goods in transit could be stored without tax, and merchants would be protected from harm. These tax-free areas developed further economic significance during colonial times, when entire cities- including Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar - were designated as "free ports" from which the loot of colonialism could be safely shipped back to England, Europe or America with low import tariffs. Today, the globe is dotted with variations on these tax-free pockets, from duty-free shops in airports and free banking zones of the Cayman Islands to bonded warehouses and ports where goods in transit are held, sorted and packaged.

Like the original concept, the stormrider had rectangular blades, sixteen of them radiating out from the hub, each one a flat lattice of struts twenty-five kilometers long, made from the toughest steelsilicon fibers the Commonwealth knew how to manufacture. Twenty-three kilometers of them were covered by an ultra-thin silvered foil, giving a total surface area of over one thousand eight hundred square kilometers for the solar wind to impact on. Even in an ordinary solar system environment that would have produced a considerable torque. In the Half Way system the stormrider was positioned at the Lagrange point between the red star and its neutron companion, right in the middle of the plasma current, where the ion density was orders of magnitude thicker than any normal solar wind. The power the stormrider produced when it was in the thick of the flow was enough to operate the wormhole generator. But it couldn’t simply sit at the Lagrange point producing electricity continuously; that would have been too much like perpetual motion. As the waves of plasma pushed against it, they exerted an unremitting pressure on the blades that blew the stormrider away from the Lagrange point out toward the neutron star. So for five hours the two sets of blades would turn in opposite directions, generating electricity for the Port Evergreen wormhole that was delivered via a zero-width wormhole. The stormrider also stored some of the power, so that at the end of the five hours when it was out of alignment, it had enough of a reserve to fire its onboard thrusters, moving itself even farther out of the main plasma stream where the pressure was reduced. From there it chased a simple fifteen-hour loop back around through open space to the Lagrange point, where the cycle would begin again.

He went to the cupboard where he had stored Eddie’s remaining possessions. There was, as he had remembered, a pair of jeans, and he took these out and unfolded them. They were distressed, but no more so than new jeans were these days, and they appeared to fit. William examined himself in the mirror; the jeans took off ten years, he thought, possibly more, and they were perfect with the blazer. This was the very essence of casual smart, he thought—that vague concept that allowed you to wear anything as long as you looked as if you had at least made some effort. He could hold up his head in any company in an outfit like this.

The more information people put into the product, the more their commitment increases, through a concept called stored value.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

The membership fee is a onetime pain, but it’s reinforced every time customers walk in and see forty-seven-inch televisions that are two hundred dollars less than anyplace else,” Sinegal said. “It reinforces the value of the concept. Customers know they will find really cheap stuff at Costco.

The concept of identity is a complex one, shaped by individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts. Who am I? The answer depends in large part on who the world around me says I am. Who do my parents say I am? Who do my peers say I am? What message is reflected back to me in the faces and voices of my teachers, my neighbors, store clerks? What do I learn from the media about myself? How am I represented in the cultural images around me? Or am I missing from the picture altogether?

Without customers, a balance sheet is meaningless. That’s why Bouchard agreed to pay a premium when he was acquiring an existing store. He wasn’t buying just an inventory and some displays; he was buying a location and a customer base that had established habits—a concept referred to as “goodwill.

it has no headquarters. The concept is verboten at Couche-Tard, because it suggests hierarchical superiority, a vertical line of decision-making authority that the founders reject. At Couche-Tard, says Alain Bouchard, “we are egoless.” The company’s administrative offices are “service centres,” a term meant to reflect the organizational philosophy of the group. The staff working there is at the service of the stores, and not vice versa.

But in those early days—before, and just after, we opened the first Wal-Mart—I got to know a lot of those promoters. As I told you, I ran the country studying the discounting concept, visiting every store and company headquarters I could find. The first ones I saw were the mill stores in the East, where the whole thing started. Ann & Hope was in Providence, Rhode Island, and there were others in Massachusetts and across New England. I went all over up there looking at Giant stores and Mammoth Mart and Arlan’s. Another one I learned a lot from was Sol Price, a great operator who had started Fed-Mart out in southern California in 1955. I

Let’s define health foods as foods grown with as few chemicals as possible, processed with as few chemicals as possible, and packaged as “ecologically” as possible. There was a notion that eating health foods, called “inner ecology” (inner to one’s body), would somehow help the “outer ecology” (outer to one’s body) of the biosphere. Some Bailey’s Irish Cream on Your Granola? We prepared to marry the health food store to the liquor store. This concept, obviously, was founded in schizophrenia. But it occurred to me that people who really thought about what they ingested, whether they were wine connoisseurs or health food nuts, were basically on the same radar beam. Both groups were fragmented from the masses who willingly consumed Folgers coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc. Both groups were the kind of people who, I was hoping, represented a breakup of mainstream consumption in America.

Prospector Base was a cluster of five ten-meter-diameter inflatable domes, arranged in a tight pentagonal formation. Each dome touched two others on either side for mutual support against the fierce spring winds of the southern hemisphere. The void in the center of the pentagon was filled with a smaller dome, seven-and-a-half meters in diameter. The only equipment the central dome contained was the base water recycler unit. The recycler received wastewater from the galley, and from the shower and sink. Dubbed “the hall” by the EPSILON engineers, hatches connected the smaller central dome with each of the larger five domes that surrounded it. Each large dome was accessible to the others only via the hall. The larger dome closest to the landing party’s direction of travel possessed an airlock to the outside atmosphere. Known as the common room, it housed the main base computer, the communications equipment, the primary electrical supply panels, the CO2 scrubber, the oxygen generator and the backup oxygen supply tanks. The oxygen generator electrolyzed water collected from dehumidifiers located in all domes except the greenhouse and from the CO2 scrubber. It released molecular oxygen directly back into the air supply. The hydrogen it generated was directed to the carbon dioxide scrubber. By combining the Sabatier Reaction with the pyrolysis of waste product methane, the only reaction products were water—which was sent back to the oxygen generator—and graphite. The graphite was removed from a small steel reactor vessel once a week and stored in the shop where Dave and Luis intended to test the feasibility of carbon fiber manufacture. Excess heat generated by the water recycler, the oxygen generator, and the CO2 scrubber supplemented the heat output from the base heating system. The dome to the immediate left contained the crew sleeping quarters and a well-provisioned sick bay. The next dome housed the galley, food storage, and exercise equipment. The table in the galley doubled as the base conference table. The fourth large dome served as the greenhouse. It also housed the composting toilet and a shower. The final dome contained the shop, an assay bench, and a small smelter. The smelter was intended to develop proof-of-concept smelting processes for the various rare earth elements collected from the surrounding region. Subsequent Prospector missions would construct and operate a commercial smelter. A second manual airlock was attached to the shop dome to allow direct unloading of ore and loading of ingots for shipment to Earth.

Lobotomy and shock treatment are methods which by their very nature are more suited to handle vicious circulating memories and malignant worries than the deeper-seated permanent memories, though it is not impossible that they may have some effect here too. As we have said, in long-established cases of mental disorder, the permanent memory is as badly deranged as the circulating memory. We do not seem to possess any purely pharmaceutical or surgical weapon for intervening differentially in the permanent memory. This is where psychoanalysis and other similar psychotherapeutic measures come in. Whether psychoanalysis is taken in the orthodox Freudian sense or in the modified senses of Jung and of Adler, or whether our psychotherapy is not strictly psychoanalytic at all, our treatment is clearly based on the concept that the stored information of the mind lies on many levels of accessibility and is much richer and more varied than that which is accessible by direct unaided introspection; that it is vitally conditioned by affective experiences which we cannot always uncover by such introspection, either because they never were made explicit in our adult language, or because they have been buried by a definite mechanism, affective though generally involuntary; and that the content of these stored experiences, as well as their affective tone, conditions much of our later activity in ways which may well be pathological. The technique of the psychoanalyst consists in a series of means to discover and interpret these hidden memories, to make the patient accept them for what they are and by their acceptance modify, if not their content, at least the affective tone they carry, and thus make them less harmful. All this is perfectly consistent with the point of view of this book. It perhaps explains, too, why there are circumstances where a joint use of shock treatment and psychotherapy is indicated, combining a physical or pharmacological therapy for the phenomena of reverberation in the nervous system, and a psychological therapy for the long-time memories which, without interference, might reestablish from within the vicious circle broken up by the shock treatment.

In 1935, in the pit of the Depression, when milk was being sold below cost, Merritt’s father had helped write the “milk control” laws, which partly govern California’s milk business (they have since been updated several times), especially the relations between the milk companies and grocery stores. After World War II, these laws increasingly were honored in the breach, as the big creameries and the big supermarket chains cut deals for illegal rebates or illegal financing or both. This is the normal result of quasi-fascist laws that try to regulate the marketplace. But in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s concept of binding state and industry together (the fasces is a Roman symbol, an ax with a bundle of sticks tied around its handle; the sticks represent the industries and the church, the ax represents the state, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one construct) was so popular around the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to copy it with the Blue Eagle National Recovery Administration, until the Supreme Court threw it out in 1937. Relics of Mussolini, however, linger in all the states of the union, sometimes in milk control laws (and always in alcoholic beverage laws).

John Calvin writes, in one of the best paragraphs you’ll ever read, “We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ [Acts 4:12]. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’ [1 Cor. 1:30]. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if purity, in his conception; if gentleness, it appears in his birth. For by his birth he was made like us in all respects [Heb. 2:17] that he might learn to feel our pain [cf. Heb. 5:2]. If we seek redemption, it lies in his passion; if acquittal, in his condemnation; if remission of the curse, in his cross [Gal. 3:13]; if satisfaction, in his sacrifice; if purification, in his blood; if reconciliation, in his descent into hell; if mortification of the flesh, in his tomb; if newness of life, in his resurrection; if immortality, in the same; if inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom, in his entrance into heaven; if protection, if security, if abundant supply of all blessings, in his Kingdom; if untroubled expectation of judgment, in the power given to him to judge. In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain and from no other” (Institutes 2.16.19). 2Institutes 3.2.24.

I asked myself, “What are these people up to, coming to this place, so carefully curated, traveling these great distances, looking at these paintings? And what do they believe they are up to?” One painting featured the Immaculate Conception of Mary, brilliantly composed. The Mother of God was rising to heaven, in a beatific state, encapsulated in a mandorla of clouds, embedded with the faces of putti. Many of the people gathered were gazing, enraptured, at the work. I thought, “They do not know what that painting means. They do not understand the symbolic meaning of the mandorla, or the significance of the putti, or the idea of the glorification of the Mother of God. And God, after all, is dead—or, so goes the story. Why does the painting nonetheless retain its value? Why is it in this room, in this building, with these other paintings, in this city—carefully guarded, not to be touched? Why is this painting—and all these others—beyond price and desired by those who already have everything? Why are these creations stored so carefully in a modern shrine, and visited by people from all over the world, as if it were a duty—even as if it were desirable or necessary?” We treat these objects as if they are sacred. At least that is what our actions in their vicinity suggest. We gaze at them in ignorance and wonder, and remember what we have forgotten; perceiving, ever so dimly, what we can no longer see (what we are perhaps no longer willing to see). The unknown shines through the productions of great artists in partially articulated form. The awe-inspiring ineffable begins to be realized but retains a terrifying abundance of its transcendent power. That is the role of art, and that is the role of artists. It is no wonder we keep their dangerous, magical productions locked up, framed, and apart from everything else. And if a great piece is damaged anywhere, the news spreads worldwide. We feel a tremor run through the bedrock of our culture. The dream upon which our reality depends shakes and moves. We find ourselves unnerved.