Distortion Detective Quotes

He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true.

Studies show that while few people are good at detecting factual lies, most of us can determine when someone is distorting, manufacturing, or withholding an emotion.

Seeing yourself like that, shadowy, distorted, it’s like looking into the darkest parts of your soul.

Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing—the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part of each human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ...

Intuition is soul guidance, appearing naturally in man during those instants when his mind is calm. Nearly everyone has had the experience of an inexplicably correct ‘hunch’, or has transferred his thoughts effectively to another person. The human mind, free from the static of restlessness, can perform through its antenna of intuition all the functions of complicated radio mechanisms—sending and receiving thoughts and tuning out undesirable ones. As the power of a radio depends on the amount of electrical current it can utilise, so the human radio is energised according to the power of will possessed by each individual. All thoughts vibrate eternally in the cosmos. By deep concentration, a master is able to detect the thoughts of any mind, living or dead. Thoughts are universally and not individually rooted; a truth cannot be created, but only perceived. The erroneous thoughts of man result from imperfections in his discernment. The goal of yoga science is to calm the mind that without distortion it may mirror the divine vision in the universe.

Once you survive trauma, outrage is the warning bell that sounds when you hear truth being distorted by those who haven’t passed through shadowed valleys. Because you have endured trauma, you can detect their lies. Maybe it’s like having survived the measles or the flu. Your body now has some small measure of immunity and recognizes that same poison when it tries to invade again. I wish you would never have to know trauma. But when trauma does appear in your path, don’t fear it. There are things you can’t fight. Still, by God’s power, you will prevail. Our God brings life out of death. Sometimes there is no option except to let the waves of trauma engulf you for a time. Just trust that they will recede again. What’s left in you will rise up afterward, and that will be enough. More than enough! There’s more to you than you know. There is more to God than you know. Trust that the trauma will leave gifts in its wake—hard gifts like outrage and perspective. Maybe this is what faith is: this trusting that God will bring something new and beautiful out of the pain.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the behavior of what’s around them—light and matter being distorted by immense forces within the collapsing star. Have I seen and yet not seen certain events that hint at deep,

Since the earliest days of the art form, humans have been the most difficult characters to animate. The more realistic the human being, the more difficult the animation becomes. Audiences will accept distortions in the actions of a cartoony character: no one has ever seen a four-foot-tall rabbit walk on its hind legs, so an artist animating Bugs Bunny enjoys considerable freedom. But everyone knows how human beings move, and if those movements are not rendered accurately, viewers won't believe in the characters. Ward Kimball, one of Disney's "Nine Old Men," commented, "As long as we deal in fantasy, we are on safe ground. The eye has no basis for comparison. But the more we try to duplicate nature realistically, the tougher our job becomes. The audience compares what we draw with what it knows to be true. Any false movement is easily detected.

In the case of the entry styles examined here, there are clear cognitive processes in operation. Officers will naturally orient on threats. They will also tend to experience acute stress response (ASR). ASR frequently produces a variety of perceptual distortions including tunnel vision and audio exclusion. The styles of entry can be considered to be the environmental structures. While it may be possible to conduct enough training to overcome the cognitive limitations of the officers (this is the point of much tactical training; Friedland & Keinan, 1992), it is easier to alter the entry style (i.e., structure of the environment) to one that is better adapted to the situation. This approach has also been suggested in other policing situations, such as how investigators can better detect deception (Blair, Levine, Reimer, & McCluskey, 2012). We now turn to discussing the specific entry techniques that dictate exactly where the officers go when they enter the room.

Workers new to the job, rookie cops and ambulance drivers, struggle with the mess. Their eyes reel at ripped distortions that blur a formerly human identity. Experienced death workers throw a professional switch in their brains and see the face more clearly. Their eyes methodically link dismembered limbs, realign a rictus grin, and separate identity from wreckage. Cooly. As connoisseurs. For the investigators a dead body is not so much victim as evidence, the ultimate clue to the workings of the perpetrator. Banked

The goal of an efficient society, and of our economy generally, is to satisfy people’s needs, or to satisfy as many needs as possible given the available resources. The advantage of the price system is that it produces an observable “image” of these needs. Again, recall the example of the infrared camera, which detects frequencies that are normally invisible to the eye and converts them to the visible spectrum. The system of needs, like infrared radiation, is invisible. The market takes these needs and converts them into something that is observable—prices. But whenever there are externalities, the image gets a bit skewed. Some of the needs get missed. As a result, the picture that emerges will be distorted; it may even be missing entire sections. Since this picture is what we use to determine what to produce, flaws in the image will lead us into systematic inefficiencies. We will waste resources producing stuff that we don’t really want, instead of other stuff that we do want.

I was just turning away to leave when I noticed a slight distortion in the air in the shape of a hole at the point where Blinky had disappeared. It was so faint you couldn’t see it if you were looking directly at it. You had to kind of catch it out of the corner of your eye. I put my hand in the middle of this distortion and not only did my hand vanish, but I could feel it being sucked down deeper into the hole. I yanked it out, after some effort. Then I put an eye to the hole. Same thing happened. What was going on here? I looked around, found a cat, and experimentally tossed it in. The cat disappeared, and moments later an ancient statue of the cat approving an important law appeared on the street nearby.

It could not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand—especially when a situation is fast-moving or contains soft, hard-to-quantify details, as is typically the case on the battlefield. The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek had a phrase for the kind of awareness that is hard to capture in metrics and maps: the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” Social scientists have long understood that statistical metrics are at their most pernicious when they are being used to control the world, rather than try to understand it. Economists tend to cite their colleague Charles Goodhart, who wrote in 1975: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”[12] (Or, more pithily: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) Psychologists turn to Donald T. Campbell, who around the same time explained: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”[13]

The price for ignoring or distorting the body’s messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you and, just as bad, what is safe or nourishing. Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation—from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.

How does electrolocation work, and what can we say about its representational and phenomenological qualities? Constant electric organ discharges emanating from the caudal region maintain a stable spatial voltage pattern over the skin surface. This voltage pattern changes when objects that have a resistance different from the surrounding water come within range of the signal and distort the field, resulting in changes of local electric voltages at particular skin loci. Objects can alter the stable electric discharge field in waveform and/or in amplitude, and weakly electric fish can detect both types of disruptions. These changes in local transepidermal electric current flow are recorded by the skin electroreceptors, which act as a 'retina' upon which an electric image of the object is projected. This image is then transduced, and the information is fed to regions of the brain that process higher-order features of objects. Whereas in humans the processing of higher-order features of objects take place in the cerebral cortex, in electrolocating fish these cognitive tasks are carried out in their hypertrophied cerebellum. The 'mormyrocerebellum' is so oversized that it accounts for the vast majority of the organism's total oxygen consumption, with metabolic expenditures exceeding that of any vertebrate. This, in turn, speaks to the great functional utility of electrolocation: all that brain stuff must be doing something computationally demanding and ecologically important.

Long, long before modern physics or modern psychology, in ancient Greece, the Skeptics had already noticed that Uncertainty, Indeterminacy and Relativity appear inescapable parts of human life, because what Xerox sees is never exactly what Exxon sees. Plato, Aristotle and other geniuses attempted to escape the agnosticism or Zeteticism of the Skeptics by "finding," or claiming to find, a method of Pure Abstract Reasoning that, they believed, would arrive at Pure Truth without any distortions introduced by our fallible human sense organs. Aside from a few conservatives in Chairs of Philosophy, the world now realizes that the Greek search for such Pure Truth failed; and the subsequent history of philosophy seems like a long detective story — the gradual discovery, century after century, of the numerous "lies" (unconscious prejudices) that crept into the Pure Reasoning of those bold Hellenic pioneers.

The price for ignoring or distorting the body’s messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you and, just as bad, what is safe or nourishing.

we’re the same man, but that’s an illusion: I’m pure light, as quick and weightless as desire, timeless if not immortal; he’s flesh and blood, heavy with pain and regret, a dying animal like any other.  Yet I’m fastened to him, no matter how bad he makes me look.  Even now his pain distorts my face, though all I feel is pity.

The press creates its own magnified version of an event. The more intense the feeding frenzy for exclusives, the more the story changes from reporter to reporter until what the public gets is a distorted version of the truth. It’s as if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle were at work everytime a large story unfolds in the media, so that the presence of the media itself creates, changes, and redefines the story. You always have to be wary of what the media reports because the media itself has created parts of the story.

The price for ignoring or distorting the body's messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you and, just as bad, what is safe or nourishing. Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation - from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.

The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself, becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal. Because what occurs in an interrogation room is indeed little more than a carefully staged drama, a choreographed performance that allows a detective and his suspect to find common ground where none exists. There, in a carefully controlled purgatory, the guilty proclaim their malefactions, though rarely in any form that allows for contrition or resembles an unequivocal admission.

fusiform face area with the same electrodes (fig. 6.6). Stimulating the right fusiform area led one patient to exclaim: “You just turned into someone else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy and went to the left.”18 Others reported similar distortions that bring to mind portraits painted by Francis Bacon. This didn’t happen when nearby regions were stimulated or during sham trials when Parvizi pretended to inject current. For these patients, the fusiform face area seems to be an NCC for seeing faces,19 as activity here correlates closely and systematically with seeing faces and stimulation of this region alters the perception of faces. Furthermore, damage to this region can lead to prosopagnosia or face blindness. Affected individuals are unable to recognize familiar faces, including their own.20 Faces of spouses, friends, celebrities, presidents all look alike, indistinguishable as pebbles in a riverbed. In its more severe forms, patients can’t even recognize a face as a face anymore. They perceive the distinct elements making up a face, the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but they can’t synthesize them into the unitary percept of a face. Intriguingly, these patients may still react unconsciously to familiar faces, with their autonomic system responding with an enhanced galvanic skin response. The unconscious has its own ways of detecting familiar faces.

The worst does sometimes happen. As men we have to count on that possibility, have to arm ourselves against it, and above all we have to realize that since absurdities necessarily occur, and nowadays manifest themselves with more and more forcefulness, we can prevent ourselves from being destroyed by them and can make ourselves relatively comfortable upon this earth only if we humbly include these absurdities in our thinking, reckon with the inevitable fractures and distortions of human reason when it attempts honestly to deal with reality. We have to realize that without this knowledge we are in danger of making an absolute of absurdity, of taking it “in itself,” as though it were established somewhere outside the human mind; we would then be forced to regard the absurd as an error which it was within our power to avoid; on the basis of which illusion we might find ourselves executing the whole world out of a kind of defiant morality one we undertook to try to establish a flawless rational structure, for its very flawless perfection would be its deadly mendacity and a sign of the most frightful blindness.

As the power of a radio-broadcasting station is regulated by the amount of electrical current it can utilize, so the effectiveness of a human radio depends on the degree of will power possessed by each person. All thoughts vibrate eternally in the cosmos. By deep concentration a master is able to detect the thoughts of any man, living or dead. Thoughts are universally and not individually rooted; a truth cannot be created, but only perceived. Any erroneous thought of man is a result of an imperfection, large or small, in his discernment. The goal of yoga science is to calm the mind, that without distortion it may hear the infallible counsel of the Inner Voice. Radio and television have brought the instantaneous sound and sight of remote persons to the firesides of millions: the first faint scientific intimations that man is an all-pervading spirit. Though the ego in most barbaric ways conspires to enslave him, man is not a body confined to a point in space but is essentially the omnipresent soul.