“
It is good to look to the past to gain appreciation for the present and perspective for the future. It is good to look upon the virtues of those who have gone before, to gain strength for whatever lies ahead. It is good to reflect upon thw work of those who labored so hard and gained so little in this worls, but out of whose dreams and early plans, so well nurtured, has come a great harvest of which we are the beneficiaries. Their tremendous example can become a compelling motivation for us all.
Gordon B. Hinckley
”
”
Gerald N. Lund (The Undaunted : The Miracle of the Hole-in-the-Rock Pioneers)
“
Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).
”
”
Krysta Williams (Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism)
“
In addition, TST's
religion carried with it a mandate for action ─ as one TST leader put
it, "Activism is our form of worship." By fighting for equal rights and
standing against theocracy, Satanists can follow the example of our
beloved literary symbol Satan, who stood up against an unjust tyrant.
”
”
Lilith Starr (Compassionate Satanism: An Introduction to Modern Satanic Practice)
“
Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?
”
”
Harry G. Frankfurt (On Truth)
“
The lack of transparency regarding training data sources and the methods used can be problematic. For example, algorithmic filtering of training data can skew representations in subtle ways. Attempts to remove overt toxicity by keyword filtering can disproportionately exclude positive portrayals of marginalized groups. Responsible data curation requires first acknowledging and then addressing these complex tradeoffs through input from impacted communities.
”
”
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype)
“
Clergy had a vested interest in retaining the old, ways, which made few demands of them as teachers, as spiritual guides, or as moral examples or agents.
”
”
Reformation Thought: An Introduction
“
Whatever the tasks, do them slowly and with ease, in mindfulness. Don’t do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work. Without this, the day of mindfulness will be of no value at all. The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness. Take the example of the Zen Masters. No matter what task or motion they undertake, they do it slowly and evenly, without reluctance.
”
”
Thich Nhat Hanh (The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation)
“
For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny or even Mme. Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her galoshes on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their galoshes, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction)
“
Still later, after the invention of saddles and stirrups, horses allowed the Huns and successive waves of other peoples from the Asian steppes to terrorize the Roman Empire and its successor states, culminating in the Mongol conquests of much of Asia and Russia in the 13th and 14th centuries A.D. Only with the introduction of trucks and tanks in World War I did horses finally become supplanted as the main assault vehicle and means of fast transport in war. Arabian and Bactrian camels played a similar military role within their geographic range. In all these examples, peoples with domestic horses (or camels), or with improved means of using them, enjoyed an enormous military advantage over those without them.
”
”
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)
“
When we look, for example, at the Parthenon for the first time, we look at it already knowing that generations of architects chose precisely that style of building for the museums, town-halls, and banks of most of our major cities.
”
”
Mary Beard (Classics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.
This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.
”
”
Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction)
“
What fascinates me in dreams is the idea that they emanate from our subconscious. I think that there are many possibilities to interpret dreams but a great deal of mystery always remains. When a dream is explained to us, it’s necessary to know the personal context of the subject. For example, what his childhood was like, his adolescence, his interpersonal relations. You’ve got to understand all these elements in order to tally up the dream and to decode it. At the cinema, that can’t happen because the approach demands the introduction of too many elements. In order for viewers to identify with this dream, I chose a parade which makes one think automatically of other common dreams and unconscious states. There are very old characters like objects that are discarded by people today or religious symbols that people have forgotten. I think that even nowadays, people have forgotten the importance of dreams.
”
”
Satoshi Kon
“
The announcement that a train has been delayed, for example, can produce anger in one person, tears in another, and weary resignation in a third. Even so, it is usually very hard to accept that we suffer in direct proportion to our own inherent tendency to do so. But until we learn to accept that we become angry or upset not because of any external cause, such as our relationships with other people or our circumstances, but ultimately because of something that already exists within our own lives – the inherent cause – we can never begin to change that innate tendency and so become fundamentally happy. We
”
”
Richard G. Causton (The Buddha In Daily Life: An Introduction to the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin)
“
Ahad Ha’am, for example, visited Palestine and observed that ‘it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed’. He warned prophetically: ‘If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily.
”
”
Martin Bunton (The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Moreover, since it is in the nature of tastes to differ, how can a standard erected by one person’s taste be used to cast judgement on another’s? How, for example, can we pretend that one type of music is superior or inferior to another when comparative judgements merely reflect the taste of the one who makes them?
”
”
Roger Scruton (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
We may mistakenly conclude, for example, that the source of our dissatisfaction and frustration is a particular intellectual view or opinion that we hold and that all we have to do to correct the situation is adopt a higher, more respectable philosophical position. But such a superficial approach never strikes at the root of our difficulties.
”
”
Thubten Yeshe (Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire)
“
From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye.
Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. No observations or experiments could ever reveal whether we lived in universe One or Two.
”
”
Samir Okasha (Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction)
“
The ideal Lexivist should be a polymath or at least interested in many different areas and fields. When it comes to creativity, whether it is in CDT or art, the transformative effect which stems from our creations can have a liberating and inspirational effect on our very selves. What we excel at, whether that is business or politics, should carry a radiant and positive effect not just on the development and progression of the self but also to lead by example for those who surround us. To inspire them to do the same if they so choose.
”
”
Alexander Lloyd Curran (Introduction to Lexivism)
“
America is a grand example of the Biblical challenge: what does it profit an empire to gain the whole world and lose its soul?
”
”
Cornel West (Race Matters, 25th Anniversary: With a New Introduction by Cornel West, Beacon Press)
“
—Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?—Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?
”
”
James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [with Biographical Introduction])
“
Try not to get overwhelmed or lost in the question. Always begin by writing down what you want to discover.
”
”
Dan Morris (Bayes' Theorem Examples: A Visual Introduction For Beginners)
“
The examples center around the existence of a conflict among the lower federal courts or the state courts on “an important federal question.
”
”
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
some modern ‘labour-saving’ devices might more precisely be labelled ‘male labour-saving’ devices. A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour-intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’.20 Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’.
”
”
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
“
Kamal was distressed and angry, not merely at the insult to the honor of teachers but first and foremost for the sake of learning itself, for what he felt was true learning. He did not think well of occupations that shook the earth. He had often found that the writers who inspired him applied derogatory epithets to them, referring, for example, to their counterfeit grandeur and ephemeral glory. Basing his opinion on what they had said, he believed that the only true greatness lay in the life of learning and truth. Thus all manifestations of majesty and pomp seemed spurious and trivial to him.
”
”
Naguib Mahfouz (The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street; Introduction by Sabry Hafez (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series Book 248))
“
There is an erroneous tendency to view empire-building by rulers from urban-agrarian kingdoms (Alexander, for example) as strategic genius, while treating nomad imperial conquests like natural disasters.
”
”
James A. Millward (The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction)
“
I know it's not a question of beauty, though, but of something else, for example, yes, something else -- mind, for example. What I want to seem I do seem, beautiful too if that's what people want me to be.
”
”
Marguerite Duras (The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities: Introduction by Rachel Kushner (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series))
“
I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward's health had anything to do with this, and I don't say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him 'on his deathbed.' He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of 'Orientalism' in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward's revised edition, I decided I'd suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.
Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as 'racist.' The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice... I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that's 'it' as it were. I didn't say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. 'Racist' is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn't go to, and wasn't invited to, his funeral.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
The inner man is the periphery of our consciousness. It is also the inner man that takes care of and protects the inner woman for example through putting up creative boundaries. The meeting between a man and a woman on the outer plane creates a relationship. This relationship is not a conflict, but they complement each other. The outer meeting between a man and a woman also creates integration between our own inner male and female sides.
”
”
Swami Dhyan Giten (The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life)
“
it is to be presumed, for example, that there are an infinite collection of trios in the world, for if this were not the case the total number of things in the world would be finite, which, though possible, seems unlikely.
”
”
Bertrand Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy)
“
Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food.
”
”
Jonathan Wolff (An Introduction to Political Philosophy)
“
Understanding the Agricultural Revolution is a first step toward understanding the Information Revolution. The introduction of tilling and harvesting provides a paradigm example of how an apparently simple shift in the character of work can radically alter the organization of society.
”
”
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
“
Bees are efficient foragers. One example is the southeastern blueberry bee, Habropoda laboriosa, a hard working little creature capable of visiting as many as 50,000 blueberry flowers in her short life and pollinating enough of them to produce more than 6,000 ripe blueberries. At market those 6,000 blueberries are worth approximately $20 or more. Not every bee that you see flitting about may be worth $20, but all of them combined keep the world of flowering plants going. The world as we know it would not exist if there were no bees to pollinate the earth’s 250,000 flowering plants.
”
”
U.S. Department of Agriculture (Bee Basics : An Introduction to Our Native Bees)
“
They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia.
None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.
”
”
David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
“
Let us consider an even simpler example of a random variable, the number obtained when you throw just one die. (Pedantic note : this is the singular of the word whose plural is dice. Two dice, one die. Like two mice, one mie.)(Well, two mice, one mouse. Like two hice, one house. Peculiar language, English.)
”
”
Christopher Dougherty (Introduction to Econometrics)
“
Woolf ’s control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, beginning in 1922, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition of
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which he read to them in June 1922, and which she found to have ‘great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure’ (D2 178).
”
”
Jane Goldman (The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge Introductions to Literature))
“
Patients do not spontaneously home in on the subjects that are most important, psychoanalytically speaking; they spontaneously avoid them, for the most part. Even if they recognize that sexuality should be dwelt upon, for example, they nevertheless tend to avoid associating to the elements in dreams and fantasies that are the most sexually charged.
”
”
Bruce Fink (A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique)
“
As Burbank points out, relations between the branches are governed as much by norms and customs as by formal structures. The Constitution permits Congress to impeach and remove federal judges, for example, but the norm is that impeachment is reserved for criminal behavior or serious ethical lapses, and not for judicial rulings with which members of Congress disagree.
”
”
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:
ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz,
Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts.
LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short.
SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc.
LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation.
("Introduction")
”
”
Irving Howe (Short Shorts)
“
Perhaps the most radical aspect of queer politics was its claim not only to transcend the homo/hetero boundary but to do so in such a way as to challenge the sexual regulation and repression of heterosexual desire, above all female desire. Queer politics, it was claimed, had a lot to teach those accustomed to the narrow confines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ heterosexual roles in relationships. The re-working of notions of monogamy and the send-up of marriage through queer weddings, the greater sexual adventurism, the rejection of the concept of gay men and lesbians as ‘victims’ in favour of assertiveness and redefinition, and the emphasis on the creation of more egalitarian relationships in the domestic, sexual and social spheres, were all cited as examples of how queer could contribute to a new sexual agenda of empowerment.
”
”
Richard Dunphy (Sexual Politics: An Introduction)
“
Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
This sort of reading of the Apocalypse was nowhere more eloquently performed than in the simple anthem of the U.S. Civil Rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.” The word “overcome” was taken from the King James Version’s rendering of the verb nikan, used pervasively in Revelation and translated in most modern versions as “conquer.”33 The word is used in the refrain of promise that concludes each of the letters to the seven churches. For example, “To him that over-cometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne” (3:21, KJV). As freedom marchers from the black churches joined hands and sang, “We shall overcome someday,” they were expressing their faith that, despite their lack of conventional political power, their witness to the truth would prevail over violence and oppression.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
Milton S. Terry, for example, author of one of the most conservative textbooks on hermeneutics (1890), begins: “Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation.”4 Yet even Terry concedes that hermeneutics “is both a science and an art. As a science it enunciates principles . . . and classifies the facts and results. As an art, it teaches what application these principles should have . . . showing their practical value in the elucidation of more difficult scriptures.
”
”
Anthony C. Thiselton (Hermeneutics: An Introduction)
“
The other sources, even when they mention Hel, rarely describe it. But when they do, it's cast in neutral or even positive terms. For example, the mention that the land of the dead is "green and beautiful" in Ibn Fadlan's account is mirrored in a passage from Saxo (The medieval Danish historian, as you likely recall). In Saxo's telling of the story of Hadding, the hero travels to the "Underworld" and finds a "fair land where green herbs grow when it is winter on earth." His companion even beheads a rooster just outside of that land and flings its carcass over the wall, at which point the bird cries out and comes back to life - a feat which is highly reminiscent of another detail from Ibn Fadlan, namely the beheading of a rooster and a hen whose bodies are then tossed into the dead man's boat shortly before it's set aflame. In both cases, the emphasis is on abundant life in the world of the dead, even when death and absence prevail on earth.
”
”
Daniel McCoy (The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion)
“
(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
It is too soon to say when or how this era will end or what will succeed it. But what is clear is that a good many of the trends are worrisome. If, for example, a Sino-American cold war materializes, it is quite possible this era may come to be known as the inter–Cold War era, one bookended by the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and one between the United States and China. Such an outcome would result in lower rates of economic growth for both because trade and investment would inevitably be curtailed. It would also reduce the potential for cooperation on regional and global issues. If the liberal world order is sustained and strengthened with the United States resuming a leading role, this could continue to be an era largely characterized by stability, prosperity, and freedom. It is possible, though, that the United States will choose to largely abandon its leading role in the world. In this case, we could in principle see an era of Chinese primacy, but given China’s character, internal constraints, and the nature and scale of the domestic challenges it faces, this is improbable. More likely is that this will turn out to be an era of deterioration, one in which no country or group of countries exercises effective global leadership. In that case, the future would be one of accelerating global disorder.
”
”
Richard N. Haass (The World: A Brief Introduction)
“
have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search For Meaning: An Introduction To Logotheraphy)
“
A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unit time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information.
”
”
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
“
How is left–right established? Vertebrates are bilaterally symmetric about the midline of the body for many structures, such as eyes, ears, and limbs, but most internal organs are asymmetric. In mice and humans, for example, the heart is on the left side, the right lung has more lobes than the left, the stomach and spleen lie towards the left, and the bulk of the liver is towards the right. This handedness of organs is remarkably consistent, but there are rare individuals, about one in 10,000 in humans, who have the condition known as situs inversus, a complete mirror-image reversal of handedness. Such people are generally asymptomatic, even though all their organs are reversed.
”
”
Lewis Wolpert (Developmental Biology: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Revelation can be read rightly only by those who are actively struggling against injustice. If Revelation is a resistance document, its significance will become clear only to those who are engaged in resistance. It is no coincidence that the most powerful modern readings of Revelation have come from interpreters in socially marginalized positions who were seeking to call the church to countercultural resistance movements: for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., William Stringfellow, and Alan Boesak.31 Something very strange happens when this text is appropriated by readers in a comfortable, powerful, majority community: it becomes a gold mine for paranoid fantasies and for those who want to preach revenge and destruction.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
What are the inner man and woman? Our being consists of two energies: the male and female aspect. Irrespective of if we are a man or a woman, we have both a male and female side.
Life develops through opposite poles and tendencies for example yes and no, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, positive and negative, day and night and life and death.
Just as electricity needs both a negative and positive pole for a spark to arise, the human consciousness has also two poles. These two poles are the male and female side.
The right side of the body represents the male side and the left side of the body represents the female side. We all have both a male and female side, which is represented by the right and left side of the body.
”
”
Swami Dhyan Giten (The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life)
“
Considerations on Representative Government (1861) – that they enjoy the benefits of her uniquely advanced culture: first, a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent ... tenure of land. Secondly, improvement of the public intelligence; the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry; and the growth of mental activity, making the people alive to new objects of desire. Thirdly, the introduction of foreign arts ... and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves, while it places before them a stimulating example.
”
”
Niall Ferguson (Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power)
“
Karl Marx’s early (1844) essay On the Jewish Question is a fascinating example of an intellectual form of Jewish self-hatred. He argues that Judaism is neither religion nor people-hood but the desire for gain; totally ignoring the vast Jewish proletariat of Central and Eastern Europe, he equates Jews, and the Christians whose religion derives from them, with the ‘enemy’ – namely, bourgeois capitalism. Clearly, he is fleeing his own Jewish identity (he was baptized at the age of 6, but was descended from rabbis on both sides of the family), ‘assimilating’ to the cultural milieu of the anti-Semitic Feuerbach, whose perverse definition of Judaism he has adopted, and finding refuge from Jewish particularism in socialist universalism.
”
”
Norman Solomon (Judaism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 11))
“
The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
”
”
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgement by the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobstrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. For example, when we do epistemology, we are interested in what it is for someone to know - know what? oh yes: p. If we inquire into rational requirements on action or intention, we ask what it is to be obliged to - what? oh yes: see to it that p, intend that, if p, then q, and so on. However, if we udnertake to reflect on thought, on its self-consciousness and its objectivity, then the letter p signifies the deepest question and the deepest comprehension. If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would be open to us.
”
”
Sebastian Rödl (Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism)
“
It was only when professionals believed that reports on errors and near misses would be treated as learning opportunities rather than a pretext to blame that this crucial information started to flow. Managers were initially worried that reducing the penalties for error would lead to an increase in the number of errors. In fact, the opposite happened. Insurance claims fell by a dramatic 74 percent. Similar results have been found elsewhere. Claims and lawsuits made against the University of Michigan Health System, for example, dropped from 262 in August 2001 to 83 following the introduction of an open disclosure policy in 2007. The number of lawsuits against the University of Illinois Medical Center fell by half in two years after creating a system of open reporting.
”
”
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
“
Anyone who does creative work is familiar with this problem, and in many ways active imagination is similar to writing, painting, and so on; all creative work entails a give-and-take between inspiration (unconscious) and execution (conscious). (As I am writing this, for example, I have to allow my intuitions expression before I can start editing them.) The difference for Jung is that the aesthetic quality of the end product isn’t important; understanding it is. Nevertheless, one of the best introductions to active imagination are the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man by the poet Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Goethe, which discuss in detail the dialogue between the creative (unconscious) and critical (conscious) drives and their union in art, both creating and experiencing it.
”
”
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
“
As the mind of the individual develops within various contexts, such as the family or different educational institutions, it seeks out those various and fluctuating traditions that are at hand. The child learns, for example, to speak the language of his or her nation and what it means to be a member of that nation as expressed through its customs and laws. These traditions become incorporated into individual's understanding of the self. When those traditions that make a part of one's self-conception are shared by other individuals as part of their self-conception, one is then both related to those other individuals and aware of the relation. The relation itself, for example, living in the same geographical area or speaking a common language, is what is meant by the term "collective consciousness".
”
”
Steven Grosby (Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction)
“
For example, at the very end of Leviathan, their discussion of "making" leads Shapin and Schaffer to express their overall conclusions in a way that involves a real confusion. They say: "It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know" (1985, 344)• This is a classic
example of a false dichotomy. Neither we alone nor reality alone is "responsible" for human knowledge. The rough answer is that both are responsible for it; knowledge involves an interaction between the two. Even this formulation is imperfect; human knowledge is part of reality, not something separate from or outside it. But, speaking roughly, in order to understand knowledge, we need both a theory of human thought, language, and social interaction, and a theory of how these human capacities are connected to the world outside us.
”
”
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series))
“
Once a competitor’s move has occurred, the denial of an adequate base for the competitor to meet its goals, coupled with the expectation that this state of affairs will continue, can cause the competitor to withdraw. New entrants, for example, usually have some targets for growth, market share, and ROI, and some time horizon for achieving them. If a new entrant is denied its targets and becomes convinced that it will be a long time before they are met, then it may withdraw or deescalate. Tactics for denying a base include strong price competition, heavy expenditures on research, and so on. Attacking new products in the test-market phase can be an effective way to foretell a firm’s future willingness to fight and can be less expensive than waiting for the introduction to actually occur. Another tactic is using special deals to load customers up with inventory, thereby removing the market for the product and raising the short-run cost of entry. It can be worth paying a substantial short-run price to deny a base if a firm’s market position is threatened. Essential to such a strategy, however, is a good hypothesis about what a competitor’s performance targets and time horizon are. An example of such a situation may be Gillette’s withdrawal from digital watches. Although claiming it had won significant market shares in test markets, Gillette bowed out, citing the substantial investments required to develop technology and margins lower than those available in other areas of its business. Texas Instruments’ strategy of aggressive pricing and rapid technological development in digital watches probably had a substantial impact on this decision.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
There is a tradition relating to the proceedings of St. Patrick in this place, which deserves to be noticed, as an example of the way in which Roman Catholic miracles come into existence. One of his biographers states, that when he arrived at the top of the mountain he was surrounded by vast numbers of birds; other writers, improving on this simple fact, transformed the birds into demons, and described him as driving them into the sea at the foot of the mountain. Another, again, perhaps believing reptiles and demons to belong to the same genus, adds, that all the venomous reptiles were collected there from every part of Ireland, and “in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”[56] This is firmly believed by the peasantry at the present day; and it is from such lying wonders they derive their ideas of the character and acts of St. Patrick.
”
”
Patrick of Ireland (The Confession of St. Patrick: Translated from the Original Latin with an Introduction and Notes)
“
Today, ethologists who study the minds and behaviors of nonhuman animals show that, such as Darwin theorized, there is no radical break between the emotional and mental capacities of humans and other animals; instead, there is a continuity of capacities. As we shall see in chapter 17, ethologists who work with great apes, dolphins, and parrots, as well as a wide variety of other animals, continue to find more and more examples of this continuity. We now know that many animals can feel and experience much of what we once considered to be “human” emotions, that they have self-recognition and self-awareness, that they can communicate with each other (and with us) through sophisticated communication systems and perhaps even languages; they can make and use tools, empathize with others, deceive others, joke, plan, and understand the past and the future.
”
”
Margo Demello (Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies)
“
Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson suggests that scepticism initially looks appealing (despite its bleak consequences) because it is a good thing carried too far. The good thing is that we have a healthy critical ability to double-check individual things we believe by suspending judgement in them temporarily to see whether they really fit with the rest of what we know. But if this ability to suspend individual beliefs serves as a useful immune system to weed out inconsistent and ungrounded ideas, scepticism is like an autoimmune disease in which the protective mechanism goes too far and attacks the healthy parts of the organism. Once we have suspended too much—for example, once we have brought into doubt the reality of the whole outer world—we no longer have the resources to reconfirm or support any of the perfectly reasonable things we believe.
”
”
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A
”
”
Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
“
The more we turn toward this creative will, the more the doubts which trouble the sane and normal man seem to us abnormal and morbid. Take for example the doubter who closes a window, then returns to verify its closing, then verifies his verification, and so forth. If we ask him what his motives are he will answer that he might have opened the window each time he tried to close it more securely. And if he is a philosopher he will transpose intellectually the hesitation of his conduct into this question: “How can one be sure, definitively sure, that one has done what one intended to do?” But the truth is that his power of action is defective, and therein lies the evil from which he suffers: he had only partial will to accomplish the act, and that is why the accomplished act leaves him only partial certitude. Now can we solve the problem this man sets himself? Obviously not, but neither do we set the problem; therein lies our superiority. At first glance I might think there is more in him than in me because we both shut the window and he, in addition, raises a philosophical question while I do not. But the question which in his case is superadded to the task accomplished represents in reality only something negative; it is not something more, but something less; it is a deficit of the will. Such is exactly the effect certain “great problems” produce in us when we set ourselves again in the direction of generating thought. They recede toward zero as fast as we approach this generating thought, as they fill only that space between it and us. Thus we discover the illusion of him who thinks he is doing more by raising these problems than by not raising them. One might just as well think that there is more in a half-consumed bottle than in a full one, because the latter contains only wine, while in the former there is wine and emptiness in addition.
”
”
Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
“
And what of the notion that “trust must be earned”? Sensible though it may sound, great managers reject it. They know that if, fundamentally, you don’t trust people, then there is no line, no point in time beyond which people suddenly become trustworthy. Mistrust concerns the future. If you are innately skeptical of other people’s motives, then no amount of good behavior in the past will ever truly convince you that they are not just about to disappoint you. Suspicion is a permanent condition. Of course, occasionally a person will indeed let you down. But great managers, like Michael, the restaurant manager from the Introduction, are wired to view this as the exception rather than the rule. They believe that if you expect the best from people, then more often than not, the best is what you get. Innate mistrust is probably vital for some roles — lawyering or investigative reporting, for example. But for a manager, it is deadly.
”
”
Gallup Press (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently)
“
Nietzsche envisaged a cultural revolution in which our appreciation of language and our conceptions of truth and knowledge would undergo a fundamental transformation. This emphasis on the crucial importance of language does not mean that Nietzsche is guilty of idealism. For him language is a material phenomenon which is rooted in our animal bodily human needs and which has historically evolved. In one of the opening sections of "Human, All Too Human", for example, he attacks philosophers for lacking a historical sense which results in their inability to grasp the fact that the human animal is a creature which is not an 'aeterna veritas' but is one which has 'become'; the same applies to the human faculty of cognition. 'Everything' Nietzsche insists, 'has become. There are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths'. Consequently, he argues, 'what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.
”
”
Keith Ansell-Pearson (An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist)
“
The Constitutional Convention quickly agreed to the proposal of Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia for a national government of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. Randolph’s resolution “that a national Judiciary be established” passed unanimously. Debating and defining the powers of Congress in Article I and of the president in Article II consumed much of the delegates’ attention and energy. Central provisions of Article III were the product of compromise and, in its fewer than five hundred words, the article left important questions unresolved. Lacking agreement on a role for lower courts, for example, the delegates simply left it to Congress to decide how to structure them. The number of justices remained unspecified. Article III itself makes no reference to the office of chief justice, to whom the Constitution (in Article I) assigns only one specific duty, that of presiding over a Senate trial in a presidential impeachment.
”
”
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.
”
”
John Baylis (The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations)
“
The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ...
Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state.
Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ...
Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively.
Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room.
There's often a brilliant overfocussing.
("Introduction")
”
”
Irving Howe (Short Shorts)
“
descriptive grammars, that is, they set out to account for the language we use without necessarily making judgements about its correctness. However, the word ‘grammar’, as we have seen, can be used to indicate what rules exist for combining units together and whether these have been followed correctly. For example, the variety of English I speak has a rule that if you use a number greater than one with a noun, the noun has to be plural (I say ‘three cats’, not ‘three cat’). Books which set out this view of language are prescriptive grammars which aim to tell people how they should speak rather than to describe how they do speak. Prescriptive grammars contain the notion of the ‘correct’ use of language. For example, many people were taught that an English verb in the infinitive form (underlined in the example below) should not be separated from its preceding to. So the introduction to the TV series Star Trek …to boldly go where no man has gone before is criticised on the grounds that to and go should not be
”
”
Open University (English grammar in context)
“
What, I wonder, does the reader know of large families? More important, how much can he stand hearing on the subject, from me? I must say at least this much: If you're an older brother in a large family (particularly where, as with Seymour and Franny, there's an age difference of roughly eighteen years), and you either cast yourself or just not very advertently become cast in the role of local tutor or mentor, it's almost impossible not to turn into a monitor, too. But even monitors come in individual shapes, sizes, and colors. For example, when Seymour told one of the twins or Zooey or Franny, or even Mme Boo Boo (who was only two years younger than myself, and often entirely the Lady), to take off his or her rubbers on coming into the apartment, each and all of them knew he mostly meant that the floor would get tracked up if they didn't and that Bessie would have to get out the mop. When I told them to take off their rubbers, they knew I mostly meant that people who didn't were slobs. It was bound to make no small difference in the way they kidded or ragged us separately.
Но, питам се, какво знае читателят за многочислените семейства? И което е по-важното, ще изтърпи ли не друг, а аз да му обясня този въпрос? Мога да кажа поне следното: ако си по-голям брат в многочислено семейство (в което разликата между Сиймор и Франи е горе-долу осемнайсет години) и сам си поел или някой е имал непредпазливостта да ти възложи ролята на наставник и опекун, почти невъзможно е да не се превърнеш и в надзирател. Но дори надзирателите се произвеждат в различни форми, размери и цветове. Така например, когато Сиймор кажеше на близнаците, на Зуи или Франи или дори на мадам Бу Бу (която е само две години по-малка от мен) да си събуват галошите, преди да влязат в апартамента, всеки от тях възприемаше думите му така: не се ли събуете, ще оставите стъпки по пода и после Беси ще трябва да се трепе с парцала. А когато аз им кажех да си събуят галошите, те го приемаха като обида: който не се събува е палачор. Оттук произтичаше и разликата в начина, по който те се шегуваха с него и с мен.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction)
“
There is a striking parallel between the emergence of the modern state and the goals of the technology we have discussed in this chapter. In scaling society up from tribes and small groups, governments have had to confront precisely the problem of enabling secure commerce and other interactions among strangers. The methods may be very different, but the goal is a shared one. Although a maximalist vision for decentralization might involve dismantling the state, this is not really a viable vision, especially when others who share our democracy want a state. However, decentralization through technology is not necessarily in opposition to the state at all. In fact, they can be mutually beneficial. For example, assuming well-identified parties, transfers of smart property can use the block chain for efficient transfers and still use the court system if a dispute arises. We think the big opportunity for block chain technology is implementing decentralization in a way that complements the functions of the state, rather than seeking to replace them. It
”
”
Arvind Narayanan (Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction)
“
Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.
”
”
Lawrence M. Principe (Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)
“
I have finished Russell's Nightmares and must confess that they did not come up to expectation. No doubt it was my fault for expecting too much, knowing how unsatisfactory I find his philosophical views; but I had hoped that, at least, when he was not writing normal philosophy, he would be entertaining. Alas! I found his wit insipid, and his serious passages almost intolerable—there was something of the embarrassment of meeting a Great Man for the first time, and finding him even more preoccupied with trivialities than oneself.
In his Introduction, Russell says 'Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities', and then he proceeds to give us examples of isolated insanities—the Queen of Sheba as Female Vanity, Bowdler as Prudery, the Psycho-Analyst as Social Conformity, and so on. Amongst these, as you noted, is the Existentialist as Ontological Scepticism. Here, Russell's satire is directed partly against what Sartre has called 'a literature of extreme situations'; and this, for an Englishman, is no doubt a legitimate target, since the English do not admit that there are such things—though, of course, this makes the English a target for the satire of the rest of Europe, particularly the French.
But what Russell is not entitled to do is to group the insanity of doubting one's existence along with the other insanities, and this for the simple reason that it precedes them. One may be vain or modest; one may be prudish or broadminded; one may be a social conformist or an eccentric; but in order to be any of these things, one must at least be. The question of one's existence must be settled first—one cannot be insanely vain if one doubts whether one exists at all and, precisely, Russell's existentialist does not even succeed in suffering—except when his philosophy is impugned (but this merely indicates that he has failed to apply his philosophy to itself, and not, as Russell would have us believe, because he has failed to regard his philosophy in the light of his other insanities). The trouble really is, that Russell does not, or rather will not, admit that existence poses a problem at all; and, since he omits this category from all his thinking nothing he says concerns anybody in particular.
”
”
Nanavira Thera
“
The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics, and to bring about a complete revolution after the example set by geometers and investigators of nature. This critique is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself; but nevertheless it marks out the whole plan of this science, both with regard to its limits and with regard to its inner organization. For it is peculiar to pure speculative reason that it is able, indeed bound, to measure its own powers according to the different ways in which it chooses its objects for thought, and to enumerate exhaustively the different ways of choosing its problems, thus tracing a complete outline of a system of metaphysics. This is due to the fact that, with regard to the first point, nothing can be attributed to objects in *a priori* knowledge, except what the thinking subject takes from within itself; while, with regard to the second point, pure reason, as far as its principles of knowledge are concerned, forms a separate and independent unity, in which, as in an organized body, every member exists for the sake of all the others, and all the others exist for the sake of the one, so that no principle can be safely applied in *one* relation unless it has been carefully examined in *all* its relations to the whole use of pure reason. Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage, an advantage which cannot be shared by any other rational science which has to deal with objects (for *logic* deals only with the form of thought in general), that if by means of this critique it has been set upon the secure course of a science, it can exhaustively grasp the entire field of knowledge pertaining to it, and can thus finish its work and leave it to posterity as a capital that can never be added to, because it has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of their use, as determined by these principles themselves. And this completeness becomes indeed an obligation if metaphysics is to be a fundamental science, of which we must be able to say, *nil actum reputants, si quid superesset agendum* [to think that nothing was done for as long as something remained to be done]."
―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 21-22
”
”
Immanuel Kant
“
People should consider, for example, the tireless unavoidable English utilitarians, how they wander around crudely and honourably in Bentham’s footsteps, moving this way and that (a Homeric metaphor says it more clearly), just as Bentham himself had already wandered in the footsteps of the honourable Helvetius (this Helvetius — no, he was no dangerous man!). No new idea, nothing of a more refined expression and bending of an old idea, not even a real history of an earlier thought: an impossible literature in its totality, unless we understand how to spice it up with some malice. For in these moralists as well (whom we really have to read with their ulterior motives in mind [mit Nebengedanken], if we have to read them—) that old English vice called cant and moral Tartufferie [hypocrisy], has inserted itself, this time hidden under a new form of scientific thinking.
Nor is there any lack of a secret resistance against the pangs of conscience, something a race of former Puritans will justifiably suffer from in all its scientific preoccupations with morality. (Isn’t a moralist the opposite of a Puritan, namely, a thinker who considers morality something questionable, worth raising questions about, in short, as a problem? Shouldn’t moralizing be — immoral?). In the end they all want English morality to be considered right, so that then mankind or “general needs” or “the happiness of the greatest number” —n o! England’s happiness — will be best served. They want to prove with all their might that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, as the highest priority, a seat in Parliament) is at the same time also the right path of virtue, in fact, that all virtue which has existed in the world so far has consisted of just such striving.
Not one of all those ponderous herd animals with uneasy consciences (who commit themselves to promoting the cause of egoism as an issue of general welfare—) wants to know or catch a whiff of the fact that the “general welfare” is no ideal, no goal, not even a concept one can somehow grasp, but is only an emetic — that what is right for one man cannot in any way therefore be right for another, that the demand for a single morality for everyone is a direct restriction on the higher men, in short, that there is a rank ordering between man and man, as a result, also between morality and morality. These utilitarian Englishmen are a modest and thoroughly mediocre kind of human being and, as mentioned, insofar as they are boring, we cannot think highly enough of their utility.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil [with Biographical Introduction])
“
With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.)
Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe.
But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy.
It was called infrared light.
Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays.
This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe
”
”
Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
“
Our critique is not opposed to the *dogmatic procedure* of reason in its pure knowledge as science (for science must always be dogmatic, that is, derive its proof from secure *a priori* principles), but only to *dogmatism*, that is, to the presumption that it is possible to make any progress with pure (philosophical) knowledge from concepts according to principles, such as reason has long been in the habit of using, without first inquiring in what way, and by what right, it has come to posses them. Dogmatism is therefore the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, *without a preceding critique of its own powers*; and our opposition to this is not intended to defend that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, much less that skepticism which makes short work of the whole of metaphysics. On the contrary, our critique is meant to form a necessary preparation in support of metaphysics as a thorough science, which must necessarily be carried out dogmatically and strictly systematically, so as to satisfy all the demands, no so much of the public at large, as of the Schools. This is an indispensable demand for it has undertaken to carry out its work entirely *a priori*, and thus to carry it out to the complete satisfaction of speculative reason. In the execution of this plan, as traced out by the critique, that is, in a future system of metaphysics, we shall have to follow the strict method of the celebrated Wolff, the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers. He was the first to give an example (and by his example initiated, in Germany, that spirit of thoroughness which is not yet extinct) of how the secure course of a science could be attained only through the lawful establishment of principles, the clear determination of concepts, the attempt at strictness of proof and avoidance of taking bold leaps in our inferences. He was therefore most eminently qualified to give metaphysics the dignity of a science, if it had only occurred to him to prepare his field in advance by criticism of the organ, that is, of pure reason itself―an omission due not so much to himself as to the dogmatic mentality of his age, about which the philosophers of his own, as well as of all previous times, have no right to reproach one another. Those who reject both the method of Wolff and the procedure of the critique of pure reason can have no other aim but to shake off the fetters of *science* altogether, and thus to change work into play, certainty into opinion and philosophy into philodoxy."
―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 28-29
”
”
Immanuel Kant
“
In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known.
To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541):
The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body.
Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3).
By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week.
Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
”
”
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction)
“
The Practical Lesson What is going on? This is a group of smart students that was told the answer to the game. The example illustrates a flaw of IEDS. It can get you reasonable answers if you think players are reasoning out further and further in nested logic. We often do not have an infinite capacity to reason logically, only a bounded ability to reason rationality. The practical answer to what you should write depends on the book answer plus your subjective beliefs about what other people do. It is the combination of book smarts plus social smarts that matters.
”
”
Presh Talwalkar (The Joy of Game Theory: An Introduction to Strategic Thinking)
“
Study Questions What is the legal definition of blindness? How does it differ from the IDEA definition? What does the Snellen chart assess? What does 20/200 mean? Describe how the eye functions. Define the terms myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism. List five eye problems common to school-age children. Why is early detection of vision problems important? Describe the social and emotional characteristics of persons with visual impairments. What is functional vision, and how is it evaluated? Define the term learning media. Give three examples of different forms of learning media. In what two educational settings do the majority of students with a visual impairment receive a special education? What are some common educational accommodations that a student with a visual impairment may require? List five signs of possible vision problems in children. Identify three critical issues that must be addressed if an adolescent is to successfully transition to postsecondary education or enter the workforce. Besides cultural differences, what diversity issue must be addressed for parents who are also visually impaired? Identify five technology accommodations that can be provided in high school for a student who is legally blind. Discuss the shortage of orientation and mobility specialists and how a child’s educational plan is affected by a shortage of personnel.
”
”
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
“
Perhaps it is worth extending this discussion a little bit further. Consider the question of the explanation of the existence of natural reality: why is there natural reality? Those theists who suppose that there are gods who created natural reality may suppose that they have an explanatory advantage here: there is no similar story that atheists can tell about the existence of natural reality. However, while it is true that there is no similar story that atheists can tell, this does nothing to support the claim that theists here have an explanatory advantage. Why not? Look back to the discussion in §5.10.2. The story that atheists tell about natural reality can be just like the story that theists tell about causal reality. If, for example, theists say that causal reality exists because gods must exist, then atheists can say that natural reality exists because it must exist. When we look at the total picture, there is no explanatory advantage that accrues to theists; rather, theists and atheists agree that causal reality exists because something must exist, but disagree about what it is that must exist. The existence of natural reality is not better explained by the suggestion that it is created by gods that must exist than it is by the suggestion that natural reality itself must exist: if all that we are considering is the existence of natural reality, then the introduction of creator gods is a fifth wheel to the explanatory coach.
”
”
Graham Oppy (Atheism: The Basics)
“
students with ADHD may benefit from using a seat cushion or a fidget toy (such as Silly Putty or a squeeze ball). Seat cushions can provide extra stimulation while seated, and fidget toys allow hand movements that can assist students in concentrating (Aune, Burt, & Gennaro, 2010; Denton & Silver, 2012). Students with ADHD may also benefit from self-monitoring. While traditionally self-monitoring involves paper and pencil, students can use technology to self-monitor, such as student response systems (Szwed & Bouck, 2013) as well as smartphones and other mobile technologies (for example, an iPod). Finally, assistive technology tools to support organization may benefit students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. See the accompanying Spotlight on Technology feature to learn additional ways that technologies can help.
”
”
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
“
One area of particular concern for professionals is the identification of ADHD in individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Some are fearful that ethnic and cultural factors may lead to the overdiagnosis of ADHD in some groups, especially African American boys. Because this disorder is frequently identified by means of behavior rating scales, which rely on the subjective opinions of the evaluators, the issue of bias may arise. This concern is especially troublesome when the rater’s background differs from that of the student. Differences have been found in how teachers evaluate for ADHD in European American versus African American youngsters. African American boys, for example, were thought to exhibit the most severe symptoms of ADHD, and European American girls were seen as manifesting the least severe symptoms (Weyandt, 2007). Interestingly, Hispanic children are less likely than white and African American children to be diagnosed with ADHD (National Resource Center on ADHD, 2019a). The intriguing question then is “Are these authentic group differences (which likely reflect normative behaviors) or an indicator of possible rater bias?” Unfortunately, this issue currently remains unresolved.
”
”
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
“
■ Types are (sets of) things we can talk about.
■ Relations are (sets of) things we say about the things we can talk about.
(There is a nice analogy here that might help you appreciate and remember these important points: Types are to relations as nouns are to sentences.) Thus, in the example, the things we can talk about are employee numbers, names, department numbers, and money values, and the things we say are true utterances of the form “The employee with the specified employee number has the specified name, works in the specified department, and earns the specified salary.”
It follows from all of the foregoing that:
1. Types and relations are both necessary (without types, we have nothing to talk about; without relations, we cannot say anything).
2. Types and relations are sufficient, as well as necessary—i.e., we do not need anything else, logically speaking.
3. Types and relations are not the same thing. It is an unfortunate fact that certain commercial products—not relational ones, by definition!—are confused over this very point.
”
”
C.J. Date (An Introduction to Database Systems)
“
In short, the period during which the main conditions of life for the vast majority of men have been subject to repeated and revolutionary changes had not even begun until the Renaissance and the great voyages, and did not assume anything like the accelerated pace which we now take for granted until well into the nineteenth century. Under these circumstances, there is no use in looking anywhere in earlier history for parallels to the successful inventions of the steam engine, the steamboat, the locomotive, the modern smelting of metals, the telegraph, the transoceanic cable, the introduction of electric power, dynamite and the modern high explosive missile, the airplane, the electric valve, and the atomic bomb. The inventions in metallurgy which heralded the origin of the Bronze Age are neither so concentrated in time nor so manifold as to offer a good counter-example.
”
”
Norbert Wiener (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science))
“
A simpleminded example can make this state of affairs plain. Whether Earth moves around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth, from the point of view of Einstein’s “cosmic constant” is more or less the same. One is no more “true” than the other, except that the second alternative would involve the introduction of many more elements to the formulae, thus a greater complication and inconvenience in the calculations. For the person unconcerned with one system being more complicated and inconvenient than another, the choice remains free; this person could calculate the various phenomena starting either from the premise that Earth revolves around the Sun, or from the opposite premise.
This banal and elementary example clarifies the type of “certainty” and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads.
”
”
Julius Evola
“
It can be useful for a function to accept any number of arguments. For example, Math.max computes the maximum of all the arguments it is given. To write such a function, you put three dots before the function’s last parameter, like this: function max(... numbers)
”
”
Marijn Haverbeke (Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming)
“
Normally, when you forget to put let in front of your binding, as with counter in the example, JavaScript quietly creates a global binding and uses that. In strict mode, an error is reported instead.
”
”
Marijn Haverbeke (Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming)
“
Short and long bios Contracts Cover page and introduction to a proposal Engagement letter Quick blurb/elevator speech—what do you do? What are your focus areas? Letters of recommendation Logo and company graphic art Nondisclosure agreements Presentations of all sorts Progress reports Proposals and statements of work Publications list Marketing trifold (less important now than in the past) Work programs and check-off lists Examples of frequently requested spreadsheets. For example, you may be in a business that uses six sigma for quality control. Graphs, statistical reports, and so on can typically be modified quickly from one client to the next. Unless you are in the graphic arts or publications business itself, there is no need to be original. Inspiring ideas permeate the Internet.
”
”
William A. Yarberry Jr. ($250K Consulting: Double or triple your income - start a consulting company! How to ramp up fast, survive the first year, pull in paying clients, gain trust, and avoid breaking the unwritten rules)
“
What distinguishes the persons of the Trinity from each other are their relations to each other, not their relations to us. In fact, as we will see more fully in later chapters, the relations that the three persons hold toward us—for example, Creator, Redeemer, Lord—are something that the three persons hold in common as the one God, not something that distinguishes them from each other.
”
”
Scott R. Swain (The Trinity: An Introduction (Short Studies in Systematic Theology))
“
The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.
”
”
Lawrence M. Principe (Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction)
“
The play contains the first known example of Gresham’s Law, that bad money drives out good.
”
”
Antony Lewis (The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains: An Introduction to Cryptocurrencies and the Technology that Powers Them)
“
The word 'spirituality' originated in Christianity with the Latin adjective spiritualis, or 'spiritual', which translated the Greek adjective pneumatikos as it appears in the New Testament. Importantly, 'the spiritual' was originally not the opposite of 'bodily' or 'physical'. Rather, it was contrasted with 'fleshly' which meant worldly or contrary to God's spirit. So the distinction was basically between two approaches to life. A 'spiritual person' (for example, in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15) was simply someone who sought to live under the influence of God whereas a 'fleshly' (or worldly) person was concerned primarily with personal satisfaction, comfort, or success.
”
”
Philip Sheldrake (Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction)
“
If a religious community lacks cohesion, it will lose members. But other problems—from isolation to aggression—arise when a religious community is too cohesive, when it is so tightly bound there is no space for adhesive forces to form ties with the wider culture and members of other communities. When inward-looking groups face outward with fear or fury, they can become, to coin a term, dehisive, a bond-breaking social force. The history of religion provides myriad examples of volatile religious movements that overemphasized in-group solidarity and escalated tensions with outsiders.
”
”
Thomas A Tweed (Religion: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Any account of what religion does must note that it also provides personal meaning and wields social power. Religions offer an account of the way the world is and the way it should be. They provide meaning by generating, in Geertz's language, "conceptions of a general order of existence." These conceptions are transmitted through story, reinforced in ritual, anchored in artifacts, and lived out in moral action. When the worldview is internalized by adherents, the "conception" provides a lens for seeing the world. These lenses provide glimpses of different worlds, sometimes very different worlds. That might be obvious if we think about the variety of views of, for example, the afterlife, but these worldviews also shape perception in less obvious and more mundane ways, including how a devotee might see a feature of the natural world such as a mountain or an ocean.
”
”
Thomas A Tweed (Religion: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Sometimes religion fails to serve its meaning-making function at moments of catastrophic disruption or cultural change. For example, many elite and middle class Christian adherents were shaken by a Victorian spiritual crisis as intellectual challenges converged. Between 1840 and 1900 some lost faith in the face of Darwinian biology and the new geology, which challenged biblical claims about the origin and age of the universe; the new historical and literary study of the Bible, called Higher Criticism, which challenged the claim that scripture was divinely inspired; and the new comparative study of religions, which challenged the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity. Those doubters now looked out on a different ocean, as does the narrator in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," who once found comfort as waves in "the sea of faith" drew near, but who now hears only "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
”
”
Thomas A Tweed (Religion: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Despite worries about idolatry, images have been important in multiple traditions. For Hindus, worship includes darśan (pronounced dar-shan), which means seeing and being seen by a deity at a temple, and followers of other traditions have venerated many gods. To glimpse the astonishing variety of supernatural beings imaged in material form you might tour a museum near you, or search a museum's online collection for keywords like "religion" "god," or "goddess." At the British Museum, for example, you can find images from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Christian traditions, as well as everything from a bronze Egyptian cat representing the goddess Bastet made about 30 BCE to a fifteenth-century Aztec eagle from Central America carved in volcanic rock and associated with the solar god Tonatiuh.
”
”
Thomas A Tweed (Religion: A Very Short Introduction)
“
What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing?
What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing -
Things to do for Self Development:
Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills.
This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully.
Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below -
Process of Introducing Yourself:
1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself.
2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work.
3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work.
4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters.
Showing Professionalism:
How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are:
1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration.
2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job.
3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work.
Win the Client's Heart:
There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind.
Mistakes to Avoid:
Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes.
The Mistakes are:
1. Failure to identify oneself.
2. Show Engagement.
3. Lack of communication with the client etc.
Being Punctual:
It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time.
So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.
”
”
Bhairab IT Zone
“
Bone beds turn up sporadically elsewhere, with spectacular examples in the Dinosaur National Monument in the USA and in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. In eastern England there are several within the early Cretaceous strata, which include, as well as bones, structures termed coprolites, some of which represent the petrified faeces of dinosaurs or marine reptiles. In the middle of the 19th century, when England’s population was booming and the farmers were struggling to feed everybody, it was discovered that these fragments (which, being bone, are phosphate-rich) made a superb fertilizer when crushed and acid-treated. A thriving and highly profitable industry formed to quarry away these ‘coprolite beds’.
Some considerable figures were involved in this industry. John Henslow, Charles Darwin’s beloved mentor of his time at Cambridge, seems to have first encouraged the farmers of eastern England to use such fossil manure. William Buckland also became involved. An extraordinary combination of early savant of geology at Oxford and Dean of Westminster, he was the first to scientifically describe a dinosaur ( Megalosaurus); carried out his fieldwork in academic gown; reputedly ate his way through the entire animal kingdom; and coined the term ‘coprolite’, using these petrified droppings to help reconstruct the ecology of ancient animals. Later, he energetically collaborated with the celebrated German chemist Justus Liebig (who had worked out how to chemically treat these fossil phosphates to make fertilizer) to show how they could be used by agriculturalists, once demonstrating their efficacy by exhibiting, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a turnip, a yard in circumference, that he had grown with such prehistoric assistance.
It is related strata (geologically rare phosphate-rich deposits, usually biologically formed) that are still a mainstay—if a rapidly depleting one—of modern agriculture. In a very real sense, these particular rocks are keeping us all alive.
”
”
Jan Zalasiewicz (Rocks: A Very Short Introduction)
“
A reader of Noam Chomsky’s political writings would conclude that the world’s most evil nations are the United States and Israel. They are the target of nearly all his invective. For example, he has denied that Israel is a democracy or that it could even become one.22 Typical of his statements about the evil nature of America was his comment during the war in Vietnam that the U.S. Defense Department is “the most hideous institution on earth.”23 As regards the Jews and Zionism, Chomsky is so hate-filled that in 1980 he defended the publication of a book written by a French neo-Nazi who claimed that the Holocaust was a fiction made up by Zionists. Chomsky’s defense was subsequently published as the introduction to the book. He claims that he was merely defending the French professor’s academic freedom. But when Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times asked Chomsky to comment on the professor’s views, Chomsky noted that he had no views he wished to state. As Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic, has noted: “On the question, that is, as to whether or not six million Jews were murdered,Noam Chomsky apparently is an agnostic”24 (for a further analysis of Chomsky, and the phenomenon of Jewish antisemitism, see this chapter’s EPILOGUE: SELF-HATING JEWS: EXPLAINING JEWISH ANTISEMITISM).
”
”
Dennis Prager (Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism (An Examination of Antisemitism))
“
In order to ensure that only states which had achieved monetary stability should participate in the euro, five ‘convergence criteria’ were established regarding rates of inflation and of interest; ceilings for budget deficits and for total public debt; and stability of exchange rates. Budget deficits, for example, were not to exceed 3 per cent of GDP and public debt was to be limited to 60 per cent of GDP, unless it was ‘sufficiently diminishing’ and approaching the limit ‘at a satisfactory pace’. Only states that had satisfied the criteria were to be allowed to participate; and once again, stages and a timetable were fixed, in order to give at least a minimum number of states the time to do so. Others
”
”
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Of the early founders, the most eminent proponent of physical geography as a scientific entity was undoubtedly the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. On his many travels, he combined observations with measurements of temperature, pressure, and the Earth’s magnetic field, and made generalizations about the geographical distribution of vegetation, global-scale patterns of temperature (depicted by isotherms on maps), the ways in which temperature falls and vegetation varies with increasing altitude (on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, for example), the alignment of volcanoes, and the course of ocean currents. In his major works, written around the middle of the 19th century, such as
Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe
, published in 1849, he emphasized not only relationships within the natural geo-ecosphere but also linkages to human societies. A year earlier, Mary Somerville, based at the University of Oxford, published
Physical Geography
and defined the subject as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings and the causes of that distribution’.
”
”
John A. Matthews (Geography: A Very Short Introduction)
“
One of the clearest principles of contemporary international law is that States are not free to threaten or use military force against each other or to intervene in each other’s affairs. That is one reason why, for example, western States have been ready to take action against terrorist groups in Iraq, where the States act at the invitation of the Iraqi government, but have been very reluctant to take such action in Syria, where there is no such invitation.
”
”
Vaughan Lowe (International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
There are many generally accepted limitations on the weapons and tactics that may be used in wartime. Many of them are set out in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the two Additional Protocols of 1977 which deal respectively with international armed conflicts and with non-international (internal) armed conflicts. (A third protocol, adopted in 2005, adopted the ‘red crystal’ as an international symbol to indicate protected persons and objects, alongside the red cross and red crescent symbols.) The Geneva Conventions also prescribe rules on matters such as the treatment of prisoners of war, and on the rights and duties of States that are in occupation of foreign territory. The latter rules, along with rules from the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, are applicable to the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the West Bank and Gaza, for example.
”
”
Vaughan Lowe (International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
There are some matters on which all, or practically all, States genuinely take the same position. The idea that torture is unacceptable is an example. There may be differences as to what actually amounts to torture: the debates over water-boarding were the product of such differences. There may even be a mental reservation that would reluctantly regard torture as permissible as a last resort in an extreme situation such as the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario; and the list of States Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture certainly includes a number which are reputed to resort to torture. But no State will actually speak out in favour of maintaining a legal right for States routinely to engage in torture.
”
”
Vaughan Lowe (International Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
general experience of brave men. Kenshin, who fought for fourteen years with Shingen, when he heard of the latter’s death, wept aloud at the loss of “the best of enemies.” It was this same Kenshin who had set a noble example for all time in his treatment of Shingen, whose provinces lay in a mountainous region quite away from the sea, and who had consequently depended upon the Hōjō provinces of the Tōkaidō for salt. The Hōjō prince wishing to weaken him, although not openly at war with him, had cut off from Shingen all traffic in this important article. Kenshin, hearing of his enemy’s dilemma and able to obtain his salt from the coast of his own dominions, wrote Shingen that in his opinion the Hōjō lord had committed a very mean act, and that although he (Kenshin) was at war with him (Shingen) he had ordered his subjects to furnish him with plenty of salt—adding, “I do not fight with salt, but with the sword,
”
”
Nitobe Inazō (Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan: With an Extensive Introduction and Notes by Alexander Bennett)
“
From the introduction by Arthur Livingston
Page xxv:
What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic character, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies—the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance—are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictatorships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority—the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example.
”
”
Gaetano Mosca (The Ruling Class)
“
We have historically focused on the use of human language, for example, as a unique characteristic that separates us from animals and makes us "better." Who says? In the first place, there is, and we have seen, compelling evidence that animals other than humans can learn human language. Moreover, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that animals are able to communicate, often in very sophisticated ways, with members of their own species. The more relevant question, however, is what is inherently better about a species that uses human words and symbols to communicate? Birds can fly; we cannot. What makes the ability to use words and symbols better for moral purposes than the ability to fly? The answer, of course, is that we say so.
”
”
Gary L. Francione (Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?)
“
Imagine for a moment that you want to attend a concert or play. After parking the car and walking six city blocks on a cold, rainy evening, and while lining up at the entrance for another half hour, you glimpse an inviting auditorium seat. The seat appears to you not as a meaningless object of neutral observation but as a place of comfort where you can rest and warm your weary bones while enjoying the anticipated performance. You do not first perceive this seat from a purely objective stance in terms of its compositional material or its measurements. Such a theoretical stance is not our primary mode of perception, but a secondary, unnatural way of looking at things we adopt when we abstract something from the context of our experience to study it separately. Should, for example, the seat collapse under us as we sat down, only then would we adopt a scientific attitude and examine the seat to determine its structure and the reasons for its malfunction.
”
”
Jens Zimmermann (Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
In contemporary society, a large capitalist enterprise, considered from the point of view of its labor technology, can serve as an example of a highly organized, rich-in-content, and plastic living environment. In this limited sphere, processes of development unfold rather harmoniously. For instance, the introduction of a new technological invention significantly reduces the expenditure of labor power in some given aspect of this production. A series of further changes follow immediately.
This matter appears in an entirely different light when we consider this company in connection with others. The capitalist system is characterized overall by anarchy.
”
”
Alexandr Bogdanov
“
There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot’s response to Helen Gardner’s book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.
”
”
Roger Scruton (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Adams disagreed. “I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light.” And as he later reflected on the day’s discussion, he realized how thoroughly he disagreed with nearly everything Calhoun and the other Southerners said by way of defense of slavery. “It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract, they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee’s manners, because he has no habit of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? It perverts human reason, and reduces man endowed with logical powers to maintain that slavery is sanctioned by the Christian religion, that slaves are happy and contented in their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and write in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color.” Adams had never pondered slavery at such length, and the experience made him fear for the future of the republic. “The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this discussion is that the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified; cruel and oppressive, by riveting the chains of slavery, by pledging the faith of freedom to maintain and perpetuate the tyranny of the master; and grossly unequal and impolitic, by admitting that slaves are at once enemies to be kept in subjection, property to be secured or restored to their owners, and persons not to be represented themselves, but for whom their masters are privileged with nearly a double share of representation. The consequence has been that this slave representation has governed the Union.
”
”
H.W. Brands (Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants)
“
In classical mathematics there occur non-constructive or indirect existence proofs, which intuitionists do not accept. For example, to prove there exists an n such that P(n), the classical mathematician may deduce a contradiction from the assumption for all n, not P(n). Under both the classical and the intuitionistic logic, by reductio ad absurdum this gives not for all n, not P(n). The classical logic allows this result to be transformed into there exists an n such that P(n), but not in general the intuitionistic … the classical meaning, that somewhere in the completed infinite totality of the natural numbers there occurs an n such that P(n), is not available to him, since he does not conceive the natural numbers as a completed totality.
”
”
Stephen Cole Kleene (Introduction to Metamathematics)
“
For example, when I become aware that my emotions are unsettling and that I am in fact feeling anxious, I become further aware that this anxiety might cause me to overreact at other smaller things. Once you realize that you are in a state of despair and anxiety, then you
”
”
Kiril Valtchev (Stoicism: Introduction to the Stoic Way of Life, Reality, Happiness and How to Use Stoicism to Improve Your Life)
“
massive transitions to something entirely “new” were always defined in terms of a response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come. World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-to-grave state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s. Today the situation is fundamentally different; in the intervening decades (in the Western world) the role of the state has shrunk considerably. This is a situation that is set to change because it is hard to imagine how an exogenous shock of such magnitude as the one inflicted by COVID-19 could be addressed with purely market-based solutions. Already and almost overnight, the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the complex and delicate balance between the private and public realms in favour of the latter. It has revealed that social insurance is efficient and that offloading an ever-greater deal of responsibilities (like health and education) to individuals and the markets may not be in the best interest of society.
”
”
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
“
For example, in England, prior to the introduction of mandatory vaccinations in 1953, there were two smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants per year. But at the beginning of the 1970s, nearly 20 years after the introduction of mandatory vaccinations, which had led to a 98 percent vaccination rate,195 England suffered 10 smallpox deaths per 10,000 inhabitants annually; five times as many as before. “The smallpox epidemic reached its peak after vaccinations had been introduced,“ summarizes William Farr, who was responsible for compiling statistics in London.
”
”
Torsten Engelbrecht (Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio, Spanish Flu. How the Medical Industry ... Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense)
“
Desire cannot be understood apart from the contexts, relational and cultural, that shape it. A patient with bulimia, for example, may not desire food as a substitute for mother but, rather, because that is the only available "vocabulary" through which her desire can be expressed. The analyst's task becomes not only to uncover desires that have been defended against but also to help the patient begin to want freely so that, over time, new containers of desire can emerge, both inside and outside the analytic relationship.
”
”
Tom Wooldridge (Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction)
“
If there is one commonality between patients with eating disorders, perhaps it is that there is disharmony in the link between body and mind. This can manifest in various ways such as, for example, the “false bodies" described in a later chapter.
”
”
Tom Wooldridge (Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction)
“
The notion of a sexualized Jesus may make modern worshippers cringe, but the most prominent early Church fathers did not shrink from the concept. They embraced it fully and made it the basis of many of their writings. For example, Origen, head of the catechetical school in Alexandria, wrote a commentary on Song of Songs. In the introduction to this work he discusses the Christian transformation of sexual desire from that of a man for a woman—or harlot—to that of a man for Jesus. Origen makes it clear that Jesus takes the place of the woman in an explicitly sexual context. The shift from “lust” to “love of Jesus” takes place at the age of sexual maturation, under the guidance of the Church: “For everyone who comes to what they call the age of puberty loves something, whether less than rightly when he loves what he should not [which Origen has previously said is a woman or harlot], or rightly and beneficially when he loves what he should [which is Jesus, as sexual love],” writes Origen in his Commentary on the Song of Songs.
”
”
David C.A. Hillman (Original Sin: Sex, Drugs, and the Church)
“
Precision medicine is revolutionizing the healthcare industry, and ExactMeds is at the forefront of this exciting field. In this article, we’ll delve into what precision medicine is, why it matters, and how ExactMeds is playing a crucial role in improving patient outcomes.
Introduction to precision medicine and its impact on healthcare.
Explanation of how ExactMeds tailors treatment plans for individual patients.
Real-world examples of success stories with ExactMeds’ precision medicine solutions.
The future of precision medicine and how ExactMeds plans to continue innovating in the field.
”
”
Johhn
“
The first such example was the article on equal pay in the Treaty of Rome. France was ahead of other founder states in having legislated that women be paid equally with men for equal work. In order to keep sectors that employed a high proportion of women competitive, France demanded that its partners introduce equal pay too. With the general movement towards gender equality, this was to become one of the most popular European laws. By the time of the Amsterdam Treaty, there was ready agreement to extend the principle from equal pay to equal opportunities and equal treatment in all matters relating to employment.
”
”
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
As far as the Balkans were concerned, the result of the EU’s initial failure was a return to the drawing board and the production of a Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe. This overarching set of policies, designed to strengthen democracy, human rights, and economic reform, was later followed by Stability and Association Agreements between the EU and each of the West Balkan states. This is backed by the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, which provides the West Balkans with some €500 million per year. With the slow stabilization of the region, the EU has been able to offer membership to Croatia; full candidate status to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia; and a provisional status to the others with Stability and Association Agreements, thus providing a strong incentive for local politicians to follow the example of the other Central and Eastern Europeans.
”
”
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
When the British government presents proposals for Royal Assent, the responses on behalf of the Monarch are still given in Anglo-Norman, for example: ‘La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult’ (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) or ‘La Reyne/Le Roy le veult’ (The Queen/King wills it).
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Although independent of grammar, sound changes might well have important consequences for the grammatical system. A good example is the extreme erosion of final consonants in French, which has left singular and plural sounding identical in many cases. Labov (1994: 569) quotes a speech by Charles De Gaulle in Madagascar in which he states: ‘Je m’adresse aux peuples français – au pluriel’ (‘I address the French peoples – in the plural’), clearly feeling the need to add ‘au pluriel’ because singular au peuple and plural aux peuples [opæpl] are homophonous.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Another important internal process is grammaticalization, by which a full lexical word acquires a grammatical function. An example here is back, which in its original meaning refers to the rear of the human torso, a meaning lost in the complex preposition at the back of, meaning ‘behind’. Similarly, the negative particle pas in French originally had only its full lexical meaning of ‘step’, and was used to reinforce the negative ne with some related verbs, e.g. il ne marcha pas (‘He did not walk a step’). But gradually in negative contexts it lost the meaning ‘step’ and became a general marker of negation, e.g Il ne parle pas (‘He does not speak’, not ‘He doesn’t speak a step’). The loss of lexical meaning that accompanies grammaticalization is known as semantic bleaching; very often phonetic reduction is also involved as the item evolves from lexical to functional unit (see Case study below).
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
The chain shift appears to have been triggered by a change in realization of the /i:/ vowel in words like bite and side, which would once have been pronounced [bi:tə] and [si:də], but diphthongized to [əI], and later [aI] similar developments affected the back vowel /u:/ in, for example, house [hu:sə], and mouse [mu:sə], which diphthongized to [əɷ] (and later [aɷ]) This left a space in the area formerly occupied by /u:/ and /i:/, into which the vowels immediately below them, i.e. half-close /e:/ and /o:/ of beet and boot respectively, could move. This is called a drag chain effect, in that a movement in one position frees up space into which other vowels may move, but the converse push chain effects appear also to have been involved in GVS. The open front vowel /a:/ of mate ([ma:tə]) shifted initially to [æ:] and then to [ε:], forcing the vowel in the existing [ε:] set (e.g. beat) to move up into the /e:/ position. Similar developments affected long back vowels. The overall effect of these changes from a systemic point of view has been to maximize available space for vowel oppositions in the vocal tract, without changing the overall number of oppositions available. A consequence is the rather chaotic mismatch between sound and grapheme which we witness in English spelling.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
What is meant by professionalism in health care?
2. Give five examples of how professionalism is
exhibited in each of the following areas:
s Attitude
s Conduct
●Meeting
”
”
Dakota Mitchell (Introduction to Health Care)
“
fourth reason for this interpretation is seen in Paul’s purpose in this context. His purpose has been to persuade the Philippians that they should “do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3), and he continues by telling them, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4). To persuade them to be humble and to put the interests of others first, he then holds up the example of Christ: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant . . .” (Phil. 2:5–7).
”
”
Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
“
Now in holding up Christ as an example, he wants the Philippians to imitate Christ. But certainly he is not asking the Philippian Christians to “give up” or “lay aside” any of their essential attributes or abilities! He is not asking them to “give up” their intelligence or strength or skill and become a diminished version of what they were. Rather, he is asking them to put the interests of others first: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4). And because that is his goal, it fits the context to understand that he is using Christ as the supreme example of one who did just that: he put the interests of others first and was willing to give up some of the privilege and status that was his as God.
”
”
Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
“
The language of martyrdom and persecution is often the language of war. It forces a rupture between “us” and “them” and perpetuates and legitimizes an aggressive posture toward “the other” and “our enemies,” so that we can “defend the faith.” Without this posture and the polarized view of the world upon which it relies, we might—without compromising our religious or political convictions—be able to reach common ground and engage in productive government, and we might focus on real examples of actual suffering and actual oppression.
”
”
James Martin (The 10 Best Books to Read for Easter: Selections to Inspire, Educate, & Provoke: Excerpts from new and classic titles by bestselling authors in the field, with an Introduction by James Martin, SJ.)
“
Lord help us to understand that everything we desire to achieve has to have a basic start/foundation. For example: every story has an introduction, body and closing. So there is no way we can skip one of the three elements.
”
”
Euginia Herlihy
“
Remember to take your time. There is no need to rush.
”
”
Dan Morris (Bayes' Theorem Examples: A Visual Introduction For Beginners)
“
Examples of supervised learning algorithms include: decision trees, back propagation, random forests and logistic regression.
”
”
Chris Smith (Decision Trees and Random Forests: A Visual Introduction For Beginners: A Simple Guide to Machine Learning with Decision Trees)
“
Certainly, what Kant calls the transcendental reference, experience and object of experience are in a sense present in both opposed views of the nature of the subjective *a-priori*. In both cases the object must 'order itself' according to the rules of the knowing mind or its functions, irrespective of whether the specific function of cognition is based on a systematic construction, synthetization, formation of the object from 'given' sensational material or on a methodical selection-process (suppression, abstraction, disregard) imposed on a self-constituting object. For if the order of selection in which the fulness of the world, as it is in ipseity, reaches man (or a particular kind of man, e.g., a type of racial or cultural unity) is so governed that an object of essence *B* is only given when an object of essence *A* has already been given (if, that is to say, *A* has datum-priority over *B* in order of time―not necessarily in direct succession), then if an object *X* is simultaneously of essence *A* and *B*, everything which is true of *A* must necessarily be true of *X*―not vice versa. For example, if spatiality and extensity have strict perceptual priority over all essential properties of matter and corporeality, geometry must be strictly valid for all possible bodies. But the same principle, the applicability of geometry to all bodies without exception, would still hold good if Kant's doctrine were true―though it denies the very reality of extension and space, and explains the spatial form as merely a subjective aspect of the datum. Thus in both cases the transcendental validity of the so-called *a-priori*, even for the objects of experience, would persist, so that in itself it offers us *no* criterion of choice between one or other *hypothesis*―that which supposes a synthetic addition of the form on the part of the spontaneous mind, or the other, which postulates an ordered selection in conformity with foreknown essences."
―from_On the Eternal in Man_. The Nature of Philosophy, with a new introduction by Graham McAleer
”
”
Max Scheler
“
Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example of a greenfield DevOps project is the Hosted LabVIEW product in 2009 at National Instruments, a thirty-year-old organization with five thousand employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. To bring this product to market quickly, a new team was created and allowed to operate outside of the existing IT processes and explore the use of public clouds. The initial team included an applications architect, a systems architect, two developers, a system automation developer, an operations lead, and two offshore operations staff. By using DevOps practices, they were able to deliver Hosted LabVIEW to market in half the time of their normal product introductions.
”
”
Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
“
Motivated by my research and examples such as Feynman, I decided that focusing my attention on a bottom-up understanding of my own field’s most difficult results would be a good first step toward revitalizing my career capital stores. To initiate these efforts, I chose a paper that was well cited in my research niche, but that was also considered obtuse and hard to follow. The paper focused on only a single result—the analysis of an algorithm that offers the best-known solution to a well-known problem. Many people have cited this result, but few have understood the details that support it. I decided that mastering this notorious paper would prove a perfect introduction to my new regime of self-enforced deliberate practice. Here
”
”
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
“
Earth, for example, is made up of oxygen (almost 50 percent) and smaller amounts of iron (19 percent), silicon (14 percent), magnesium (12.5 percent),
”
”
David Christian (Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2) (Volume 2))
“
The provision of news and information, for example, has been ‘dumbed down’ to a previously unimaginable degree, and the line between Hollywood fiction and journalistic fact is increasingly blurry. Between the latest action blockbuster and a Fox News ‘embedded’ exclusive – or, at an ‘advanced’ level, between some sentimental Oscar-bait and a John Simpson BBC news report – locating the line is no easy task.20 In search of the facts, sceptical and curious citizens turn to the web for scraps of truth, and struggle to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff. But their eagerness to educate themselves and their hostility to the mainstream, corporate- and state-owned media assures us that the rational pursuit of objective reality hasn’t been forsaken in a world of hyper-propaganda and philosophical relativism.
”
”
Paul McLaughlin (Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism)
“
Unscrupulous leaders can manipulate this mechanism in whole populations. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly described the Jews as Untermenschen (subhumans) and through the skilful use of propaganda was able to induce enough Germans to project their shadow on to them as to make the Holocaust possible. The
”
”
Anthony Stevens (Jung: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 40))
“
No one wants to suffer. But much as we would all like to live a totally happy life, suffering is an inescapable fact of our human existence. The observation that ‘Man is born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward’ may not have been much consolation to Job but, nevertheless, remains an uncomfortable truth. Generally speaking, suffering arises through our encounters with problems and difficulties; this is why much of our time is spent trying to avoid them, even though they are inherent in life. In trying to avoid problems, however, we are often simply putting off the inevitable to a future date, by which time the trouble has usually grown much more difficult to resolve. Personal relationships are a good example of this. The failure to tackle a problem between two people — a clash of desires, for instance – usually for fear of not knowing what the consequences will be, or perhaps simply because of a dislike of conflict, can very easily lead to a build-up of resentments which, when finally expressed, can be immensely destructive. The story of the ‘mild-mannered’ civil servant who, in 1987, was jailed for strangling his wife after twenty-six years of marriage, ostensibly because she simply moved his favourite mustard from its usual place at the dinner table, is an extreme, but true, example of this.
”
”
Richard G. Causton (The Buddha In Daily Life: An Introduction to the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin)
“
The V connective of first-order logic, used in many earlier examples, is built into Coq. It can be viewed as the dependent function type constructor.
”
”
Adam Chlipala (Certified Programming with Dependent Types: A Pragmatic Introduction to the Coq Proof Assistant (The MIT Press))
“
Second, you need an effective opening. That means thanking the group that invited you to speak and expressing appreciation if someone gives you a nice introduction. Next, you should tell a joke or story to loosen up the crowd and show your human side. For example, after expressing appreciation for an effusive introduction, I might say, “But you forgot my basketball career!” I would then briefly recount my teenage efforts to guard Calvin Murphy, who went on to be a high scorer at college and an All-Star player for the Houston Rockets. I was determined to guard Calvin closely—if he went to the water cooler during time-outs, I went, too. By guarding Calvin really closely for the whole game, I held him to 56 points—only 6 above his season’s average. At that point I decided to give up my basketball ambitions and concentrate on finance.
”
”
Robert C. Pozen (Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours)
“
Introduction. You introduce the characters/environment in the story, and hook in your listener. For example, “The music bumped and the ground shook below me. I looked around in awe. I had just stepped into my first nightclub in Asia, after nearly 30 hours of travel. And I was scared.” 2) Development. You share the characters’ main struggles and obstacles. For example, “It took me about six months and a few lucky breaks. But once I started making $2k a month, I pulled the trigger and bought my plane ticket in May of 2014. I was set to leave at the end of July. But a week after I bought my ticket, I met Natalie. She was the first girl in years that I truly connected with. The problem? I knew I’d have to leave her…” 3) Climax. This is the turning point in the story. For example, “And that’s when it hit me. ‘Holy fuck. What have I done?!’ I thought. I’d flown all the way across the world to fulfill some dream of adventure, travel, and entrepreneurship. But maybe that’s not what I wanted after all.” 4) Resolution. You wind the story down and wrap it up. It’s the “come-down” from the climax. For example, “I decided to give Vietnam a real try, even though it was scary. So I guess sometimes, you have to scare yourself a little bit. You have to destroy your life to let the next great thing happen. And that’s okay. Because you can build it back up better than you ever thought possible.
”
”
Dave Perrotta (Conversation Casanova: How to Effortlessly Start Conversations and Flirt Like a Pro)
“
The role of the body was thus to reproduce in action the life of the mind, to emphasize its motor articulations as the orchestra conductor does for a musical score; the brain did not have thinking as its function but that of hindering the thought from becoming lost in dream; it was the organ of attention to life. Such was the conclusion to which I was led by the specially detailed study of normal and pathological facts, more generally through external observation. But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a “substance” whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where memories are preserved. They preserve themselves, as we admit, for example, when we pronounce a word. In order to pronounce it we have to remember the first half of it while we are articulating the second. But no one will think that the first has been immediately deposited in a drawer, cerebral or otherwise, so that consciousness may come for it a moment later. But if that is the case for the first half of the word, it will be the same for the preceding word, which is an integral part of it as far as sound and meaning are concerned; it will be the same from the beginning of the sentence, and the preceding sentence, and the whole discourse that we could have made very long, indefinitely long had we wished. Now, our whole life, from the time of our first awakening to consciousness, is something like this indefinitely prolonged discourse. Its duration is substantial, indivisible insofar as it is pure duration.
”
”
Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
“
For the church, it is perhaps important to know that the obedience of faith was lived out in history by the flesh-and-blood man Jesus, for his example teaches us that to trust in the power of God over history is not to trust in vain.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
Another example of assurance that believers will persevere to the end is found in Paul’s statement to the Philippians: “I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). It is true that the word “you” here is plural (Gk. hymas), and thus he is referring to Christians in the Philippian church generally, but he is still talking about the specific believers to whom he is writing, and saying that God’s good work that began in them will continue and will be completed at the day Christ returns.
”
”
Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
“
For example, by aggregating search data, we might be able to find out what legal issues and concerns are troubling particular communities; by analysing databases of decisions by judges and regulators, we may be able to predict outcomes in entirely novel ways; and by collecting huge bodies of commercial contracts and exchanges of emails, we might gain insight into the greatest legal risks that specific sectors face.
”
”
Richard Susskind (Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future)
“
There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol’s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate’s leadership from Samsung’s founder to his son in the late 1980s.72 A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea’s best and brightest young people.73
”
”
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
“
To talk about information theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer yet never letting him hear an example of the composer’s music.
”
”
John R. Pierce (An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (Dover Books on Mathematics))
“
The introduction of networked lights is happening because of another trend. Manufacturers have been replacing incandescent and fluorescent lights with ultra-efficient LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. The U.S. Department of Energy says that LEDs had 4 percent of the U.S. lighting market in 2013, but it predicts this figure will rise to 74 percent of all lights by 2030. Because LEDs are solid-state devices that emit light from a semiconductor chip, they already sit on a circuit board. That means they can readily share space with sensors, wireless chips, and a small computer, allowing light fixtures to become networked sensor hubs. For example, last year Philips gave outside developers access to the software that runs its Hue line of residential LED lights. Now it’s possible to download Goldee, a smartphone app that turns your house the color of a Paris sunset, or Ambify, a $2.99 app created by a German programmer that makes the lights flash to music as in a jukebox.
”
”
Anonymous
“
what I call Destination Jewish Culture. These programs are also low barrier and held in secular spaces. However, they usually require some level of planned participation (a set start time and destination event) and may charge a nominal fee (though no more than what would be charged at a secular equivalent). Good examples of programs that might fit in this circle are Jewish film festivals held in commercial theaters or a Jewish musical event held in a concert hall. The third level of Public Space Judaism is what might be described as Open Door Community programs. These may be held within Jewish communal institutions, but they are open to the entire community. A good example of this approach is the Reform Jewish movement’s Taste of Judaism program (although the program is not limited to the Reform movement). This brief three-week introduction to Judaism is free, welcomes all participants
”
”
Kerry M. Olitzky (Playlist Judaism: Making Choices for a Vital Future)
“
In this simplistic example we have to admit that the sender has no way of knowing whose padlock is on the briefcase and that it might be possible for an adversary to impersonate the receiver and place their padlock on the briefcase. This is a problem that has to be addressed. The ‘Whose padlock is it?’ question in this briefcase example is similar to the ‘Whose public key is it?’ question that is so important when public key systems are used.
”
”
Fred C. Piper (Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 68))
“
The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness. It seems reasonable to assume that relevance of results is the most important factor: blindingly fast, useless answers do not make a user happy. However, user perceptions do not always coincide with system designers' notions of quality. For example, user happiness commonly depends very strongly on user interface design issues, including the layout, clarity, and responsiveness of the user interface, which are independent of the quality of the results returned.
”
”
Christopher D. Manning (Introduction to Information Retrieval)
“
Thus, metaphors reshape perception. For example, when the Gospel of John presents Jesus as saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51a), the message jolts his hearers, who are looking for him to play the role of Moses by providing them with miraculous bread to eat (6:30–31). Jesus’ striking response refuses the identification with Moses and posits instead a metaphorical conjunction between himself and the manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness. The metaphor quickly takes a gruesome turn when Jesus goes on to say, “[T]he bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” and affirms that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” (6:51b, 54a). At one level, the metaphorical shock induces the reader to confront the scandal of John’s claim that “the Word became flesh.” (Indeed, the statement that the Word became flesh strikingly illustrates the power of metaphor to “mutilate our world of meanings” and create a new framework for perception.)13 On another level, the metaphor leads the reader to make the imaginative connection between the Exodus story and the church’s Eucharist, with the flesh of Jesus as the startling common term. The hearer of such a metaphor is confronted by two options. We can take offense at this jarring conjunction of images, as did those disciples who went away murmuring, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60). Or, alternatively, we can “understand” the metaphor. To “understand” it, however, is to stand under its authority, to allow our life and perception of reality to be changed in light of the “ontological flash”14 created by the metaphorical conjunction, so that we confess with Peter, “Lord, to whom [else] can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68).
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
First, we are not starting from nowhere, reading the New Testament as though it had just been found sealed in a cave; we are the heirs of a community that has been reading and performing these texts for nineteen hundred years already. Our interpretation will be our own, just as a new performance of King Lear (Lash’s example) will be a fresh product of the skills and sensibilities of the actors, but our interpretation will also stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. We can point to prior performances that illuminate the meaning of the text. As Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, “The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
One of the purposes for treating a range of different issues is to show that the decisions reached are not based on ad hoc prooftexting; rather, they represent the coherent outworking of a considered set of judgments about the way in which the New Testament ought to form the life of the church. One reason that appeals to the authority of Scripture often seem unconvincing is that the church has been inconsistent in shaping its life according to Scripture. For example, some voices in the church have insisted stoutly on the normative authority of a few texts dealing with sexual morality while ignoring or finessing equally clear New Testament teachings on possessions and violence. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that the church’s witness is ineffectual? If the church is to have any credibility, any integrity, we must seek to be a Scripture-shaped community in all respects, not merely on selected issues of our own preference.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
Is it appropriate for those who profess to be followers of this gentle Shepherd to take up lethal weapons against enemies? More broadly, is it ever God’s will for Christians to employ violence in defense of justice? The New Testament contains important texts that seem to suggest that this question must be answered in the negative, but human experience presents us over and over again with situations that appear to require violent action to oppose evil. An often-cited example is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s agonized decision to participate in a plot to kill Hitler.
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
What made this spending possible was that having adopted the euro, Greece and the other European periphery states (Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Ireland) were effectively endowed with Germany’s credit rating on the assumption that the ECB would back all outstanding debt issued by member states since it was all in the “same” new euro currency. As such, the historically high borrowing costs of these countries fell. Greece’s borrowing costs, for example, fell from 20 percent on a ten-year bond before the introduction of the euro to around 4 percent in 2005, and in the case of Greece in particular, more borrowing was the result.24 Since Greece was able to borrow more easily, money became more plentiful locally, financing both consumption and investment. However, this also raised Greece’s labor costs relative to its Euro Area neighbors; its competitiveness fell, widening its current account deficit—Greece was importing more than it was exporting with the extra cash.
”
”
Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
“
The original audience of the book would have read such symbolism “as fluently as any modern reader of the daily papers reads the conventional symbols of a political cartoon.”10 (For example, American readers of a political cartoon featuring an elephant and a donkey immediately know that the elephant symbolizes the Republican party and that the donkey symbolizes the Democrats.)
”
”
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
“
The new covenant is the eschatological fulfillment of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants by bringing the Abrahamic promises to bear on Jews and Gentiles through faith in Jesus Christ. What is new in the new covenant is the death and resurrection of Jesus as the means of salvation, Jesus as the object of faith, God’s people as multiethnic, and the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The obligations of the new covenant are not the moral law of the Decalogue but the example of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus, and life in the Spirit. Those things represent the “law of Christ” (Gal 6:2) and their performance fulfills the Mosaic law. Nonetheless, the law remains as a type of wisdom for Christian living, but it no longer defines the constitution or conduct for God’s people.
”
”
Michael F. Bird (Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction)
“
The prime advantage of defining the geometry of the pebble's surface in terms of general coordinates is that we can then proceed to define tensors that are true in any coordinate system, tensors that describe both the pebble's curvature (the Riemann curvature tensor) and physics (the field equations, for example).
”
”
Peter Collier (A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes Towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity)
“
In other words, the utilitarian must appeal to principles to determine what constitutes a good or harmful consequence. What makes an outcome harmful or beneficial thus depends on a prior commitment to principles. It seems that the utilitarian must “smuggle in” principles to give substance to the notions of harm and benefit. For example, why should we conclude that a murder victim has been harmed? What makes that a harm if his or her life is not sacred, possessing intrinsic human dignity? It’s true that someone is harmed when murdered, but what makes that harmful is that the principle of the dignity of persons is violated. You could make a similar argument for other actions that produce harms, such as the above example of sexual assault.
”
”
Scott B. Rae (Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics)
“
Normally, making a moral judgment involves at least four specific considerations.6 First, you should consider the action itself. This is usually the focus of a moral judgment but hardly the only aspect of moral evaluation. Second, you should evaluate the motive of the person (called the “moral actor”) performing the action. In some cases the motive is the only difference between two otherwise identical actions. For example, your motive in giving something to someone is often the only difference between a gift and a bribe. Of course, sometimes you might not be able to determine the motive, in which case it cannot be assessed. Third, you should evaluate the consequences of your actions and decisions. Bear in mind, however, that actions may be inherently right or wrong, regardless of the consequences.
”
”
Scott B. Rae (Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics)
“
Self-cherishing is a state of mind that is reflected in our actions. However, we can’t evaluate others’ degree of selfishness and altruism merely by their actions. For example, one person may flamboyantly give a thousand dollars to charity with the motivation to appear generous to her friends. Another person may humbly contribute five dollars to a charity with the sincere wish that others receive benefit. In fact, the latter person is the generous one, while the former is stingily seeking a good reputation.
”
”
Thubten Chodron (Open Heart, Clear Mind: An Introduction to the Buddha's Teachings)
“
When we recognize that there are unbelievers in the visible church, there is a danger that we may become overly suspicious. We may begin to doubt the salvation of many true believers and thereby bring great confusion into the church. Calvin warned against this danger by saying that we must make a “charitable judgment” whereby we recognize as members of the church all who “by confession of faith, by example of life, and by partaking of the sacraments, profess the same God and Christ with us.”9 We should not try to exclude people from the fellowship of the church until they by public sin bring discipline upon themselves. On the other hand, of course, the church should not tolerate in its membership “public unbelievers” who by profession or life clearly proclaim themselves to be outside the true church.
”
”
Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
“
Recent discussions of how natural selection changes biological populations tend to be expressed in the form of mathematical models. These models are written down, of course. They are formulated using mathematical symbolism, and they have to be supplemented with a commentary telling us (for example) which phenomena in the real world are being represented by the model. But we should not expect an analysis of how mathematical models relate to the world to use the same concepts as an analysis of how hypotheses expressed in ordinary language relate to the world.
”
”
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series))
“
Along the way after introductions to putting Boyd’s, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz (two other brilliant military (human conflict) thinkers) as well as other’s thoughts to practice, we begin introductions to actually implementing these ideas in the classroom along with examples of how they translated to the street. Over the course of the book, these real-world examples compile to actually form a real world Program of Instruction (POI) for a course that was implemented successful in a large police force just a couple of years ago.
”
”
Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
“
The attitude of the average decent person towards the classics of his own tongue is one of distrust... I will take, for an example, Sir Thomas Browne, as to whom the average person has no offensive juvenile memories. He is bound to have read somewhere that the style of Sir Thomas Browne is unsurpassed by anything in English literature. One day he sees the Religio Medici in a shop-window (or, rather, outside a shop-window, for he would hesitate about entering a bookshop), and he buys it, by way of a mild experiment. He does not expect to be enchanted by it; a profound instinct tells him that Sir Thomas Browne is “not in his line”; and in the result he is even less enchanted than he expected to be. He reads the introduction, and he glances at the first page or two of the work. He sees nothing but words. The work makes no appeal to him whatever. He is surrounded by trees, and cannot perceive the forest. He puts the book away. If Sir Thomas Browne is mentioned, he will say, “Yes, very fine!” with a feeling of pride that he has at any rate bought and inspected Sir Thomas Browne. Deep in his heart is a suspicion that people who get enthusiastic about Sir Thomas Browne are vain and conceited poseurs. After a year or so, when he has recovered from the discouragement caused by Sir Thomas Browne, he may, if he is young and hopeful, repeat the experiment with Congreve or Addison. Same sequel! And so on for perhaps a decade, until his commerce with the classics finally expires! That, magazines and newish fiction apart, is the literary history of the average decent person.
”
”
Arnold Bennett (Literary Taste)
“
The Industrial Revolution created a transformative critical juncture for the whole world during the nineteenth century and beyond: those societies that allowed and incentivized their citizens to invest in new technologies could grow rapidly. But many around the world failed to do so—or explicitly chose not to do so. Nations under the grip of extractive political and economic institutions did not generate such incentives. Spain and Ethiopia provide examples where the absolutist control of political institutions and the implied extractive economic institutions choked economic incentives long before the dawn of the nineteenth century. The outcome was similar in other absolutist regimes—for example, in Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and China, though in these cases the rulers, because of fear of creative destruction, not only neglected to encourage economic progress but also took explicit steps to block the spread of industry and the introduction of new technologies that would bring industrialization. Absolutism
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
Table Of Contents Introduction The Problem With Contracts The Smart Solution Distinctive Properties What You Need to Know What Is A Smart Contract? Blockchain and Smart Contracts Vitalik Buterin On Smart Contracts Digital and Real-World Applications How Smart Contracts Work Smart Contracts' Historical Background A definition of Smart Contracts The promise What Do All Smart Contracts Have in Common? Elements Of Smart Contracts Characteristics of Smart Contracts Capabilities of Smart Contracts Life Cycle Of A Smart Contract Why Are Smart Contracts Important? How Do Smart Contracts Work? What Does Smart Contract Code Look Like In Practice? The Structure of a Smart Contract Interaction with Traditional Text Agreements Are Smart Contracts Enforceable? Challenges With the Widespread Adoption of Smart Contracts Non-Technical Parties: How Can They Negotiate, Draft, and Adjudicate Smart Contracts? Smart Contracts and the Reliance on “Off-chain” Resources What is the "Final" Agreement Reached by the Parties? The Automated Nature of Smart Contracts Are Smart Contracts Reversible? Smart Contract Modification and Termination The Difficulties of Integrating Specified Ambiguity Into Smart Contracts Do Smart Contracts Really Guarantee Payment? Allocation of Risk for Attacks and Failures Governing Law and Location Best Practices for Smart Contracts Types Of Smart Contracts A Technical Example of a Smart Contract Smart Contract Use-Cases Smart Contracts in Action Smart Contracts and Blockchains In the Automobile Industry Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Governments Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Business Management Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Rights Management (Tokens) Smart Contracts And Blockchains In NFTs - Gaming Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains in the Legal Industry Smart contracts and Blockchains in Real Estate Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Corporate Structures - Building DAOs Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Emerging Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Insurance Companies Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Powering DEFI Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Healthcare Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Other Industries What Smart Contracts Can Give You How Are Smart Contracts Created? Make Your Very Own Smart Contract! Are Smart Contracts Secure?
”
”
Patrick Ejeke (Smart Contracts: What Is A Smart Contract? Complete Guide To Tech And Code That Is About To Transform The Economy-Blockchain, Web3.0, DApps, DAOs, DEFI, Crypto, IoTs, FinTech, Digital Assets Trading)
“
Thus, for example, an article in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel proclaims that this women’s soccer has nothing to do with sports—a standard European reaction to women’s soccer in America.47 “Typically American” were the first two words in the introduction to the article, so that the reader would know right away what to expect.
”
”
Andrei S. Markovits (Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (The Public Square Book 5))
“
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is an excellent introduction to web usability. We passionately believe it should be on the school curriculum. Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis is less entertaining than Don’t Make Me Think, but it covers more usability concepts. If this book list seems worryingly short, that’s a testament to how much ground this book covers. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte contains many examples of complex data shown in beautifully elegant ways. Don’t be put off by its technical-sounding title. It’s fun to read.
”
”
Karl Blanks (Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites)
“
Failure to make, or to sustain, the kind of intimate attachments which the object-relations theorists maintain are the main source of life’s meaning and satisfaction does not imply that a person is necessarily cut off from other, less intimate human relationships. Whilst it is certainly more difficult for most people to find meaning in life if they do not have close attachments, many people can and do lead equable and satisfying lives by basing them upon a mixture of work and more superficial relationships. Edward Gibbon, from whom I quoted in the Introduction, is a good example. We should also remember that exceptional people have suffered long periods of solitary confinement without coming to feel that their lives are meaningless, whilst others have deliberately sought weeks or months of solitude for reasons to which we shall return.
”
”
Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
“
The tour of the South Caucasus in 2018 ends where the book began, in the mountains. The extraordinary natural features of the Caucasus cross all political boundaries, and its extraordinary landscape and outstanding biodiversity are its often-hidden glory. Foreign visitors are awestruck by these landscapes, still far less developed than the alpine zones of western Europe. The World Wildlife Fund has named the wider Caucasus region—stretching into Russia and Turkey—one of thirty-five “biodiversity hotspots” on the planet, with over 1,650 indigenous plants and animals in nine climate zones. To name but three examples of this biodiversity: the mountains of Georgia and Azerbaijan contain more species of oak than western Europe, as they survived the last Ice Age; a few mountain leopards still prowl the highlands of Armenia; and less than 200 “goitered gazelles” are to be found on the borders of Azerbaijan and Georgia. Some natural spectacles draw visitors from all over the world. From late August to early October, birdwatchers come to the Black Sea coast of Georgia to see the annual migration southwards of millions of birds of prey through a 10-kilometer-wide corridor between the sea and the Lesser Caucasus Mountains known as the “Batumi bottleneck.” On October 2, 2014, after days of rain kept the gates of the corridor closed, an astonishing 271,000 birds were counted flying through and darkening the skies.
”
”
Thomas de Waal (The Caucasus: An Introduction)
“
When an eyeball is longer than normal from front to back, the incoming rays of light focus in front of the retina instead of on the retina. This condition is known as myopia or nearsightedness. In this situation, a pupil can see near objects (for example, his or her textbook), but viewing objects at a distance—the chalkboard—may be problematic. If the eyeball is too short, the image will focus behind the retina. This condition is commonly referred to as hyperopia or farsightedness. A child with hyperopia typically has no problem seeing distant objects but encounters difficulty seeing near objects. Hyperopia is the most common refractive error in children (Geddie, Bina, & Miller, 2013). myopia Elongation of the eye that causes extreme nearsightedness and decreased visual acuity. hyperopia Change in the shape of the eye, which shortens the light ray path and causes farsightedness. In the case of astigmatism, one or more surfaces of the cornea or lens (the eye structures that focus incoming light) are not spherical (shaped like the side of a basketball) but cylindrical (shaped like the side of a football). As a result, there is no distinct point of focus inside the eye but, rather, a smeared or spread-out focus.
”
”
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
“
Autumn Psalm
To understand a fraction of what they mean.
The writings in the world’s most spoken language
across from one that can barely get a minyan.
Sick of lanzmen, the yidden are trying to engage
the guys across the aisle in some conversation:
How, for example, do you squeeze an image
into so few words, respectfully asks Glatstein.
Wang Wei, at first, doesn’t understand the problem
but then he shrugs his shoulders, mumbles Zen
... but, please, I, myself, overheard a poem,
in the autumn rain, once, on a mountain.
How do you do it? I believe it’s called a psalm?
Glatstein’s cronies all crack up in unison.
Okay, groise macher, give him an answer.
But Glatstein dons his yarmulke (who knew he had one?)
and starts the introduction to the morning prayer,
Pisukei di zimrah, psalm by psalm.
Wang Wei is spellbound, the stacks’ stale air
suddenly a veritable balm
and I’m so touched by these amazing goings-on
that I’ve forgotten all about the autumn
staring straight at me: still alive, still golden.
What’s gold, anyway, compared to poetry?
a trick of chlorophyll, a trick of sun.
True. It was something, my changing tree
with its perfect complement: a crimson vine,
both thrown into panic by a Steller’s jay,
but it’s hard to shake the habit of digression.
Wandering has always been my people’s way
whether we’re in a desert or narration.
It’s too late to emulate Wang Wei
and his solitary years on that one mountain
though I’d love to say what I set out to say
just once. Next autumn, maybe. What’s the occasion?
Glatstein will shout over to me from the bookcase
(that is, if he’s paying any attention)
and, finally, I’ll look him in the face.
Quick. Out the window, Yankev. It’s here again.
Part 2
”
”
Jacqueline Osherow
“
Do you think ADHD should be recognized as a separate disability category according to IDEA? Support your position. What are the three subtypes of ADHD? List three symptoms typical of each subtype. Identify three possible causes of ADHD. Give an example of each. Give five examples of characteristics typical of children and adolescents with ADHD. Why do you think pupils with ADHD frequently exhibit other academic and behavioral difficulties? How is ADHD diagnosed? What role do parents and teachers play in the diagnostic process? What role does medication play in the treatment of ADHD? Why is this approach controversial? Describe three other intervention options for students with ADHD. How can assistive technology help students with ADHD? ADHD is usually a lifelong condition. In what ways might this disorder affect the lives of adults with ADHD? Why are some professionals concerned about the identification of ADHD in students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds?
”
”
Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
“
For centuries, naturalists and philosophers have struggled to make sense of the range of life on Earth. One of the earliest and most pervasive ideas was that of a ‘Scale of Nature’ in which living, and sometimes non-living, things were arranged into a linear hierarchy. Each ascending rung on a ladder represented increasing ‘advancement’, based on a blend of anatomical complexity, religious significance, and practical usefulness. The idea had its origins in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, but was crystallized by the work of the 18th-century Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet. In Bonnet’s scheme, the Scale of Nature rose from earth and metals, to stones and salts, and stepwise through fungi, plants, sea anemones, worms, insects, snails, reptiles, water serpents, fish, birds, and finally mammals, with man sitting comfortably on top. Or almost on top, being marginally trumped by angels and archangels. It is easy to ridicule such ideas today, but Bonnet had a good knowledge of the natural world. For example, it was Bonnet who discovered asexual reproduction in aphids and the way that butterflies and their caterpillars breathe. Furthermore, the idea of a Scale of Nature still pervades much modern writing, with many scientists talking of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ animals: language that bears an uncanny resemblance to this old and discredited idea.
”
”
Peter Holland (The Animal Kingdom: A Very Short Introduction)
“
In ideographic writing systems, for example Egyptian hieroglyphics or modern Chinese characters, the symbols used offer no clue to pronunciation,
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Why, for example, is the h of hope pronounced, but not that of hour or honest? Why is night spelt with a gh sequence which isn’t pronounced?
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
The relationship between spelling and speech can be ridiculously idiosyncratic, as seen in this example from English: 1 ought [ɔ:] 2 through [ʉ:] 3 cough [ɔf] 4 thorough [ə] 5 Lough [ɔx] 6 hiccough [ʌp] 7 though [əɷ] 8 drought [aɷ] 9 rough
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
languages of Europe (but not beyond) the Port-Royal Grammar presented the six-case structure of Latin noun declension as a universal framework, realized in a variety of ways by different languages (in the Romance languages, for example, much of the grammatical work which had been done by Latin case-endings was now performed by prepositions).
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
From the sixteenth century onwards, prescriptive works in Britain largely follow Priscian’s Latin model. Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English (1586), for example, takes the eight Priscianic word classes set out in William Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English (c.1540) and applies them to English; the prescriptions of Robert Lowth’s Introduction to English Grammar (1762) are likewise informed by Latin, and even by 1795, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar was arguing for three nominal cases (nominative, genitive, accusative), justified on the model of Latin, in spite of the fact that English – then as now – only regularly distinguishes nominative and accusative in pronouns (he saw me vs. I saw him). While prescriptive grammarians of English are no longer as in thrall to Latin as they once were, many complaints about ‘bad’ English, as we saw in Chapter 1, start from assumptions about Latin grammar. Simon Heffer’s Strictly English: The correct way to write… and why it matters, published in 2011, still condemns the use of split infinitives, though its author seems more relaxed than his predecessors about ending sentences with prepositions (p.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
In many words where Latin has [p], the Germanic languages have [f], as in the examples below.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
The family tree model is a useful presentational tool which has been successfully applied to other language groups, for example Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan or Austro-Asiatic, but it is nonetheless misleading in a number of respects. Firstly, it takes far too little account of language contact (see Case study on next page): the dotted arrow in the diagram above is an attempt to represent the very strong lexical influence of (Norman) French on Middle English, which belong to quite separate branches of the Indo-European trunk. The branching works well where there is a physical separation between speaker groups, allowing varieties to develop independently, as in the case of Afrikaans and Dutch, but in most cases the picture is rather messier, with branches often confusingly intertwined.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Even for onomatopoeic words, however, there is a large measure of arbitrariness: cuckoos are called ‘cuckoos’ only in English, and to return to our canine example above, there is a remarkable divergence cross-linguistically even in the way barking is represented in print: English dogs go woof! woof! while French ones go ouah! ouah! and Russian ones gav! gav! in spite of the fact that there are no linguistic differences (to the best of our knowledge) between dogs of different nationalities.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
This introduces us to several things about Mark's Gospel. First, he writes at an absolutely breakneck pace, often focusing on deeds without many words. For example, his account of Jesus' temptation by Satan does not include the mini-debate familiar from Matthew and Luke. Mark portrays Jesus as relentlessly active, driven by a sense that time is short and he has much to do. Things inevitably slow down after this remarkable opening chapter, but Mark will still move his narrative along.
Second, we see the importance the evangelist puts upon Jesus' authority. He differs from everyone else. He is unique. The world has never seen his like and never will again. Human history has changed because of him, although few knew it at the time.
Third, one reason few people knew him was that Jesus kept cautioning those he healed as well as the evil spirits to tell no one about the work he did. On the surface this makes little sense. How can he cure someone in a synagogue or when the whole town is present and expect word of that not to get around? The answer is that this is a Markan literary device.
”
”
Joseph F. Kelly (An Introduction to the New Testament for Catholics)
“
The most common failure seen with stream ciphers is an amateur mistake: it occurs when a nonce is reused more than once with the same key. This produces identical keystreams, allowing you to break the encryption by XORing two ciphertexts together. The keystream then vanishes, and you’re left with the XOR of the two plaintexts.
For example, older versions of Microsoft Word and Excel used a unique nonce for each document, but the nonce wasn’t changed once the document was modified. As a result, the clear and encrypted text of an older version of a document could be used to decrypt later encrypted versions.
”
”
Jean-Philippe Aumasson (Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption)
“
Jesus’ life, example, decisions, and teachings are the ‘rule of truth and ethics when the Bible does not agree. This is a Christocentric biblical hermeneutic in most denominations, but nearly universally in all Anabaptist churches.” (Pg. 14)
”
”
Marion G. Bontrager (The Bible as Story: An Introduction to Biblical Literature)
“
The law of Christ can be defined as those prescriptive principles drawn from the example and teaching of Jesus and his apostles (the central demand being love), which are meant to be worked out in specific situations by the guiding influence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit.
”
”
A. Blake White (What is New Covenant Theology? An Introduction)
“
Animacy, for example, is important in Navajo, in Basque and in Spanish, where animate direct objects are inflected with the preposition a: • está buscando una solución he is looking for a solution • está buscando a su hermano he is looking for his brother
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Verbs may also be inflected for mood, the Romance languages notably having a full paradigm of inflections for the subjunctive mood, which marks the verbal action as hypothetical or in doubt, as in the following French examples: • Il est malade He is ill • Je crains qu’il (ne) soit malade I fear he may be ill • Je suis fatigué I’m tired
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
Insofar as gender applies to inanimates, its assignment often seems arbitrary: the word for ‘sun’, for example, is masculine in Spanish (sol), feminine in German (Sonne) and neuter in Russian (solntse). For this reason, some linguists prefer the term noun classification to gender, which we have used here.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
In non-pro-drop languages, some specified subjects have no obvious referent. What, precisely, is raining in it is raining, for example, and what does ‘it’ refer to in it is clear that we need a new plan? Likewise there in There is a lot of confusion has no referent and serves only to satisfy a requirement that English verbs have a specified subject. Subjects like these, which have a purely grammatical role, are generally known as dummy subjects.
”
”
David Hornsby (Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself (Ty: Complete Courses Book 1))
“
The first English grammar book to achieve lasting influence and popularity by creating laws for language was Robert Lowth’s 1758 A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Lowth boldly announced that it was his aim to “lay down rules” for grammar. These rules, he felt, were usually best presented by showing violations of them along with judicious corrections. Accordingly, he assembled examples from some of the very worst syntactical offenders available in English at the time, true grammatical failures including Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, and Milton.
”
”
Cecelia Watson (Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark)
“
This gives rise to a new symptom, namely a dissociation, or rather the power of a momentary dissociation of three faculties which, in man, are united: the faculties of willing, feeling and thinking. We must learn to separate and to re-unite them at will. So long, for example, as some outer event carries us away with uncontrolled enthusiasm, we are immature, for such enthusiasm comes from the event, not from ourselves, and we may even exercise a shattering influence of which we are not master.
”
”
Rudolf Steiner (The Essential Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man; An Esoteric Cosmology; ... Education; How to Know Higher Worlds)
“
Other cells besides neurons use action potentials as the basis of cellular signalling. For example, the synchronized contraction of heart muscle is performed using action potentials, and action potentials are transmitted from nerves to skeletal muscle at the neuromuscular junction to initiate movement.
Local anaesthetic drugs are therefore toxic to the heart and brain. In the heart, local anaesthetic drugs interfere with normal contraction, eventually stopping the heart. In the brain, toxicity causes seizures and coma. To avoid toxicity, the total dose is carefully limited and extra care is taken to avoid accidental intravenous injection.
”
”
Aidan O'Donnell (Anaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction)