Errors Are Noticed Quotes

Some sleepers have intelligent faces even in sleep, while other faces, even intelligent ones, become very stupid in sleep and therefore ridiculous. I don't know what makes that happen; I only want to say that a laughing man, like a sleeping one, most often knows nothing about his face. A great many people don't know how to laugh at all. However, there's nothing to know here: it's a gift, and it can't be fabricated. It can only be fabricated by re-educating oneself, developing oneself for the better, and overcoming the bad instincts of one's character; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change for the better. A man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all of his innermost secrets. Even indisputably intelligent laughter is sometimes repulsive. Laughter calls first of all for sincerity, and where does one find sincerity? Laughter calls for lack of spite, but people most often laugh spitefully. Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth. A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. Note at the same time all the nuances: for instance, a man's laughter must in no case seem stupid to you, however merry and simplehearted it may be. The moment you notice the slightest trace of stupidity in someone's laughter, it undoubtedly means that the man is of limited intelligence, though he may do nothing but pour out ideas. Or if his laughter isn't stupid, but the man himself, when he laughs, for some reason suddenly seems ridiculous to you, even just slightly—know, then, that the man has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or finally, if his laughter is infectious, but for some reason still seems banal to you, know, then, that the man's nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty that you noticed in him before is either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed, and later on the man is certain to change for the worse, to take up what's 'useful' and throw his noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth.

Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

Life is like a good book; There is bound to be typos and errors in it, but the only ones that noticed them are the critics and haters.

But in the military you don't get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with. The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out. That was the military.

Deeply moved, she poured the tea while they were finishing up. They came into the kitchen to replace the cleaning things, and she handed two cups to Om. Noticing the red rose borders, he started to point out her error, "The pink one's for us," then stopped. Her face told him she was aware of it. "What?" she asked, taking the pink cup for herself, "Is something wrong?" "Nothing," his voice caught . He turned away, hoping she did not see the film of water glaze his eyes.

You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could—" "Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the papers about it." (from "The Plutonian Fire")

One must always proceed with method. I made an error of judgment asking you that question. Toeach man his own knowledge. You could tell me the details of the patient's physical appearance- nothing there would escape you. If I wanted information about the papers on the desk, Mr. Raymond would have noticed anything there was to see. To find out about the fire, I must ask the man whose business is to observe such things. - Detective Hercule Poirot to Doctor Sheppard

The healthy, dynamic, and above all else truthful personality will admit to error. It will voluntarily shed—let die—outdated perceptions, thoughts, and habits, as impediments to its further success and growth. This is the soul that will let its old beliefs burn away, often painfully, so that it can live again, and move forward, renewed. This is also the soul that will transmit what it has learned during that process of death and rebirth, so that others can be reborn along with it. Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance. Aim at something profound and noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be

A fundamental error that I have noticed within a lot of independent women, is that by default, they must succeed. If not, their self-reflection in stagnation will overcome them. In striving to succeed immediately, they have failed successfully, and have fallen into the ocean of persistence and fluctuation. But it's not all in vain, for hope is a returning daydream. Unknown to them, their opposite is merely sleeping with time, awaiting the impending song of daybreak's bell.

Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” “Chairman, allow me to interrupt you with a question,” said K., “didn’t you mention a control agency? As you describe it, the organization is such that the very thought that the control agency might fail to materialize is enough to make one ill.” “You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.

Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land. Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?" Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.

Next morning at church the pastor said our beautiful visitor {the Great Comet of 1965} meant war was coming (...). At twelve I was unsure what to make of his sweltering interpretation but noticed a strain of quiet annoyance in my stepmom's demeanor driving home. When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness has like water over smooth stones. She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman's error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.

The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred.

It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the transmission of Yellow Fever.

Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior. As a consequence, East Asians are less susceptible to what social psychologist Lee Ross labeled the “Fundamental Attribution Error” (or FAE for short).

Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because the one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting in an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual fruits but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. - But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

And I have always had an especially great desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to see my way clearly in my actions, and to go forward with confidence in this life. It is true that, so long as I merely considered the customs of other men, I found hardly anything there about which to be confident, and that I noticed there was about as much diversity as I had previously found among the opinions of philosophers. Thus the greatest profit I derived from this was that, on seeing many things that, although they seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved among other great peoples, I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason.

The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Met in Childhood… • Is satisfied with reasonable dividends of need-fulfillment in relationships. • Knows how to love unconditionally and yet tolerates no abuse or stuckness in relationships. • Changes the locus of trust from others to himself so that he receives loyalty when others show it and handles disappointment when others betray. The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Not Met in Childhood… • Exaggerates the needs so that they become insatiable or addictive. • Creates situations that reenact the original hurts and rejections, seek relationships that stimulate and maintain self-defeating beliefs rather than relationships that confront and dispel them, • Refuses to notice how abused or unhappy she is and uses the pretext of hoping for change or of coping with what is unchanging. • Lets her feelings go underground. “If the only safe thing for me was to let my feelings disappear, how can I now permit the self-exposure and vulnerability it takes to be loved?” • Repeats the childhood error of equating negative attention with love or neurotic anxiousness with solicitude. • Is afraid to receive the true love, self-disclosure, or generosity of others. In effect: cannot receive now what was not received originally.

Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: “If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.

From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster. All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.) Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

I apologize if I've rated your book but not left a review. I've noticed lately that some of my reviews are disappearing after a day or two. It may be a tech issue, might be operator error (me) but I always intend to leave at least a short comment along with a rating.

And I have always had an especially great desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to see my way clearly in my actions, and to go forward with confidence in this life. It is true that, so long as I merely considered the customs of other men, I found hardly anything there about which to be confident, and that I noticed there was about as much diversity as I had previously found among the opinions of philosophers. Thus the greatest profit I derived from this was that, on seeing many things that, although they seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved among other great peoples, I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason. But after I had spent some years thus studying in the book of the world and in trying to gain some experience, I resolved one day to study within myself too and to spend all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths that I should follow.

One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.

You may have noticed that the decomposition of system noise into level noise and pattern noise follows the same logic as the error equation in the previous chapter, which decomposed error into bias and noise. This time, the equation can be written as follows: System Noise2 = Level Noise2 + Pattern Noise2

I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups—two large beads, three small ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.” In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea. For

I have just published a revised version of my book for Kindle and it will be available soon. When it is, I will make a formal announcement. The story is the same but without the noticeable errors. The revised paperback is already available, Thank you for your patience and thanks to all who are reading "A Woman Of Courage.

One of the most intriguing ideas in the developmental sciences over the past decades is the phenomenon of the “J-shaped curve.”19 While observing children learning to master new skills in dozens of domains (math, writing, the arts), psychologists noticed a surprising pattern: as a learner struggles to master difficult new challenges, there is often an initial decline in skill. Errors are made on tasks that previously seemed easy, and the learner feels more “stupid” than ever before. This is the dip that forms the middle part of the “J.” But it turns out that the “stupid mistakes,” in retrospect, were nothing more than growth errors. Once the learner gets past the dip, performance rises rapidly to new heights.

I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good-morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!

No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits. As each year until the fall of France more and more reading matter was obtruded on people’s notice, they had to protect themselves in some way from having their whole leisure time engrossed by it. How much of the averagely interesting book is actually read nowadays by the averagely interested person? It can only be a small part, and of that small part a good deal is lost because, though the eye goes through the motions of reading, the mind does not necessarily register the sense. Even when a book is being read with the most literal attention—a fair example is proof-reading by the author, his friends and members of the publishing firm and printing house—scores of errors pass by undetected.3

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions—seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of words as if from a salt shaker. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: “Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results.” All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is “the daily Telegraph”? Is it really possible to be that unobservant? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an e-mail from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in Great Britain. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: “Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families…” In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and gotten the name of her own department wrong—this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a pediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word “children’s” twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

When, through enjoyment (or indeed through pain) which takes possession of some inner strength, the soul is gathered up round that alone, 4 it can’t, it seems, pay heed to other powers. And this refutes the error that maintains the soul ignites in us in multiples. 7 When something, therefore, that is heard or seen holds in its thrall the lower act of soul, time passes by, and we don’t notice it.

Make a claim that is directionally accurate but has a big exaggeration or factual error in it. Wait for people to notice the exaggeration or error and spend endless hours talking about how wrong it is. When you dedicate focus and energy to an idea, you remember it. And the things that have the most mental impact on you will irrationally seem as though they are high in priority, even if they are not. That’s persuasion.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, ‘Good morning.’ I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and, coming on the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near; but at that instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half-round to look for some sticking-plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.

I live, at all times, for imaginative fiction; for ambivalence, not instruction. When language serves dogma, then literature is lost. I live also, and only, for excellence. My care is not for the cult of egalitarian mediocrity that is sweeping the world today, wherein even the critics are no longer qualified to differentiate, but for literature, which you may notice I have not defined. I would say that, because of its essential ambivalence, 'literature' is: words that provoke a response; that invite the reader or listener to partake of the creative act. There can be no one meaning for a text. Even that of the writer is a but an option. "Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. "It is a paradox: yet one so important I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth." "It is one of the main errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'original form' of myth can be separated from its miraculous elements. 'Wonder is only the first glimpse of the start of philosophy,' says Plato. Aristotle is more explicit: 'The lover of myths, which are a compound of wonders, is, by his being in that very state, a lover of wisdom.' Myth encapsulates the nearest approach to absolute that words can speak.

The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him. "We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small. "When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great. "Now, the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief.

But there’s this giant deception at the foundation of their relationship, their happiness. This impure motive. There was that small mistake that the woman made, uttering the wrong number. And then the man reconstructed an entire intrigue, a big thick plot— a seduction and affair and relationship and marriage proposal, a whole life— around her error and his notice of it. Taking advantage of her lie. But does that make their relationship less real? Does that make it impossible that they genuinely love each other?

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated … has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances … and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behavior is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature, which we behold, merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you show him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stupor if an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.

The following work, in which, at the outset, nothing more was contemplated than a temporary jeu-d’esprit, was commenced in company with my brother, the late Peter Irving, Esq. Our idea was to parody a small hand-book which had recently appeared, entitled, “A Picture of New York.” Like that, our work was to begin an historical sketch; to be followed by notices of the customs, manners and institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local errors, follies and abuses with good-humored satire.

The first printing of the King James Bible in 1611 included a number of printing errors. For example, a small slip in the typesetting of the description of the interior of the tabernacle led to the following reading (Exodus 28:11). And for the north side the hangings were an hundred cubits, their pillars were twenty, and their sockets of brass twenty; the hoops of the pillars and their fillets of silver. But there were probably few who noticed, let alone cared, that the pillars really bore hooks, not hoops. This error was corrected in the 1613 reprint.

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say. The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves). To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.

Errors are even more likely when we see the world through trauma glasses. We may see a threat directed toward us personally when there is no threat. When we are mindful, we aim to notice these judgments as they happen. To wisely and skillfully navigate daily life, especially after trauma, it is quite useful to notice and set aside judgments that can fuel suffering. In doing so, we can take in our experiences more fully and objectively. As much as possible, we aim to view all experiences with an impartial or neutral attitude. This is one way to keep our rational mind working when our emotional mind would otherwise shut it down.

I was trained to sniff out weakness in my cohorts. I learned how to read body language, how to detect lies, how to use people against one another, all in order to discover where my own people had committed trespasses against the Empire. Anything from small breaches of conduct to outright treachery against the throne. I was the shadow they couldn’t shake. You put me in a base or battle station or office and they knew they were on notice. I’d scare up what they’d done like a hunter flushing prey from the brush. And I’d hurt them to earn a confession and correct the errors. Oh, it wasn’t just physical pain I caused, though that was certainly a part of it. It was emotional pain.

The sixty-story John Hancock Tower was built in Boston in the 1970s, and it was discovered to have an unexpected torsional instability. The interplay of the wind between the surrounding buildings and the tower itself was causing it to twist. Despite being designed in line with current building codes, torsional instability found a way to twist the building, and people on the top floors started feeling seasick. Once again, it was tuned mass dampers to the rescue! Lumps of lead weighing 330 tons were put in vats of oil on opposite ends of the fifty-eighth floor. Attached to the building by springs, the lead weights damp any twisting motion and keep the movement below noticeable levels.

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process. In its process of developing,

Historians have been quick to pounce on the blind spots in Grant’s report. Less noticed is that he almost immediately recanted what he wrote. As early as January 12, 1866, Carl Schurz informed his wife that “Grant feels very bad about his thoughtless move and has openly expressed regret for what he has done.”102 When Schurz encountered Grant at a soldiers’ reunion in December 1868, Grant was still more regretful, admitting that on his southern tour “I traveled as the general-in-chief and people who came to see me tried to appear to the best advantage. But I have since come to the conclusion that you were right and I was wrong.”103 Here Grant echoed a famous line Abraham Lincoln had written to him, showing he was a big enough man to confess frankly to past error. In the future, he wouldn’t pull his punches about black-white relations in the South

It staggers the imagination to wonder what the foundation thinkers of our culture would have written if they’d known that humans has lived perfectly well on this planet for millions of years without agriculture and civilization, if they’d known that agriculture and civilization are not remotely innated to humans….but here is one of the most amazing occurrences in all of human history. When the thinkers of he 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were finally compelled to admit that the entire structure of thought in our culture had been built on a profoundly important error, absolutely nothing happened. It’s hard to notice nothing happening. Everyone knows that. Readers of Sherlock Homes will remember that the remarkable thing the dog did in the night was…nothing. And this is the remarkable thing that these thinkers did: nothing. Obviously they didn’t care to do anything. They didn’t care to go back to all the foundation thinkers of our culture and ask how their work would have changed if they knew the truth about our origins.

The report is more persuasive in describing the department’s shoddy record-keeping and the lax oversight of beat cops. The failure to supervise officers’ use of force results in excessive resort to Tasers. Equally problematic is Ferguson’s practice of issuing a quasi-warrant known as a “wanted” without the requisite probable cause to believe that the target has committed a crime. (Many other departments abuse “wanteds,” too.) The municipal court, like the police department, is error-prone in its records and notice systems. Had the Justice Department blasted Ferguson’s management and training failures and left it at that, it would have been on solid footing. But the imperative to racialize the problems was overwhelming, especially given Holder’s previous statements against Ferguson and the subsequent discrediting of the Brown story. So the department trots out the usual statistical analyses with which to bootstrap a charge of “intentional discrimination” against blacks. And these statistical analyses are irredeemably deficient.

all teachers in the content-based French immersion classes they observed used recasts more than any other type of feedback. Indeed, recasts accounted for more than half of the total feedback provided in the four classes. Repetition of error was the least frequent feedback type provided. The other types of corrective feedback fell in between. Student uptake was least likely to occur after recasts and more likely to occur after clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, and repetitions. Furthermore, elicitations and metalinguistic feedback not only resulted in more uptake, they were also more likely to lead to a corrected form of the original utterance. Lyster (1998) has argued that students receiving content-based language teaching (where the emphasis is on meaning not form) are less likely to notice recasts than other forms of corrective feedback, because they may assume that the teacher is responding to the content rather than the form of their speech. Indeed, the double challenge of making the subject-matter comprehensible and enhancing knowledge of the second language itself within content-based language teaching has led Merrill Swain (1988) and others to conclude that ‘not all content teaching is necessarily good language teaching’ (p. 68). The challenges of content-based language teaching will be discussed further in Chapter 6.

responsibility—the very topic we made central in this book in Rule IV: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. That response was fascinating—and not at all predictable. Responsibility is not an easy sell. Parents have been striving forever to make their kids responsible. Society attempts the same thing, with its educational institutions, apprenticeships, volunteer organizations, and clubs. You might even consider the inculcation of responsibility the fundamental purpose of society. But something has gone wrong. We have committed an error, or a series of errors. We have spent too much time, for example (much of the last fifty years), clamoring about rights, and we are no longer asking enough of the young people we are socializing. We have been telling them for decades to demand what they are owed by society. We have been implying that the important meanings of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden. Because we have not been doing this, they have grown up looking in the wrong places. And this has left them vulnerable: vulnerable to easy answers and susceptible to the deadening force of resentment. What about the unfolding of history has left us in this position? How has this vulnerability, this susceptibility, come about?

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

Structurally, then, errors of love are similar to errors in general. Emotionally, however, they are in a league of their own: astounding, enduring, miserable, incomprehensible. True, certain other large-scale errors can rival or even dwarf them; we’ve gotten a taste of that in recent chapters. But relatively few of us will undergo, for example, the traumatic and total abandonment of a deeply held religious belief, or the wrongful identification of an assailant. By contrast, the vast majority of us will get our hearts seriously broken, quite possibly more than once. And when we do, we will experience not one but two kinds of wrongness about love. The first is a specific error about a specific person—the loss of faith in a relationship, whether it ended because our partner left us or because we grew disillusioned. But, as I’ve suggested, we will also find that we were wrong about love in a more general way: that we embraced an account of it that is manifestly implausible. The specific error might be the one that breaks our heart, but the general one noticeably compounds the heartache. A lover who is part of our very soul can’t be wrong for us, nor can we be wrong about her. A love that is eternal cannot end. And yet it does, and there we are—mired in a misery made all the more extreme by virtue of being unthinkable. We can’t do much about the specific error—the one in which we turn out to be wrong about (or wronged by) someone we once deeply loved. (In fact, this is a good example of a kind of error we can’t eliminate and shouldn’t want to.) But what about the general error? Why do we embrace a narrative of love that makes the demise of our relationships that much more shocking, humiliating, and painful? There are, after all, less romantic and more realistic narratives of love available to us: the cool biochemical one, say, where the only heroes are hormones; the implacable evolutionary one, where the communion of souls is supplanted by the transmission of genes; or just a slightly more world-weary one, where love is rewarding and worth it, but nonetheless unpredictable and possibly impermanent—Shakespeare’s wandering bark rather than his fixèd mark. Any of these would, at the very least, help brace us for the blow of love’s end. But at what price? Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world.

properly. If Vom was destruction incarnate, and Smorgaz was creation personified, then West was order in its ultimate obsessive-compulsive form. It wasn’t an easy job. He wasn’t perfect. He still hadn’t found the time to nail down the confusing jumble that humans foolishly labeled quantum physics. And once, when he’d eaten a bad hot dog and been sick in bed for a week, the result had been the ludicrousness of superstring theory. A few extra dimensions leaked through here and there at the wrong times, and the human race just couldn’t let it go. He’d never found the time to fix the error. And it’d probably work out fine in the end. Like when he’d accidentally let space-time become curved. At first it’d bugged him, but now he hardly noticed. And the humans seemed to get a kick out of it.

Anyway, zis is Austria. Now somesing else funny! Ze Austrians do not call it 'Austria.' Zey call it O-s-t-e-r-r-e-i-c-h!" and the professor wrote the letters out on the blackboard. "Zat is because zey do not know how to spell. Zey are very nice people, se Austrians, but you will notice zey are very bad spellers.

He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein, which means the Being that such particular beings have. (In English, one way of signalling the distinction is by using the capital ‘B’ for the latter.) He calls it the ‘ontological difference’ — from ‘ontology’, the study of what is. It is not an easy distinction to keep clear in one’s mind, but the ontological difference between Being and beings is extremely important to Heidegger. If we get confused between the two, we fall into errors — for example, settling down to study some science of particular entities, such as psychology or even cosmology, while thinking that we are studying Being itself. Unlike beings, Being is hard to concentrate on and it is easy to forget to think about it. But one particular entity has a more noticeable Being than others, and that is myself, because, unlike clouds and portals, I am the entity who wonders about its Being. It even turns out that I have a vague, preliminary, non-philosophical understanding of Being already — otherwise I would not have thought of asking about it. This makes me the best starting point for ontological inquiry. I am both the being whose Being is up for question and the being who sort of already knows the answer. I

Innocent III confirms this in cap. Litteras, de rest. spol. “Whatever is against conscience, paves the way to hell.” But an erroneous conscience is that which dictates what is false as though it were true. Moreover, some erroneous consciences are vincible, and some are invincible. A conscience is vincible, when it may and must be conquered by the operation, or because it notices an error, or at least hesitates about an error, and at the same time notices the obligation to conquer it, but does nothing to conquer it, as many teach (S. Anton. 2. p. tit. 5, c. 1 §5; Navarr. praelud. 9. n. 9; Salm. tr. 20. c. 14. punct. 2. n. 9; Suarez in 5. p. d. 4. sect. 8. n. 18 with Sylvius, Cajetan, communissime aliisque ex S. Thoma de Veritate, q. 15. art. 4. ad 10). Furthermore, the Salamancans (loc. cit.) and Alphonse de Castro (tr. 2, de pecc. d. 1. p. 15. n. 6, with Azor, Suarez, Vasquez, Bonac. etc. and Wigandt de consc. ex 1. q. 5, n. 7), teach that it is not necessary to apply oneself to the utmost so as to conquer error, rather it is sufficient to do what is common and ordinary. On the other hand, an invincible conscience is such that cannot be morally conquered, since no thought or doubt comes into the mind of the one who acts, nor even confusion while he acts, or when he considers the cause of the action, as it is explained in greater length in the Treatise On sins (book 2) where it is argued on the knowledge that is required for sin.

Elliot opened the passenger door. He picked up the box and plunked it firmly on the warm hood of the truck. “What kind of person keeps their dogs on somebody else’s property?” He watched her face change. Watched all the fight drain out of her. It might have been a harsh thing to say, but he hadn’t meant to hurt or upset her. He had simply made an error. She had presented herself to him as invincible, and he had made the mistake of believing her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and for a second she looked as though she might cry. “I thought the place was abandoned. I didn’t expect anybody would notice or care.” “I guess we can pin that on me. I haven’t come up here in years.

In avowedly “Christian” countries like Great Britain and the U.S.A., the churches regulate the pulse of the nation. They act as the “salt” upon the corporate body, and when their ways please the Lord, He gives them favour in the eyes of those round about them. When the Holy Spirit is unhindered His power is manifested, not only in calling out the elect, but in subduing sin in the non-elect and by causing the machine of the State to support godliness, as was more or less noticeably the case a hundred years ago. But when error comes into the churches and discipline is relaxed, the Spirit is grieved and His power is withheld, and the evil effects of this become more and more apparent in the country by a rising tide of lawlessness. If the churches persist in a downward course, then the Spirit is quenched and “Ichabod” is written over them, as is the case today. Then it is that the restraining hand of God is removed, and an orgy of licentiousness comes in. Then it is the government becomes an empty title, for those in power have no power except what the people have delegated to them, and therefore they act in accord with the depraved desires of the masses. This, then, is ever the order—turning from the true God, turning to false gods, and then the disturbance of the peace—either social revolution or international war.

The water harmed him. Soon after Anyanwu had revealed herself, he began to grow ill. He became dizzy. His head hurt him. He said he thought he would vomit if he did not leave the confinement of the small room. Anyanwu took him out on deck where the air was fresh and cooler. But even there, the gentle rocking of the ship seemed to bother him— and began to bother her. She began to feel ill. She seized on the feeling at once, examining it. There was drowsiness, dizziness, and a sudden cold sweat. She closed her eyes, and while Okoye vomited into the water, she went over her body carefully. She discovered that there was a wrongness, a kind of imbalance deep within her ears. It was a tiny disturbance, but she knew her body well enough to notice the smallest change. For a moment, she observed this change with interest. Clearly, if she did nothing to correct it, her sickness would grow worse; she would join Okoye, vomiting over the rail. But no. She focused on her inner ears and remembered perfection there, remembered organs and fluids and pressures in balance, their wrongness righted. Remembering and correcting were one gesture; balance was restored. It had taken her much practice— and much pain— to learn such ease of control. Every change she made in her body had to be understood and visualized. If she was sick or injured, she could not simply wish to be well. She could be killed as easily as anyone else if her body was damaged in some way she could not understand quickly enough to repair. Thus, she had spent much of her long life learning the diseases, disorders, and injuries that she could suffer— learning them often by inflicting mild versions of them on herself, then slowly, painfully, by trial and error, coming to understand exactly what was wrong and how to impress healing. Thus, when her enemies came to kill her, she knew more about surviving than they did about killing.

Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It's not that no position is correct; it's that no position is correct for long. We're perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in--to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever; to find an agenda and stick with it.

But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem. The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.

But in the military you don’t get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with. The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out. That was the military. These teachers were all the kind of people who thrived in that environment. And they were selecting their favorite students based on precisely that same screwed-up sense of priorities.

because the Japanese learners’ attention was regularly drawn to form, they were primed to notice the corrective function of recasts. In the more meaning-oriented French immersion classes, however, recasts were less likely to signal to the learner that the teacher was responding to a language error. Thus is likely that learners assumed that the teachers’ recast was simply a confirmation of what they had said.

In plain English, an assert statement says, “I assert that this condition holds true, and if not, there is a bug somewhere in the program.” Unlike exceptions, your code should not handle assert statements with try and except; if an assert fails, your program should crash. By failing fast like this, you shorten the time between the original cause of the bug and when you first notice the bug. This will reduce the amount of code you will have to check before finding the code that’s causing the bug. Assertions are for programmer errors, not user errors. For errors that can be recovered from (such as a file not being found or the user entering invalid data), raise an exception instead of detecting it with an assert statement.

According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.

My walk to Alex’s study is like the green mile. I wonder what he’s going to say. This isn’t going to be fun. I step inside his study, but no one announces me, and he doesn’t notice. So I just stare. He’s writing something. With a quill and ink. The well is sitting next to his right hand. He’s so intent on whatever he’s writing he keeps at it for thirty seconds before he sees me. Long enough for me to see the way he narrows his eyes when he’s concentrating and the way he purses his lips. Long enough for me to wonder what it would be like to kiss him. Oh God, where did that come from? I hate him. Hate him. There’s no way I could possibly want to kiss him. He looks up at that instant, and I do my best to just smile right at him and not give away my thoughts. “Please sit,” he says, rising. I nod and sit down in the same fancy chair as before. The door stays open. I sit as erect as possible, my hands in my lap, my ankles crossed beneath me. Victoria must be rubbing off on me. Alex comes around to the front of his desk and rests on it, crossing one ankle over the other as he leans back. “What you did was overstepping your bounds.” I clench my teeth, hard, to stop from snapping back. I have to see where he’s going with this before I get angry. “You went behind my back and orchestrated one of the most ill-planned, riskiest schemes I’ve ever seen. I am shocked.” “But--” He puts his hand up to silence me. “I won’t tell you what I had to do to convince her father to consent to the new arrangement. You are lucky Mr. Rallsmouth will have the means necessary to support Miss Emily, as she will not be receiving a thing from her father from here on out.” All I hear is convince her father. So it worked?” A grin spreads across my features and I jump to my feet. “She’s going to marry Mr. Rallsmouth?” Alex pushes off the desk behind him and stands in front of me. “Have you not heard a word I said? You made grievous errors of judgment. You--” “But I was right! And thanks to me, she’s going to marry the love of her life!” He’s standing right in front of me, inches away. “You were not right! You interfered and it was not your place!” I clench my fists as my anger flares to match his. “You think nothing is my place because I’m some lowly, untitled girl! But someone had to do it, and you didn’t care to!” “You should not have gotten involved!” he growls. “You should not have forced me to!” I say, jabbing my finger into his chest. “You should have been there for her when she needed you!” In an instant, he closes the gap between us. His lips hit mine so fast I can’t even close my eyes. His hands find a place on either side of my face and pull me close, and for two-point-five seconds, I’m lost somewhere between closing my eyes and standing there, frozen. Somehow the eyes win out and I shut them, and my knees start to buckle as I press my lips into to his. I stop breathing and grip his sleeves with both hands to keep from falling straight over. His lips are warm and soft and… And then I realize what’s going on. Who I’m kissing. You’re not a lady, he’s said. It stings as much now as it did the moment he said it. He thinks I’m unworthy. What am I doing? I reel back and knock into the wall with a loud crash that makes him jerk his eyes open. “I, uh…” I stutter, then spin around so fast my skirts twist around my legs and I have to wait for them to swing around again before dashing out of the room.

And these fancies affect not only dogmas, but also simple notions. 46. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all other things to support and agree with it. And though there is a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet it either neglects and despises these, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. And therefore it was a good answer that was made by one who, when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods; “Yes,” he asked again, “but where are the pictures of those who were drowned after their vows?” And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like, in which men, having a delight in such vanities, notice the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much more often, neglect and pass them by. But this mischief insinuates itself with much more subtlety into philosophy and the sciences, in which the first conclusion colors and brings into conformity with itself all that come after, though far sounder and better. Besides, independently of that delight and vanity which I have described, it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives, whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike. Indeed, in the establishment of any true axiom, the negative instance is the more forcible of the two.

When all these data were collected they came into the hands of Kepler,* who then tried to analyse what kind of motion the planets made around the sun. And he did this by a method of trial and error. At one stage he thought he had it; he figured out that they went round the sun in circles with the sun off centre. Then Kepler noticed that one planet, I think it was Mars, was eight minutes of arc off, and he decided this was too big for Tycho Brahe to have made an error, and that this was not the right answer. So because of the precision of the experiments he was able to proceed to another trial and ultimately found out three things.

Dedication Although she is no longer with us, I would like to thank Mrs. Fuller, my high school English teacher. Believe it or not, I have a variety of learning disabilities which makes it difficult for me to spell words correctly or consistently. This issue got me placed, briefly, in the Special Learning track at school. It was Mrs. Fuller who noticed that I was carrying Lord of the Rings around with me one day and asked why I was carrying a book for someone else. Obviously someone as disabled as me could not possibly be reading it herself. Ha! When I demonstrated I was able to READ even if I couldn't write she had me bounced back to the regular classes. Even though the rules of English Lit. required her to mark me down for each and every grammatical error and spelling mistake she would write, in some amazement I remember, how impressed she was with the breadth and comprehensive nature of my imagination. Many years later I still remember her telling me to put the story down on paper somehow. The publishers will hire someone to fix the little things. It was the story that counted. So, Hi to Mrs Fuller and all her ilk. Thank you from a C+ student.

Pat and I felt rather insignificant in a throng that included not only England’s most important, famous, and titled citizens but also most of western Europe’s royalty and heads of state from all over the world. The marriage of the heir to the English throne was very much a grand state occasion, in contrast to the ball, which had been a private celebration. The relative intimacy of the ball and the chance to visit with Diana made the party the more dazzling experience for us that week. Nonetheless, our spirits were buoyed by the happy fact that we actually knew the bride. Given our lack of social or political stature, Pat and I had joked that our assigned seats were likely to be at the very back of the nave and behind a pillar. Silently, we gave each other wide-eyed looks of surprise as the usher led us slowly up and up the center aisle to seats under the famous crossing dome, less than a dozen rows from the very front of the nave. We were floored! We would have an unobstructed view of the ceremony taking place on the dais on the front edge of the choir. As we entered our row to the left, we noticed Mrs. Thatcher, somber in dark blue, on the aisle in the same row to the right. Once again, I regretted my timidity two nights earlier. Pat and I couldn’t understand how we had ended up so near to the front of the cathedral. We assumed some error had been made, but were grateful for the mistake. Years later, when I was in London for Diana’s funeral, I learned that she had been allowed only one hundred personal invitations to her own wedding. We must have been in that small group, fortunately placed near the front of the church. As we waited almost breathlessly for the ceremony to being, Pat and I gazed discreetly at our splendid surroundings and the other guests privileged to be inside the cathedral. Once again, we didn’t know a soul and we would only see Diana from a distance today.

The general principle is called passive ranging. Imagine you and a friend who lives far away each possess highly accurate synchronized clocks. In addition to your clock, you have a live video feed showing the face of your friend’s clock. You notice, from looking at the feed, that your friend’s clock is just slightly off from yours. What does this tell you? Perhaps one of your clocks is malfunctioning. But if you can rule out that error, and know with absolute confidence that both clocks are working perfectly, this discrepancy becomes information. The lag is caused by the time required for the image of your friend’s clock, traveling at the speed of light, to reach you. The speed of light is constant and stable. Your clocks are constant and stable. The lag is directly related to the distance between you and your friend. You now have tools in place for a satellite-based passive positioning system.

Given our lack of social or political stature, Pat and I had joked that our assigned seats were likely to be at the very back of the nave and behind a pillar. Silently, we gave each other wide-eyed looks of surprise as the usher led us slowly up and up the center aisle to seats under the famous crossing dome, less than a dozen rows from the very front of the nave. We were floored! We would have an unobstructed view of the ceremony taking place on the dais on the front edge of the choir. As we entered our row to the left, we noticed Mrs. Thatcher, somber in dark blue, on the aisle in the same row to the right. Once again, I regretted my timidity two nights earlier. Pat and I couldn’t understand how we had ended up so near to the front of the cathedral. We assumed some error had been made, but were grateful for the mistake. Years later, when I was in London for Diana’s funeral, I learned that she had been allowed only one hundred personal invitations to her own wedding. We must have been in that small group, fortunately placed near the front of the church.

Among Christians in North America today, I’ve noticed a tendency to err in one of two extremes when it comes to the believer’s success in business. The first error is that wealth is evil, and if I work hard and, as a result, build some personal wealth, then I’m somehow evil too. It doesn’t matter how I built that wealth. It doesn’t matter what I choose to do with that wealth. All that matters is that wealth—financial success in business or at home—is morally wrong. The

Over the past year, as I have been working with the global tax-accounting firm KPMG to help their tax auditors and managers become happier, I began to realize that many of the employees were suffering from an unfortunate problem. Many of them had to spend 8 to 14 hours a day scanning tax forms for errors, and as they did, their brains were becoming wired to look for mistakes. This made them very good at their jobs, but they were getting so expert at seeing errors and potential pitfalls that this habit started to spill over into other areas of their lives. Like the Tetris players who suddenly saw those blocks everywhere, these accountants experienced each day as a tax audit, always scanning the world for the worst. As you can imagine, this was no picnic, and what’s more, it was undermining their relationships at work and at home. In performance reviews, they noticed only the faults of their team members, never the strengths. When they went home to their families, they noticed only the C’s on their kids’ report cards, never the A’s. When they ate at restaurants, they could only notice that the potatoes were underdone—never that the steak was cooked perfectly. One tax auditor confided that he had been very depressed over the past quarter. As we discussed why, he mentioned in passing that one day during a break at work he had made an Excel spreadsheet listing all the mistakes his wife had made over the past six weeks. Imagine the reaction of his wife (or soon to be ex wife) when he brought that list of faults home in an attempt to make things better. Tax auditors are far from the only ones who get stuck in this

Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come… saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.’ For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.” 2 Peter 3:3-6   Word Faith Movement In 1 Timothy 6, Paul says it is an error to assume godliness is a means of financial gain. Today this manifests as the “Word Faith Movement” and the “Prosperity Doctrine.”   “…men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain.” 1 Timothy 6:5   Received Text We have been told by the ancient church fathers

I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I won’t notice. But the thing is, I’m always paying attention to you, Jackie. It’s like—you’re gravity and I’m just a little blip on your radar.

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.

Read this simple analogy and see if an alternative to the judging process doesn’t begin to emerge. When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process. In its process of developing, our tennis game gains a great deal from errors. Even slumps are part of the process. They are not “bad” events, but they seem to endure endlessly as long as we call them bad and identify with them. Like a good gardener who knows when the soil needs alkali and when acid, the competent tennis pro should be able to help the development of your game.

Often, no matter how careful you tried to be, sheer exhaustion would lead to errors that weren’t caught until it was too late. Sometimes it was due to what we called the F9 mistake. Back then, computers were very slow, so you didn’t want to wait for the spreadsheet program to recalculate automatically every time you made a change. You would instead turn off that feature, but then you needed to be careful to remember to hit F9 at the end, which would trigger the recalculation of data throughout the model. There were always stories about analysts who made a bunch of changes and then forgot to hit F9, printing the books with faulty numbers. They might realize during the client presentation, or perhaps after the meeting, that the wrong data had been utilized. The models were so complicated that usually no one would notice, but people were making big decisions based on erroneous information. How many deals were done, we wondered, or people laid off because some sleep-deprived analyst got a model wrong? Steve forgot to hit F9; ten thousand people got fired.

IT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times. Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. At first, he had been only fascinated. He had never seen aircraft so close, for it was against the rules for Pilots to fly over the community. Occasionally, when supplies were delivered by cargo planes to the landing field across the river, the children rode their bicycles to the riverbank and watched, intrigued, the unloading and then the takeoff directed to the west, always away from the community. But the aircraft a year ago had been different. It was not a squat, fat-bellied cargo plane but a needle-nosed single-pilot jet. Jonas, looking around anxiously, had seen others—adults as well as children—stop what they were doing and wait, confused, for an explanation of the frightening event. Then all of the citizens had been ordered to go into the nearest building and stay there. IMMEDIATELY, the rasping voice through the speakers had said. LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES WHERE THEY ARE. Instantly, obediently, Jonas had dropped his bike on its side on the path behind his family’s dwelling. He had run indoors and stayed there, alone. His parents were both at work, and his little sister, Lily, was at the Childcare Center where she spent her after-school hours. Looking through the front window, he had seen no people: none of the busy afternoon crew of Street Cleaners, Landscape Workers, and Food Delivery people who usually populated the community at that time of day. He saw only the abandoned bikes here and there on their sides; an upturned wheel on one was still revolving slowly. He had been frightened then. The sense of his own community silent, waiting, had made his stomach churn. He had trembled. But it had been nothing. Within minutes the speakers had crackled again, and the voice, reassuring now and less urgent, had explained that a Pilot-in-Training had misread his navigational instructions and made a wrong turn. Desperately the Pilot had been trying to make his way back before his error was noticed. NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED, the voice had said, followed by silence. There was an ironic tone to that final message, as if the Speaker found it amusing; and Jonas had smiled a little, though he knew what a grim statement it had been. For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.

You may or may not have noticed an overall degradation of the language, and a proliferation of errors of spelling and grammar in even the most official documents?

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them.

First error: Freud failed to notice that sins of omission contributed to mental illness as much as, or more than, the sins of commission, listed above, that constitute repression. In doing so, he merely thought in the typical manner. People generally believe that actively doing something bad (that is the sin of commission) is, on average, worse than passively not doing something good (that is the sin of omission).

Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0 One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder. You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book. The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do. Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used. “You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.” In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors. I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line. “You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.” At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M. “Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.” In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.” A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.” About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class. “Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.” I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.

It was true that normal people couldn’t hear Gaspode speak, because dogs don’t speak. It’s a well-known fact. It’s well known at the organic level, like a lot of other well-known facts which overrule the observations of the senses. This is because if people went around noticing everything that was going on all the time, no one would ever get anything done.8 Besides, almost all dogs don’t talk. Ones that do are merely a statistical error, and can therefore be ignored.

Notice your own dark wood of error symptoms even when they’re very slight—a touch of irritation here, a wave of fatigue there. Immediately address any level of suffering in yourself. Even a slight drift off course can have serious consequences as your fractal gets bigger.

We?” Mr. Newton asks, and I cringe at the error. I now sound even more insane, like I have an imagined equipage accompanying me. “My fiancée and I.” “Good Lord, you’re engaged?” He presses a hand to his forehead with a laugh. “I feel so old.” He smiles again, and it is so sincerely kind that it has the adverse effect entirely and I feel my eyes well up. I look to the side quickly, like there’s anything subtle in a sudden head whip. If he notices, Mr. Newton is too kind to comment.

As a rule, the people who call themselves liberals or democrats are very glad if they can point to evidence that the number of people in a particular region on earth is increasing tremendously. An increase in the population is something which is very much desired, especially by politically minded democratic and liberal people, and also by people who think that they are free thinkers and intellectuals. Now first of all this is not quite correct, because the statistics are based on errors; people usually look at one part of the earth and they don't realize that the other parts of the earth were more densely populated in previous times than they are today. It is not quite correct; however, on the whole it is correct in the sense that there is a kind of a surplus of human beings who are already appearing in our time who have no egos, who are not really human. This is a terrible truth. They walk around and are not incarnations of an ego; they enter into the physical line of heredity and receive an etheric body and an astral body. In a certain way they are equipped with an Ahrimanic consciousness, and they look human if one doesn't look too closely, but they are not human beings in the full sense of the word. This is a terrible truth, which is present, it's a truth, and when the Apocalypticer speaks about the plague of locusts during the trumpets epoch he is referring directly to human beings. Here again one can see how good the Apocalypticer's vision is, for such men in their astral body look exactly the way the Apocalypticer describes them — like etheric locusts with human faces. One definitely has to think about such supersensible things in this way, and priests must know about such things. For a priest is a minister. Hence he must also be able to find words for everything that happens in such a soul. They're not always bad souls; they can just be souls who get to the soul stage but are lacking an ego. One will certainly realize this when one runs into these human beings. A priest has to know this, for after all there is fellowship among men with regard to such matters. People with normal souls suffer through their association with such persons who really go through the world like human locusts. The question can and must arise: How should one behave towards such human beings? It is often very difficult to relate to such people because they feel things deeply, they can feel things very deeply, but one notices that there is no real individuality in them. However, one must of course take care to keep the fact that they have no individualities from them, otherwise insanity will necessarily result. But even though one has to conceal this from them, it's a question of arranging things for such souls — after all they are souls, even though they're not spirits — in such a way that these people can develop in the company of others, that they can make connections with others and go along with them, as it were. These human beings display the nature and essence of human beings fairly closely until their 20th year. The intellectual or mind soul only emerges around age 20, and this makes it possible for the ego to live out its life on earth.

Did they all escape?” Steve asked. “How did it happen?” There were layers to Steve’s tone. Perhaps all Ben heard were the words his father said and the flat concern he exhibited. But Abby was primed to notice things you only saw after you spent years with someone. How he stressed the word all, as if her mistake wasn’t just a momentary error but a monumental lapse in judgment. And that question “How did it happen?” laced with such incredulous amazement, as if in the world Steve inhabited, such a thing was almost physically impossible.

Noticing other people’s faults arises from dissatisfaction with ourselves. Often, in criticizing our neighbour, we fall into making the same error for which we have just criticized someone else. Those people who are not concerned about the salvation of their soul and who do not attempt to improve themselves can easily fall into temptation and be seduced into following the example of others. From Pious Thoughts

This feeling of irritability and alienation meant I was malleable. Have you ever tried to argue with someone who doesn’t want anything from you? It’s hard. Have you ever noticed in a row with someone that no longer loves you that you have no recourse? No tools with which to bargain. If you stroll up to a stranger and tell them that unless they comply with your demands they’ll never see you again, it’s unlikely that they’ll fling themselves at your feet and beg you not to go. They’ll just wander off. When people are content, they are difficult to maneuver. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies. My intention in writing this book is to make you feel better, to offer you a solution to the way you feel. I am confident that this is necessary. When do you ever meet people that are happy? Genuinely happy? Only children, the mentally ill, and daytime television presenters. My belief is that it is possible to feel happier, because I feel better than I used to. I am beginning to understand where the solution lies, primarily because of an exhausting process of trial and mostly error. My qualification to write a book on how to change yourself and change the world is not that I’m better than you, it’s that I’m worse. Not that I’m smarter, but that I’m dumber: I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. My only quality has been an unwitting momentum, a willingness to wade through the static dissatisfaction that has been piped into my mind from the moment I learned language. What if that feeling of inadequacy, isolation, and anxiety isn’t just me? What if it isn’t internally engineered but the result of concerted effort, the product of a transmission? An ongoing broadcast from the powerful that has colonized my mind? Who is it in here, inside your mind, reading these words, feeling that fear? Is there an awareness, an exempt presence, gleaming behind the waterfall of words that commentate on every event, label every object, judge everyone you come into contact with? And is there another way to feel? Is it possible to be in this world and feel another way? Can you conceive, even for a moment, of a species similar to us but a little more evolved, that have transcended the idea that solutions to the way we feel can be externally acquired? What would that look like? How would that feel—to be liberated from the bureaucracy of managing your recalcitrant mind. Is it possible that there is a conspiracy to make us feel this way? If we were cops right now, we’d look for a motive. If our peace of mind, our God-given right to live in harmony with our environment and one another, has been murdered, who are the prime suspects? Well, who has a motive?

However, it was not until the sixteenth century that due notice was taken of this fact by Pope Gregory, whose experts had determined that the accumulated error of the Julian calendar amounted by that time to about ten days. Consequently, in 1582, Gregory decreed that the day which followed October 4, 1582, would not be October 5 but rather October 15.

Watch a baby struggle to sit up, or a toddler learn to walk: you’ll see one error after another, failure after failure, a lot of challenge exceeding skill, a lot of concentration, a lot of feedback, a lot of learning. Emotionally? Well, they’re too young to ask, but very young children don’t seem tortured while they’re trying to do things they can’t yet do. And then . . . something changes. According to Elena and Deborah, around the time children enter kindergarten, they begin to notice that their mistakes inspire certain reactions in grown-ups. What do we do? We frown. Our cheeks flush a bit. We rush over to our little ones to point out that they’ve done something wrong. And what’s the lesson we’re teaching? Embarrassment. Fear. Shame.

Always notice errors,But never realise them that they did,nor we noticed

The invention of the Audion sounds like a classic story of ingenuity and persistence: a maverick inventor holed up in his bedroom lab notices a striking pattern and tinkers with it for years as a slow hunch, until he hits upon a contraption that changes the world. But telling the story that way misses one crucial fact: that at almost every step of the way, de Forest was flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The Audion was not so much an invention as it was the steady, persistent accumulation of error. The strange communication between the spark gap transmitter and the Wersbach gas burner flame turned out to have nothing to do with the electromagnetic spectrum. (The flame was responding to ordinary sound waves emitted by the spark gap transmitter.) But because de Forest had begun with this erroneous notion that the gas flame was detecting the radio signals, all his iterations of the Audion involved some low-pressure gas inside the device, which severely limited their reliability. It took another decade for researchers at General Electric and other firms to realize that the triode performed far more effectively in a true vacuum. (Hence the term “vacuum tube.”) Even de Forest himself willingly admitted that he didn’t understand the device he had invented. “I didn’t know why it worked,” he remarked. “It just did.

I fill Grant in on my boring day of bids, the embarrassment of the staff meeting where Murph called me out for signing off on the Rick Bayless restaurant bathrooms without noticing that we installed the women's room door on the men's bathroom. "Apparently our little Anneke can pee in a urinal with no problem, so it didn't occur to her that the other ladies might not have such great aim." This was received with a roomful of laughter, and Liam jumped right in. "Well, she does have bigger balls than you, Murph." It took five minutes before everyone stopped laughing and poking fun, and I sat there smiling and chuckling as if it didn't matter. And then I said that my balls were perfectly delicate and ladylike, but my dick was definitely bigger than Murph's, and the room went totally silent in that way where you can almost hear the needle scratching violently across the record, and he glared at me and curtly told me to get the hell over there and fix it and apologize to Rick for the error. Lucky for me, Rick Bayless is a very kind gent, and pals with Grant, so we laughed about it and he made a delicious torta that he has been experimenting with and we split it and talked about Grant's new place, and he sent me off with a bag of warm churros, so the day was somewhat saved.

Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented colapse. They were getting depressed.

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The statement that the essence of the human being consists in being-inthe-world likewise contains no decision aboutwhether the human being in a theologico-metaphysical sense is merely a this-worldly or an other-worldly Creature. 115th the existential determination of the essence of the human being, therefore, nothing is decided about the "existence of God" or his "nonbeing," no more than about the possibility or impossibility of gods. Thus it is not only rash hut also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of the human being from the relation of his essence to the mth of being is atheism. And what is more, this arbitrary classification betrays a lack of careful reading. No one bothers to notice that in my essay "On the Essence of Ground" (1929) the following appears (,,, 2~, note I): "Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as beingin-the-world no decision, whether positive or neptive, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumi- .,tion of transcendence we first achieve nn adeqrcnte concept of Dnsein, with respect to which it can now he asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered." If we think about this remark too quickly, as is usually the case, we will declare that such a philosophy does not decide either for or against the existence of God. It remains stalled in indifference. ~hus it is unconcerned with the religious question. Such indifferentism falls prey to nihilism. Rut does the foregoing observation teach indifferentism? Why then are particular words in the note italicized - and not just random ones? For no other reason than to indicate that the thinking that thinks from the question concerning the uuth of being questions more primordially than metaphysics can. Only from the truthofbeing can the essence of the holy he thought. [I~z] Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to he thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word "God" is to signify. Or should we not first be able to hear and understand all these words carefully if we are to be permirted as human beings, that is, as eksistent creatures, to experience a relation of God to human beings? How can the human being at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorously whether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of the holy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of being is not cleared and in its clearing is near to humans. Perhaps what is distinctive about this world-epoch consists in the closure of the dimension of the hale [des Heilen]. Perhaps that is the sole malignancy [Unheil]. But with this reference the thinking that points toward the truth of I)eing as what is to be thought has in no way decided in favor of theism. It can he theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude, hutoutofrespect forthe boundaries that have heen set forthinking as such, indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought, 1)). the truth of being. Insofar as thinking limits itself to its task it tlirects the human being at the present moment of the world's destiny into the primordial dimension of his historical abode.

If our leg or arm offend us, we covet by all means possible to redress it; and if we labour of a bodily disease, we send for a physician; but for the diseases of the mind, we take no notice of them. Lust harrows us on the one side; envy, anger, ambition on the other. We are torn in pieces by our passions, as so many wild horses, one in disposition, another in habit; one is melancholy, another mad, and which of us all seeks for help, doth acknowledge his error, or knows he is sick? As that stupid fellow put out the candle because the biting fleas should not find him, he shrouds himself in an unknown habit, borrowed titles, because nobody should discern him. Every man thinks with himself, Egomet videor mihi sanus [I regard myself as sane], I am well, I am wise, and laughs at others.