Eureka Day Quotes

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminate in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself.

Occasionally the poster pictures a pair of cyclists; and then one grasps the fact how much superior for purposes of flirtation is the modern bicycle to the old-fashioned parlour or the played-out garden gate. He and she mount their bicycles, being careful, of course, that such are of the right make. After that they have nothing to think about but the old sweet tale. Down shady lanes, through busy towns on market days, merrily roll the wheels of the “Bermondsey Company’s Bottom Bracket Britain’s Best,” or of the “Camberwell Company’s Jointless Eureka.” They need no pedalling; they require no guiding. Give them their heads, and tell them what time you want to get home, and that is all they ask. While Edwin leans from his saddle to whisper the dear old nothings in Angelina’s ear, while Angelina’s face, to hide its blushes, is turned towards the horizon at the back, the magic bicycles pursue their even course.

The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penrose had shown that once a dying star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a singularity, that is a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star from collapsing under its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. I realised that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where space–time had a beginning. A eureka moment came in 1970, a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed one evening, which my disability made a slow process, I realised that I could apply to black holes the casual structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. If general relativity is correct and the energy density is positive, the surface area of the event horizon—the boundary of a black hole—has the property that it always increases when additional matter or radiation falls into it. Moreover, if two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon around the resulting black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the event horizons around the original black holes.

Drinkers think they are trying to escape, but really they are trying to overcome a mental disorder they didn’t know they had.” Eureka!—someone understands me. But reading that was both wonderful and horrible. It meant I wasn’t alone—there were others who thought like me—but it also meant I was an alcoholic and would have to quit drinking one day at a time, for the rest of my life. How was I ever going to have fun again?

Mabel went on, and you Petites Cendres, you haven’t forgotten we’re throwing a party for your Doctor Dieudonné, oh yes, soon as he gets back, the entire Black Ancestral Choir’s going to celebrate Dieudonné, man of God taking care of the poor and never asking for one cent, why did he have to go away said Petites Cendres, carefree in the comfort of his bed, wasn’t his clinic enough, he mumbled into the dishevelled folds of his sloth, I mean why go volunteer there when we’re holding a party for him right here, Mabel’s singsong voice cut in, going from deep to nasal, he’s getting the town’s medal of honour for doctoring all you lazy layabouts and lost souls, and running two hospitals and a hospice, our very own choir director’s going to give him his plaque with those same fingers and long thin red nails of hers, the ideal man, says the doctor, is not one who piles up money but one who saves lives, why he’s even helped our Ancestral Choir a whole lot too, he’s going to need a nice black tuxedo, just what he hates, and Eureka, the head of the choir, will be so proud that day when Reverend Ézéchielle invites us all to sing in her church,

Here’s another thing—I can’t get any cell phone reception here. I should let my family know I’m here safely. More or less.” “The pines are too tall, the mountains too steep. Use the land line—and don’t worry about the long distance cost. You have to be in touch with your family. Who is your family?” “Just an older married sister in Colorado Springs. She and her husband put up a collective and huge fuss about this—as if I was going into the Peace Corps or something. I should’ve listened.” “There will be a lot of people around here glad you didn’t,” he said. “I’m stubborn that way.” He smiled appreciatively. It made her instantly think, Don’t get any ideas, buster. I’m married to someone. Just because he isn’t here, doesn’t mean it’s over. However, there was something about a guy—at least six foot two and two hundred pounds of rock-hard muscle—holding a newborn with gentle deftness and skill. Then she saw him lower his lips to the baby’s head and inhale her scent, and some of the ice around Mel’s broken heart started to melt. “I’m going into Eureka today for supplies,” he said. “Need anything?” “Disposable diapers. Newborn. And since you know everyone, could you ask around if anyone can help out with the baby? Either full-time, part-time, whatever. It would be better for her to be in a family home than here at Doc’s with me.” “Besides,” he said, “you want to get out of here.” “I’ll help out with the baby for a couple of days, but I don’t want to stretch it out. I can’t stay here, Jack.” “I’ll ask around,” he said. And decided he might just forget to do that. Because, yes, she could. *

Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.

My Top Eureka Moments: Focusing today is hard…really hard. But it can be learned. It can become a habit. Systems, processes, and routines trump willpower. Letting something go is sometimes the best way to complete it. A not-to-do list is more important than your to-do list. To attain knowledge add things every day; to obtain wisdom subtract things every day. The difference between successful people and very successful people is very successful people say no to almost everything. If you try to help everyone, you will end up helping no one. Neil Armstrong got it right…small steps lead to giant leaps. WWW: What am I doing right now? Why? What should I be doing? Focus on the important, not the immediate. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

What we found in our conversations with these superachievers was that success di not come to them in the thunderclap of their Eureka! moments. Talent was just the beginning. Their sustained success depended on many factors -some in their control, and some not- but the first steps of these superachievers were to know themselves and to assess what they had to work with. Then, their progress toward their goals was furthered by their fierce dedication to the day-to-day struggle for achievement.

Eureka,

Hey, Preach,” Mel said. “Where’s Jack?” “Eureka.” “How about Mike?” “It’s not my day to watch him,” he said gruffly, going back to the kitchen. “Jeez,” Mel said. She looked at Paige and met twinkling eyes. “Something funny?” “John appears to be a little tense. Amazing he got through so many years without sex every day.” “Every day?” Mel asked. “Well, holy shit, his count must be down to nothing!” She looked over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. “How’s he handling the drought?” “He’s a little testy,” Paige said, amused. “I keep telling him this is entirely up to him. If it’s too much, we can make a few adjustments. But he wants to do it right.” “Hope he doesn’t explode,” Mel said absently. “He asked if we can close the bar on ovulation day.” Mel’s eyes widened in surprise and they both melted into laughter. *

He believed that the greatest benefit of solitude is its ability to engender new ideas. A leading scholar of his day, Storr analyzed the lives of great artists—Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sexton, the list goes on—with a psychiatrist’s eye. And he found that the eureka moment (“aha moment” in today’s Oprah terms) does not occur at conference tables. Why does the Buddha meditate alone beneath a tree? Why does Jesus spend forty days in the wilderness? Why does Muhammad withdraw for the month of Ramadan? For that matter, why do so many tribal cultures incorporate a solitary quest into a child’s rite of passage? Solitude is built into the stories we tell ourselves about illumination

People lock themselves in bathrooms’ glass when they want to, I can do that too, of break it and cut myself as I want to all so I want to do bad things, like have sex or throw up, freak and never stop, kill something or someone, have a threesome or something unforgivable or unbelievable to be remembered by- for there not kill themselves, to be like me. So far- I do it every day for them, to slice me up one side and down the other, they have end freaked through me, at least my girlfriend can’t do that as those boys do. (Lunchroom) ‘Liv…? Are reading that same pace of crap again?’ ‘It sucks, not that heard it better than Twilight pace of horse crap, that I could write better in one day- yet come on, like read something else, I am just in love this man writhing I can’t help it, then read something else, by him, I never even thought of that really, in a dumb moment of Eureka! Do you read Twilight? Are you freaking five… that for babies! Said Ray, boy falls to freaked up face guy, and she has no freaking face yet she looks freaking high all the time, oh may- and thing happens. You suck for saying this book sucks! Said liv is awesome! Where does the daemon come out of?

Later in the day, Holly frowned at her reflection in the mirror. “This can’t be right!” Holly muttered to herself. She looked like a cross between a panda bear and a raccoon. She had tried to apply a more advanced version of makeup than she was used to, and it was not going well. “Smokey eye, my foot! I look like I have two black eyes.” She had not done the proper shading with her eye shadow, and now her large green eyes were encased with a deep black color that spanned her entire eyelid. “Maybe I should try a different one,” Holly mused aloud. She sat in William’s bedroom at his dresser. She already had on her pretty crushed velvet black dress and a small heart-shaped diamond pendant. It had been William’s birthday gift to her last year. “Let me re-read this article again to see if I can make sense of these instructions.” Holly read her magazine article out loud. “Which Greek Goddess are you? Athena, Venus, or Aphrodite? Check out our makeup tips below to turn heads at your next event!” “Hmmmm, that sounds soooooo good, if only I was better at applying makeup.” She had decided to try their Aphrodite look and had been trying to apply the eyeliner to give her a smoky eye effect. Holly had to wash her face four times already and start over because each time was worse than the last. “Concentrate, Holly, or you’ll be late for the gala. This is your last chance; it’s do or die time!” she warned her reflection in the mirror. “So, it says to put the light grey eyeshadow on the inner one-third of my eyelids. Hmmm, maybe that’s the problem. I don’t know where the inner third is.” She got an idea and went to William’s desk. Looking around, she found a ruler. “Ah-ha! Eureka, I got it!” She went back to her position at his dresser and closed her eyes for a quick, small prayer, then held the ruler up to measure her eye. “Ah-ha! Twenty-one millimeters. So, that means the inner one-third of my eye must be from my nose out seven millimeters . . . right about HERE!” Holly expertly applied the light grey eye shadow to the inner third of her eyelids. “What a big improvement already! Wow! I’m not a panda bear anymore! Ok, one-third down, two-thirds to go . . . I can do this!” Reading further, she said, “Ok, now apply the dark grey eye shadow to the next third of your eye, finishing with the dark brown eye shadow on the outer third of your eyelid.” Holly expertly followed the instructions and sat back in her chair, stunned. She looked beautiful! She had achieved the desired effect, and now her green eyes were enhanced to perfection. “Wow, wow, wow!” Holly felt encouraged to keep going. She read the next instructions. “‘Now, apply blush to your face with an emphasis on contouring your cheekbones.’” “‘Contouring my cheekbones? Who do they think I am, Rembrandt?” Holly said with a groan. Holly gingerly picked up her blush container as if it were about to bite her. She decided another quick prayer wouldn’t go amiss. With a deep breath she muttered, “Ok, I’m going in!” She glanced nervously at the picture in the magazine and tried her hardest to follow it along her cheekbones. “That turned out pretty good!” Holly turned her face this way and that, examining it. It may not have been exactly as in the picture, but the blush now accentuated her beautiful high cheekbones. “Whew! Only the lip left, thank goodness! You got this, Holly!” She encouraged her reflection in the mirror.

In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, midwestern farming communities were struggling, and certainly Reagan’s family didn’t have extra funds for his education. But he set his sights on Eureka College, seventy-five miles from home, and secured a football scholarship for half his tuition, which was $400. The remainder he paid for with his lifeguarding savings, and he was given a job to cover his board, first washing dishes in a fraternity house. By his junior year, he was working as a lifeguard and official swim coach.

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl: “whorled” and “crosshatched,” “sonorous” and “plump” (Dennis’s MFA in poetry served him well in these marketing descriptions)—in other words, authentic in ways that the bloodless, odorless tinctures that passed for weed nowadays were not.

Fine.” Eureka!!! Okay, so it was only one word, but at least I’d moved beyond the undecipherable squeaky noises that had sounded eerily like a dolphin on crack only moments before.

They failed to realize that in science, gaps are different from those in murder cases. Every important and well-accepted theory has its share of gaps in the supporting data—and this is particularly true of historical scientific theories that rely on evidence such as ancient fossils (in the case of evolution) or other indirect observations, as contrasted with watching chemicals react in a test tube in real time. The theory of gravity, the big bang theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, plate tectonics theory—their histories all consist not simply of eureka moments in the lab, but also of a gradual filling in of gaps, a process that continues to this day. That is the nature of science, which continually tests its theories with new information. With large, explanatory theories such as evolution, the fact that there are gaps in the data is expected—problems arises only when gaps are filled and new information doesn’t fit the theory. Then scientists say that a theory has been “falsified.” This is why ancient Greek mathematicians and naturalists stopped believing the Earth was flat long before cameras were launched into space to photograph the globe—they knew the Earth couldn’t be flat, because the available data did not fit the theory anymore. Ships sailed off in one direction but did not find or fall off an edge. On the other hand, the theory that the Earth is a globe was accepted centuries before it was actually “proved.” That didn’t mean there weren’t gaps—such as why objects on the “bottom” of the globe didn’t fall off into space, as the principles of gravity were not well understood until much later (and gaps in that understanding remain to this day). So gaps in theories are not only real but expected in science—and they do not in themselves disprove or discredit a theory. The board members didn’t grasp that distinction, however, and so they enthusiastically endorsed mentioning “gaps” in the belief that this statement represented a valid criticism of

At the end of the eighteenth century, Dr Edward Jenner was doing his usual medical rounds in the deep Gloucestershire countryside when he realized he had been looking at the solution every day. As he strolled down the country lanes, Jenner realized that milkmaids were the only people whose skin was not scarred by smallpox. He hypothesized that they contracted cowpox, the milder bovine equivalent of the disease, which created immunity to smallpox.12 Testing his theory, he took pus from Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid with cowpox, and injected it into a cut in the arm of a local village boy, James Phipps, who had not yet contracted smallpox. A few days later, Jenner injected the boy with scab material of someone infected with smallpox. Nothing happened. This eureka moment led to the world’s first vaccine (vaccus being the Latin for cow).13 Jenner has arguably saved more lives than any other scientist in history.

For example, consider how Paul Graham explained Yahoo’s valuation in 1999: By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of “Eureka!” I was shouting “Sell!” 146

I ignored their banter because my mind was still stuck on what Jae said about creating something crunchy but not too sweet with the honey butter. We didn't do deep-frying at the Brew-ha Cafe, so that was out. I could maybe incorporate our honey butter into a biscotti, but that didn't really excite me. Unless... "Biscocho!" "Is that like a Filipino version of eureka? You look like you've had some kind of revelation," Adeena said. "I mean, I did have a lightbulb moment, but biscocho isn't some exclamation. It's like a budget Filipino version of biscotti, using day-old pandesal. Jae gave me the idea of trying to make a honey butter version." Jae's eyes were practically sparkling. "Crunchy honey butter snacks?" I laughed. "If it turns out well, then yes, we'll be able to serve crunchy honey butter snacks.