Double Adapter Quotes

But... it's a nice day today, the birds is singing, there's stuff like... kittens and stuff, and the sun is shining off the snow, bringin' the promise of spring to come, with flowers, and fresh grass, and more kittens and hot summer days an' the gentle kiss of the rain and wonderful clean things which you won't ever see if you don't give us what's in that drawer 'cos you'll burn like a torch you double-dealing twisty dried-up cheating son of a bitch!

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.

If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus,” the historian William H. McNeill has noted, “or even a bacterium—we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the very recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.

One of the most serious harms of trauma is that of loss of control. Some researchers of trauma have defined it as a state of complete helplessness in the face of an overwhelming force. Whether or not such total loss of control is constitutive of trauma, a daunting, seemingly impossible, task faced by the trauma survivor is to regain a sense of control over her or his life. Trauma survivors (rape survivors, in particular, because they are frequently blamed for their assaults) are faced with an especially intractable doubled bind: they need to know there's something they can do to avoid being similarly traumatized in future, but if there *is* such a thing, then they blame themselves for not knowing it (or doing it) at the time. They are faced with a choice between regaining control by accepting (at least some) responsibility--and hence blame--for the trauma, or feeling overwhelmed by helplessness. Whereas rape victims' self blaming has often been misunderstood as merely a self-destructive response to rape, arising out of low self-esteem, feelings of shame, or female masochism, and fueled by society's desire to blame the victim, it can also be seen as an adaptive survival strategy, if the victim has no other way of gaining control.

■​Let what you know—your known knowns—guide you but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Remember the Griffin bank crisis: no hostage-taker had killed a hostage on deadline, until he did. ■​Black Swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage: positive (the ability to give someone what they want); negative (the ability to hurt someone); and normative (using your counterpart’s norms to bring them around). ■​Work to understand the other side’s “religion.” Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That’s where Black Swans live. ■​Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double-check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners whose job is to listen between the lines. They will hear things you miss. ■​Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone they share a cultural similarity with, so dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground. ■​When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren’t. Faced with this situation, search for constraints, hidden desires, and bad information. ■​Get face time with your counterpart. Ten minutes of face time often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart’s verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments—at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

The heart and soul of adaptability – a theme throughout an ACM – will be the desired result, not the way the result is achieved. Teachers of adaptability should reject any attempt to control the type of action initiated during a mission because it is counter-productive. The ACM should instead concentrate on instilling in students the will to act, as they deem appropriate in their situations to attain a desired result. The LES should be a “double loop” system defined as “the knowledge of several different perspectives that forces the organization to clarify differences in assumptions across frameworks, rather than implicitly assuming a given set.

For comparison, we use the Mann-Whitney test to compare the two samples of 10th graders discussed earlier in this chapter. The sum of ranks for the “before” group is 69.55, and for the “one year later group,” 86.57. The test statistic is significant at p = .019, yielding the same conclusion as the independent-samples t-test, p = .011. This comparison also shows that nonparametric tests do have higher levels of significance. As mentioned earlier, the Mann-Whitney test (as a nonparametric test) does not calculate the group means; separate, descriptive analysis needs to be undertaken for that information. A nonparametric alternative to the paired-samples t-test is the Wilcoxon signed rank test. This test assigns ranks based on the absolute values of these differences (Table 12.5). The signs of the differences are retained (thus, some values are positive and others are negative). For the data in Table 12.5, there are seven positive ranks (with mean rank = 6.57) and three negative ranks (with mean rank = 3.00). The Wilcoxon signed rank test statistic is normally distributed. The Wilcoxon signed rank test statistic, Z, for a difference between these values is 1.89 (p = .059 > .05). Hence, according to this test, the differences between the before and after scores are not significant. Getting Started Calculate a t-test and a Mann-Whitney test on data of your choice. Again, nonparametric tests result in larger p-values. The paired-samples t-test finds that p = .038 < .05, providing sufficient statistical evidence to conclude that the differences are significant. It might also be noted that a doubling of the data in Table 12.5 results in finding a significant difference between the before and after scores with the Wilcoxon signed rank test, Z = 2.694, p = .007. Table 12.5 Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test The Wilcoxon signed rank test can also be adapted as a nonparametric alternative to the one-sample t-test. In that case, analysts create a second variable that, for each observation, is the test value. For example, if in Table 12.5 we wish to test whether the mean of variable “before” is different from, say, 4.0, we create a second variable with 10 observations for which each value is, say, 4.0. Then using the Wilcoxon signed rank test for the “before” variable and this new,

need to have a prostate biopsy to confirm that the cancer recurrence is local; you will also need a bone scan and CT scan or MRI of the abdomen and pelvis to rule out the possibility that cancer has spread to distant sites. The guidelines above (see What Should I Do If My PSA Comes Back After Surgery?) may one day be adapted for men who have failed radiation treatment, but the overriding principles can be useful here in identifying the likelihood of metastases. If you have a high Gleason score (8 or greater), or if the PSA level begins to rise early after radiation therapy, or if the PSA level has a rapid doubling time, it is more likely that you have metastases than a local recurrence, and in this case, you should seek systemic therapy (see chapter 13).

There are three types of teams, each of which requires different types of management and organization. The first type of team is like a pair of doubles tennis partners. It is a small team, in which each person adapts to the abilities of the other. Players have a primary responsibility, but can play many different roles. The second type of team is like a soccer or football team, in which each person has a given position, but the whole team moves together. The third team type is like a baseball team, in which all players have an assigned position and play on the team, rather than as a team. This model is akin to the traditional Detroit automaker, where each person has his or her assigned task. Organizations have to decide which type of team fits best, a decision that affects the entire organizational culture. Mixed teams don’t work; they just confuse everyone involved. Increasingly, organizations are becoming more like soccer or tennis teams, in which each member has to take more personal responsibility in making decisions. In such organizations, managers must inspire, rather command. You must fit the appropriate management style for your team type.

Ripped calluses are manly, but since they make you lose training time, try to avoid them when you do your quick lifts. It is elementary, Watson—you must gradually build up the volume of swings, cleans, and snatches to let your skin adapt. You may want to sandpaper your kettlebell’s handles, as kettlebell sport competitors do. Remove the paint and smooth out the iron. Unlike presses and other grind lifts, swings, cleans, and snatches call for a loose grip. “Hook” the handle with your fingers rather than gripping it. Try to lift in a way that minimally stretches the skin on your palm. Figure it out. Load the calluses at the bases of your fingers as little as possible; let the kettlebell handle glide from the “hook” of the fingers to the heel of the palm and back in a manner that does not pinch the skin at the bases of the fingers. Do not let the calluses get thick and rough. Russian gireviks soak their hands in hot water at night, then thin out and smooth out their calluses with a pumice stone, and finally apply an oily cream or a three-to-one mix of glycerin and ammonia. I hang my head in shame to be giving you metrosexual skin-care advice. Speaks Brett Jones, Senior RKC, who gives his hands the double abuse of kettlebell lifting and extreme gripping feats: “Go out and get Cornhuskers Lotion and use it several times a day. This lotion is unique in that it is not greasy and actually toughens and conditions your skin. At night you may want to use a product that penetrates and moisturizes in a different way. Bag Balm and other heavy (oily) lotions can be used at night and can best be absorbed if you put them on before bed and wear mittens, socks or specially designed gloves available at some health and beauty stores. [Brett, I will take your word for it.]

Like in business, the emergence of new players necessarily changes the way the game must be played. Blockbuster—the sole superpower in the movie rental business—failed to appreciate that a small company like Netflix and an emerging technology like the internet required them to reexamine their entire business model. Big publishers doubled down on old models when Amazon showed up instead of asking how they could update and upgrade their models in the face of a new digital age. And instead of asking themselves, “What do we need to do to change with the times,” taxi companies chose to sue the ridesharing companies to protect their business models instead of learning how to adapt and provide a better taxi service. Sears got so big and so rich from sending out paper catalogues for so many decades that they were too slow to adapt to the rise of big-box stores like Walmart and ecommerce. And believing itself without Rival, the behemoth that was Myspace didn’t even see Facebook coming.

Aussi ai-je décidé d'emprunter, pour intituler cet ouvrage, une formule utilisée par André Glucksmann ["La double vie de Chaperon rouge", in "Le Bien et le Mal. Lettres immorales d'Allemagne et de France", Hachette, Paris, 1997] dans un contexte tout à fait différent et l'associer ainsi à la traduction, "là où tout est pareil et rien n'est semblable" ; mais s'il me fallait la paraphraser, procédant à une adaptation outrageusement libre, j'aimerais récupérer (en essayant de la traduire) une autre belle formule qui, elle, se rapporte directement à la traduction et qui appartient à Ion Heliade Rădulescu (1802-1872), le premier président de l'Académie roumaine : la traduction ou un "acquis général, nuisible à personne". (p. 31, extrait de l'avant-propos)

The mildly venomous colubrid Chrysopelea is the flying snake of south-eastern Asia. It is up to about 1.2 metres in length, and has several arboreal adaptations, such as ridged ventral scales, and a flattened belly. However, it has taken arboreal existence even further, for it is capable of gliding through the air from tree to tree for distances as much as 100 m. When ready to launch itself, the snake extends its ribs forwards and outwards. This doubles the width and surface area of the underside, and creates an aerodynamic shape like the wing of an aeroplane. As it throws itself forwards into the air, undulations of the body apparently make it an even more efficient glider, although we are not sure exactly how.

Page 11: Yet the very fact of contact over a period of time has inevitably produced changes among the overseas Chinese. Like Chinese everywhere they have a well-ingrained cultural pattern of adaptability and flexibility. Culturally and socially this minority in Thailand has learned to accept Thai ways without, however, losing its attachment to Things Chinese. The question is whether these changes represent simply protective coloration or true identification with Thai society. It is the seemingly opportunistic and vacillating quality of their cultural and social dualism which has made the Chinese, in the opinion of many responsible Thai, only summer patriots and fair-weather citizens. In the other countries of [Southeast Asia], the colonial powers protected and encouraged minority interests, and under colonialism these groups flourished.

The topic of motivation often comes up when dealing with the issue of follow-through on plans. Many adults with ADHD may aspire to achieve a goal (e.g., exercise) or get through an unavoidable obligation (e.g., exam, paying bills), but fall prey to an apparent lack of motivation, despite their best intentions. This situation reminds us of a quote attributed to the late fitness expert, Jack LaLanne, who at the age of 93 was quoted as saying, “I’m feeling great and I still have sex almost every day. Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday . . .” Returning to the executive dysfunction view of ADHD, motivation is defined as the ability to generate an emotion about a task that promotes follow-through in the absence of immediate reward or consequence (and often in the face of some degree of discomfort in the short-term). Said differently, motivation is the ability to make yourself “feel like” doing the task when there is no pressing reason to do so. Thus, you will have to find a way to make yourself feel like exercising before you achieve the results you desire or feel like studying for a midterm exam that is still several days away. You “know” logically that these are good ideas, but it is negative feelings (including boredom) or lack of feelings about a task that undercut your attempts to get started. In fact, one of the common thinking errors exhibited by adults with ADHD when procrastinating is the magnification of emotional discomfort associated with starting a task usually coupled with a minimization of the positive feelings associated with it. Adults with ADHD experience the double whammy of having greater difficulty generating positive emotions (i.e., motivation) needed to get engaged in tasks and greater difficulty inhibiting the allure of more immediate distractions, including those that provide an escape from discomfort. In fairness, from a developmental standpoint, adults with ADHD have often experienced more than their fair share of frustrations and setbacks with regard to many important aspects of their lives. Hence, our experience has been that various life responsibilities and duties have become associated with a degree of stress and little perceived reward, which magnifies the motivational challenges already faced by ADHD adults. We have adopted the metaphor of food poisoning to illustrate how one’s learning history due to ADHD creates barriers to the pursuit of valued personal goals. Food poisoning involves ingesting some sort of tainted food. It is an adaptive response that your brain and digestive system notice the presence of a toxin in the body and react with feelings of nausea and rapid expulsion of said toxin through diarrhea, vomiting, or both. Even after you have fully recuperated and have figured out that you had food poisoning, the next time you encounter that same food item, even before it reaches your lips, the sight and smell of the food will reactivate protective feelings of nausea due to the previous association of the stimulus (i.e., the food) with illness and discomfort. You can make all the intellectual arguments about your safety, and obtain assurances that the food is untainted, but your body will have this initial aversive reaction, regardless. It takes progressive exposure to untainted morsels of the food (sometimes mixing it in with “safe” food, in extreme cases) in order to break the food poisoning association. Similarly, in the course of your efforts to establish and maintain good habits for managing ADHD, you will encounter some tasks that elicit discomfort despite knowing the value of the task at hand. Therefore, it is essential to be able to manufacture motivation, just enough of it, in order to be able to shift out of avoidance and to take a “taste” of the task that you are delaying.

L’arche J’ai construit dans mon âme inquiète et brisée Une arche – informe double à la Bible calquée – Et ce sont des troupeaux, des peuples de pensées, Soumis au ciel puissant, qui s’y sont embarqués. Il est temps que du ciel la colère s’abatte ! Une rigide pluie tend sa herse d’acier. Dans la lourde vapeur le navire se hâte Sans savoir où il va, sur les flots incliné. Et le dernier sommet des monts sombre dans l’onde. Vers quel bord, ô Seigneur, et vers quel Ararat Hors des brouillards lointains me portent l’eau profonde ? Sur la mer, un linceul de ténèbres s’abat. Ah, j’entends quelque part une âme se défaire Dans l’aigre mélopée de la pluie et des larmes. Et l’arche dans la nuit, ô Jéhovah, t’espère Qui scellera, d’un arc-en-ciel, les mers de l’âme. (Adaptation en français par Jean Rousselot) [În turburatu-mi suflet am construit o Arcă - Informa nălucire de biblic corăbier -, Și turme-ntregi de gînduri pe puntea ei se-mbarcă, Noroade-ntregi, plecate puternicului cer. E vremea să se-abată mînia Lui! O ploaie De stropi rigizi întinde zabrele de otel. Corabia aleargă… în negura greoaie, Corabia se-nclină, și-aleargă fără țel… Și cel din urmă creștet de munte se scufundă… - Spre care țărm, Stapîne, spre care Ararat Din bruma depărtării mă poartă-adînca undă? S-a coborît pe ape lințoliu-ntunecat. Aud cum se destramă un suflet undeva, Departe, în a ploii acidă melopee… E noapte-n larg… Iar Arca te așteaptă, Jehova, Pe mările din suflet să fereci curcubee. Sburătorul, 20 decembrie 1919]

PACKING CHECKLIST Light, khaki, or neutral-color clothes are universally worn on safari and were first used in Africa as camouflage by the South African Boers, and then by the British Army that fought them during the South African War. Light colors also help to deflect the harsh sun and are less likely than dark colors to attract mosquitoes. Don’t wear camouflage gear. Do wear layers of clothing that you can strip off as the sun gets hotter and put back on as the sun goes down. Smartphone or tablet to check emails, send texts, and store photos (also handy as an alarm clock and flashlight), plus an adapter. If electricity will be limited, you may wish to bring a portable charger. Three cotton T-shirts Two long-sleeve cotton shirts preferably with collars Two pairs of shorts or two skirts in summer Two pairs of long pants (three pairs in winter)—trousers that zip off at the knees are worth considering Optional: sweatshirt and sweatpants, which can double as sleepwear One smart-casual dinner outfit Underwear and socks Walking shoes or sneakers Sandals/flip-flops Bathing suit and sarong to use as a cover-up Warm padded jacket and sweater/fleece in winter Windbreaker or rain poncho Camera equipment, extra batteries or charger, and memory cards; a photographer’s vest and cargo pants are great for storage Eyeglasses and/or contact lenses, plus extras Binoculars Small flashlight Personal toiletries Malaria tablets and prescription medication Sunscreen and lip balm with SPF 30 or higher Basic medication like antihistamine cream, eye drops, headache tablets, indigestion remedies, etc. Insect repellent that is at least 20% DEET and is sweat-resistant Tissues and/or premoistened wipes/hand sanitizer Warm hat, scarf, and gloves in winter Sun hat and sunglasses (Polaroid and UV-protected ones) Documents and money (cash, credit cards, etc.). A notebook/journal and pens Travel and field guide books A couple of large white plastic garbage bags Ziplock bags to keep documents dry and protect electronics from dust

One of the key lessons to draw from Bazalgette’s sewers is that successful long-term planning needs to be based on building adaptability, flexibility, and resilience into the original design. In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand points out that the most long-lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time: They can accommodate different users or be easily extended, retrofitted, or upgraded. He draws an analogy with biology: “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”24 This is exactly where the London sewers were exemplary. By making the tunnels double the size needed at the time, Bazalgette designed long-term adaptability into the system, just as his use of the finest building materials gave the sewers enough resilience to survive over a century of constant wear and tear. Of course, we can learn about resilience not just from cases like the Victorian sewers, but from natural phenomena such as a delicate spider web that manages to survive a storm or the way sweating and shivering help regulate human body temperature.

Although adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations. An adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proximity or fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgment or the focus of analysis.

The story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of strength, of Jefferson’s adaptability and, most important, his determination to secure the territory from France, doubling the size of the country and transforming the United States into a continental power. A slower or less courageous politician might have bungled the acquisition; an overly idealistic one might have lost it by insisting on strict constitutional scruples. Jefferson, however, was neither

So before working to design the thing right, we must first be sure we’re designing the right thing. This calls for a process of diverging and converging twice. The “Double Diamond” asks us to discover many possible paths and goals before we define the problem and craft the plan; and then to develop and test prototypes before deciding upon and delivering the solution.[ 45] Figure 1-8. The Double Diamond. At the heart of design is our ability to model the world as it is and as it might be. This is powerful. A sketch or prototype can spark insights and change minds. Goals and vision may shift in a “now that I see it” moment. In recent years, business has begun to adapt these practices to strategy and planning under the aegis of Design Thinking. Post-its and prototypes engage our brains, bodies, colleagues, customers, and ecosystems in distributed cognition. Design helps us solve wicked problems by exploring paths and goals. And it works for individuals and teams, not just big business. In short, design is a great fit for planning, and its practices are the inspiration for this book.

BAKED HOT CHOCOLATE It’s crucial to use the best quality chocolate you can find. Don’t put anything in this dessert you wouldn’t eat directly. And don’t overbake. You want a delicate crust on top of a warm, silken interior. 9 ounces of dark semi-sweet chocolate, chopped 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into cubes 4 eggs 1/4 cup sugar whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to taste Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Arrange six small ovenproof mugs or custard cups in a baking pan. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a double boiler set over barely simmering water. Whisk until smooth and set aside. Whisk eggs and sugar together in a mixing bowl, then set the bowl over simmering water and stir constantly until warm to the touch. Remove from heat. Beat egg mixture with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Fold egg mixture into chocolate mixture. Spoon the batter into cups. Add enough hot water to baking pan to come halfway up sides of cups. Bake until the tops lose their glossy finish, about fifteen minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature with a scoop of ice cream or dollop of whipped cream that has been lightly sweetened and spiked with Cointreau. (Source: Adapted from a recipe by Heidi Friedlander, former pastry chef of the Cleveland bistro Moxie)

Sometimes when he would tell me those stories his eyes would fill with tears. People used to say he was sentimental, but it was because he cared. He felt everything deeply. People around here used to call a man like him ‘soft.’ ‘Maybe so,’ he used to say, ‘but I’m always hard when I have to be, you know that.’ He was full of little double meanings like that, my husband.

Then there is Roman engineering: the Roman roads, aqueducts, the Colosseum. Warfare, alas, has always been beneficial to engineering. Yet there are unmistakeable trends in the engineering of the gamgster states. In a healthy society, engineering design gets smarter and smarter; in gangster states, it gets bigger and bigger. In World War II, the democracies produced radar and split the atom; German basic research was far behind in these fields and devoted its efforts to projects like lenses so bog they could burn Britain, and bells so big that their sound would be lethal. (The lenses never got off the drawing board, and the bells, by the end of the war, would kill mice in a bath tub.) Roman engineering, too, was void of all subtlety. Roman roads ran absolutely straight; when they came to a mountain, they ran over the top of the mountain as pigheadedly as one of Stalin's frontal assaults. Greek soldiers used to adapt their camps to the terrain; but the Roman army, at the end of a days' march, would invariably set up exactly the same camp, no matter whether in the Alps or in Egypt. If the terrain did not correspond to the one and only model decreed by the military bureaucracy, so much the worse for the terrain; it was dug up until it fitted inti the Roman Empire. The Roman aqueducts were bigger than those that had been used centuries earlier in the ancient world; but they were administered with extremely poor knowledge of hydraulics. Long after Heron of Alexandria (1st Century A.D.) had designed water clocks, water turbines and two-cylinder water pumps, and had written works on these subjects, the Romans were still describing the performance of their aqueducts in terms of the quinaria, a measure of the cross-section of the flow, as if the volume of the flow did not also depend on its velocity. The same unit was used in charging users of large pipes tapping the aqueduct; the Roman engineers failed to realize that doubling the cross-section would more than double the flow of water. Heron could never have blundered like this.

biggest wins from new technology will go to the societies and firms that don’t just double down on the past but that can adapt and direct their citizens toward industries that are growing.

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment.

I was on the Big‬ ‪Island‬ of ‪Hawaii in 2015 and managed to characterize the ionizing ‪‎radiation‬ ‎levels‬ in the south of the island. ‪Mauna‬ ‪Kea‬ was the radiation hot zone with approximately a doubling of radiation levels at the Mauna Kea Visitors Center at 9,200 feet as compared to sea level. I did not venture to the summit due to the known biologically harmful environmental conditions to the sea level adapted human that exist at 13,796 feet.

Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.” “Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.