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I was starting to see that this wasn't just sex, and it wasn't something just working out of my system. Sex was just the fastest route to the deeper possession that I needed. I was falling in love with her, and falling to fast and hard to easily find any footing.
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Christina Lauren (Beautiful Bastard (Beautiful Bastard, #1))
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Dying is the fastest route to fame for an aspiring rock star. The dead man’s melodies become profound, acquiring mystery and rising into a realm beyond the reach of human criticism. In the stopping of a heartbeat, the rocker is transformed from decadent hedonist into misunderstood genius. Aye, death and musical stardom go together like Scotland and rain.
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Mark Rice (Metallic Dreams)
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What’s the fastest route to the library in Peachtree City? (Carlos)
What? You’ve got an overdue book? (Gabrielle)
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Whispered Lies (B.A.D. Agency, #3))
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A Pope usually worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and died of exhaustion in an average of 6.3 years. The inside joke was that accepting the papacy was a cardinal's 'fastest route to heaven.
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Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
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Reporting and dealing with workplace health and safety issues is the fastest route to unemployment.
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Steven Magee
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Staying silent about workplace health and safety issues is the fastest route to sickness, disease and death.
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Steven Magee
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Whistling in unison, the two brothers began rolling the cask along the cobbles, steering for the Temple District, not necessarily by the fastest or smoothest route available.
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Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1))
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I have learned that trying to control other people’s opinions of you is the fastest possible route to unhappiness.
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Dan Pearce (Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One)
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I just needed the fastest route to the best future for my family. Something that paid the bills on time, that guaranteed stability.
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Ann Liang (I Hope This Doesn't Find You)
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Take the scenic route. There are apps (try Kamino and Field Trip) that will tell you not the fastest route but the prettiest.
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Meik Wiking (The Little Book of Lykke: Secrets of the World's Happiest People (The Happiness Institute Series))
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You were willing. See here, Kamala: When you throw a stone into water, it falls quickly by the fastest route to the bottom of the pond. This is the way it is when Siddhartha has an aim, an intention. Siddhartha does nothing—he waits, he thinks, he fasts—but he passes through the things of the world like the stone through the water, without bestirring himself. He is drawn forward and he lets himself fall. His goal draws him to it, for he lets nothing enter his mind that interferes with the goal. This is what Siddhartha learned from the shramanas. This is what fools call magic, thinking that it is brought about by demons. Nothing is brought about by demons; demons do not exist. Anyone can do magic, anyone can reach his goals if he can think, wait, and fast.
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Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha: A New Translation (Shambhala Classics))
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Kamala, listen: if you throw a stone into water it drops quickly to the bottom by the fastest route it can. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the things of the world like a stone through water without doing anything, without making any effort; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His objective pulls him to itself, for he allows nothing into his soul that might work against his objective. That, Kamala, is what Siddhartha learnt among the samanas. That, Kamala, is what fools call magic in the supposition that it is performed by demons. Nothing is ever performed by demons, there are no demons. Anyone can perform magic, anyone can attain his objectives if he is capable of thought, if he is capable of waiting, if he is capable of fasting.
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Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha (Wisehouse Classics Edition))
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In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital.
Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964.
Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.
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Hank Bracker
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1. State the situation. “You go right in and hit them with how you see it in the cold light of day, without being too inflammatory or dramatic,” says Rosenberg. She made it clear to the A.M.A. that (a) having no women speakers was wrong, and (b) hiring her would be a step in the right direction. It makes sense that before you can speak persuasively—that is, before you speak from a position of passion and personal knowledge—you need to know where you stand. 2. Communicate your feelings. We downplay the influence of emotions in our day-to-day contacts, especially in the business world. We’re told that vulnerability is a bad thing and we should be wary of revealing our feelings. But as we gain comfort using “I feel” with others, our encounters take on depth and sincerity. Your emotions are a gift of respect and caring to your listeners. 3. Deliver the bottom line. This is the moment of truth when you state, with utter clarity, what it is you want. If you’re going to put your neck on the line, you’d better know why. The truth is the fastest route to a solution, but be realistic. While I knew Phil Knight of Nike wasn’t going to buy anything based on one five-minute conversation on a bus in Davos, Switzerland, I did make sure to get his e-mail and tell him that I’d like to follow up with him again sometime. Then I did so. 4. Use an open-ended question. A request that is expressed as a question—one that cannot be answered by a yes or no—is less threatening. How do you feel about this? How can we solve this problem? The issue has been raised, your feelings expressed, your desires articulated. With an open-ended suggestion or question, you invite the other person to work toward a solution with you. I didn’t insist on a specific lunch date at a specific time with Phil. I left it open and didn’t allow our first exchange to be weighted down by unnecessary obligations
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Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time)
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I don’t remember when I first allowed a boy to treat me like a dagger, or the first time I discovered that crying in the rain underneath a boy you don’t love or won’t remember isn’t the fastest route to god, to heaven, or the torments of truth.
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Brett Fletcher Lauer (Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation)
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Efferent impulses may be conducted along one of two major pathways of motor neurons as they pass from the brain through the cord and out to the muscles, and together these longitudinal pathways provide for the convergence of the influences from all levels of the central nervous system upon the motor units. The fastest of these descending routes is the direct corticospinal pathway. As the name suggests, the cell bodies of this path are in the cortex, and they send their long axons directly through the brain and down the spinal cord without any interruptions. These axons do not form any synapses until they reach their corresponding motor neurons in the cord, and thus they form direct connections between specific cells in the motor cortex and specific motor neurons at each level of the cord, making one-to-one relationships between cortical cells and peripheral motor units. This pathway bypasses most of the intermediate circuitry of the lower brain and the spinal cord. This gives it the advantage of speedy transmission. The axons which are bundled together within it maintain a constant spatial relationship throughout their length, faithfully reflecting the spatial relationships of the cell bodies in the cortex. The longest axons, reaching all the way to the end of the cord, lie the closest to the center of the cord, and the progressively shorter axons which synapse to motor neurons in progressively higher segments, are carefully laid down in layers progressively far from the center of the cord, so that a “map” of skeletal muscle relationships is projected onto the motor cortex. This gives a high degree of specificity to this direct corticospinal tract. This direct pathway is the mediator of fine, intricate movements, which require close conscious attention and constantly refined adjustment. When it is severed, actions become clumsier, because the sharp edge of delicate conscious control is missing.
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
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We're all here because we love reading. Especially novels... To be honest, I've never particularly liked the idea of literature. I'm still suspicious of the word. When I was growing up in London's East End, it always seemed to be a stick with which to beat the lower classes. As a teen I resented those who read and enjoyed the classics, who went to see Shakespeare at the theater, who could drop quotes into their conversation. And I was right to. Many people did use literature as a weapon. And they still do. And I would hate for anyone to think that I thought of literature that way. To me, literature is the fastest and surest route to understanding something of this life.
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John Purcell
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The fact is that all roads lead to Rome. Eventually, regardless of what you choose to do, you will end up having the experiences you came here for. You may have spiritual amnesia and find yourself getting lost again and again, but your soul is always right there next to you, waiting for you to wake up and pay attention to what it has to tell you. It will make sure you have the experiences it wants you to have, even when you’re taking every back road and “wrong” turn. Trust it! When you add your light to the sum of Light and co-create wholeheartedly, mindfully, and respectfully in community with others, you are doing what you came here to do. You will be on the right road even if it seems you are taking the long way and wasting time. If you think about it, why wouldn’t you take the scenic route rather than the highway? Are you in a rush to get somewhere? What’s the destination? Get rid of the mentality that you are going “to” some specific place on the map—trying to create some specific situation that will allow you to be happy ever after. Life will always change, and you will always be in motion. So the scenic route is a back road—not the most direct, fastest way to what you think you want to experience. Guess what? You can experience joy, abundance—whatever you seek—wherever you are. And your soul may want something more: the experience of opening your heart and your eyes in compassion. You may have to take a back road to have that experience because you probably don’t have “develop deeper understanding of people who frustrate me” and “experience the bittersweetness of life” on your small self’s list of goals to accomplish. Remember, your soul takes winding paths to get the experiences it wants to have. It is working with Spirit to co-create a reality your small self might not be conscious of—although
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Colette Baron-Reid (Uncharted: The Journey through Uncertainty to Infinite Possibility)
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A R Cargo Packers and Movers Ulwe uses the latest technology to speed up the relocation process. By packing your goods with our highly skilled professionals, you can avoid your worries even when shifting to a new destination.We choose the fastest route to reach your destination as soon as possible. We use door-to-door delivery mode as we understand that delivering goods at the earliest is essential.
Name- A R Cargo Packers and Movers
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Packers and Movers In Ulwe
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Their navigation system had recently had them pull off the main road that they had been traveling on. Instead insisting that the fastest route to their destination would be down a long dark dirt road going
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Devin Cabrera (Welcome to Nightmare Island)
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Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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Pain is one of the fastest routes to a no-frills encounter with the Holy, and yet the majority of us do everything in our power to avoid it.
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Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)
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A world where the fastest route to social recognition is sexualizing and objectifying ourselves is a very toxic reality to dwell in. This is because it further reinforces the toxic and misguided belief that it is solely our outward appearance, rather than other more spiritual or intellectual attributes, which determines our worth as human beings—a misguided idea that can divert individuals from pursuing more spiritually balanced ways of living.
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Enric Mestre Arenas (THE MODERN WORLD AGAINST THE HUMAN SOUL: Exploring modernity's impact on the human spirit and well-being)
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Religion can often be the fastest route to ignorance.
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Siddharth Katragadda (Dark Rooms)
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And you, Ivanhoe,' Skaggs said, 'intend to find her and fetch her home?'
'I do intend to find her. If she is at the ends of the earth, I shall find her. And to stay with her forever if she'll allow me.'
Duff stared in admiration: the ends of the earth. He had never heard anyone but a priest use that phrase. He felt a wave of love for Ben, and suddenly saw his chance. 'I'll come along with you,' he said, practically shouting, he was so excited. 'West.'
Ben smiled, and clasped Duff's hand, thumb hooked to thumb.
'Wait, wait, wait...' It had fallen to Skaggs, of all people, to challenge their quest on practical grounds. 'How shall you possibly find her? She has been two weeks on the road already. They might be anywheres between Ohio and the desert.'
'We shall obtain from Mr. Brisbane a copy of his little guide,' Ben said, 'and follow it like a map from east to west. The only question is our fastest route. Speed is paramount.'
Skaggs saw that his friend would not be deterred. 'Well, a steamboat to Albany, railways to Buffalo, then a steamer across Lake Erie. It sickens me even to describe the route. But you could be in Cleveland before the end of the week.'
He paused. 'I cannot believe that I am describing a speedy arrival in Cleveland as a desirable thing.
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Kurt Andersen (Heyday)
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Instead of taking the easy route, which is to do nothing, challenge the way you might be thinking and ask yourself how you can make this work.
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Than Merrill (The Real Estate Wholesaling Bible: The Fastest, Easiest Way to Get Started in Real Estate Investing)
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Action is the fastest and most direct route to clarity.
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Marie Forleo (Everything is Figureoutable)
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A Pope usually worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and died of exhaustion in an average of 6.3 years. The inside joke was that accepting the papacy was a cardinal’s “fastest route to heaven.
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Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon #1))
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Pain makes theologians of us all… Pain is one of the fastest routes to a no-frills encounter with the Holy.
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Barbara Brown Taylor
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In a research study called “How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers,” startup veteran Lenny Rachitsky interviewed early members of teams from Slack, Stripe, Figma, and Asana. In studying how these earliest companies found their first customers, it was concluded that a significant number came from the founders tapping their personal networks: Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company’s very early growth. [These are: Personal network, Seek out customers where they are, Get press.] Thus, your choices are easy, yet limited. Almost every B2B business both hits up their personal network and heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on. It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC. Getting press is rarely the way to get started.44 Just as Uber’s ops hustle worked for solving the city-by-city Cold Start Problem, B2B startups have an equivalent card to play: they can manually reach out and onboard teams from their friends’ startups, building atomic networks quickly, as Slack did in their early launch. Or, many productivity products begin by launching within online communities—like Twitter, Hacker News, and Product Hunt—where dense pockets of early adopters are willing to try new products. In recent years, B2B products have started to emphasize memes, funny videos, invite-only mechanics, and other tactics traditionally associated with consumer startups. I expect that this will only continue, as the consumerization of enterprise products fully embraces meme-based go-to-market early on, instead of leading with direct sales.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Among Morgan’s many “loads” at the time was a scheme to create a huge international shipping syndicate that could stabilize trade and yield huge returns from the lucrative transatlantic routes. By June of 1902 he had purchased Britain’s prestigious White Star Line for $32 million and combined it with other shipping acquisitions to form a trust called the International Mercantile Marine. In 1904 Morgan installed White Star Line’s largest shareholder, forty-one-year-old J. Bruce Ismay, son of the line’s late founder, as president of the IMM. The second-largest shareholder was Lord William J. Pirrie, the chairman of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders responsible for the construction of White Star’s ships. Pirrie had been the chief negotiator with Morgan’s men and was placed on the board of the new trust. The British government had acceded to Morgan’s flexing of American financial muscle in the acquisition of White Star but had also provided loans and subsidies to the rival Cunard Line for the building of the world’s largest, fastest liners, Lusitania and Mauretania—with the proviso that they be available for wartime service. By the summer of 1907, the Lusitania had made its record-breaking maiden voyage, and Pirrie and Ismay soon hatched White Star’s response. They would use Morgan’s money to build three of the world’s biggest and most luxurious liners. Within a year Harland and Wolff had drawn up plans for two giant ships, and by mid-December the keel plate for the first liner, the Olympic, had been laid. On March 31, 1909, the same was done for a sister ship, to be called Titanic. A third, named Britannic, was to be built later.
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Hugh Brewster (Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World)
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The great escape can be summed up in this vicious cycle: “I believe that I deserve an escape, so I will choose the fastest, most predictable, most accessible, and most effective route available, and I will end up with more pain and problems, hating myself more, and feeling shame, thus further limiting my capacity to love … so, I deserve an escape.
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Sharon A. Hersh (The Last Addiction: Own Your Desire, Live Beyond Recovery, Find Lasting Freedom)
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150 Screenwriting Challenges by Eric Heisserer, the writing exercises within it could change the way you write. In my opinion, writing exercises are the fastest route to becoming a better writer as well as being an immediate idea generator.
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Usher Morgan (Lessons from the Set: A DIY Filmmaking Guide to Your First Feature Film, from Script to Theaters)
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Conceptually, this was an approach borrowed more from the world of freight movers than communications experts. Think of each message as if it were a large house and ask yourself how you would move that house across the country from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Theoretically, you could move the whole structure in one piece. House movers do it over shorter distances all the time—slowly and carefully. However, it’s more efficient to disassemble the structure if you can, load the pieces onto trucks, and drive those trucks over the nation’s interstate highway system—another kind of distributed network. Not every truck will take the same route; some drivers might go through Chicago and some through Nashville. If a driver learns that the road is bad around Kansas City, for example, he may take an alternate route. As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at their destination in L.A. and the house can be reassembled on a new site. In some cases the last truck to leave Boston might be the first to arrive in L.A., but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating its place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places. In
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Katie Hafner (Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet)
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In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.
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Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
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The fastest route to God’s perfect will for your life is to simply start seeking Him today.
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Andrew Wommack (How to Find, Follow, Fulfill God's Will)
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April 1965, then, marked the beginning of a new epoch for the new breed of singer-songwriters in Britain. As well as Collins and Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, in that year there appeared Donovan’s What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid and Fairytale; John Renbourn’s self-titled first album; Mick Softley’s Songs for Swingin’ Survivors; Martin Carthy, a collection of folk songs with violinist Dave Swarbrick; Jackson C. Frank’s Jackson C. Frank; and Bert Jansch, the debut by the fastest-rising star of them all. Jansch, who was born
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Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
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Performance Tactics on the Road Tactics are generic design principles. To exercise this point, think about the design of the systems of roads and highways where you live. Traffic engineers employ a bunch of design “tricks” to optimize the performance of these complex systems, where performance has a number of measures, such as throughput (how many cars per hour get from the suburbs to the football stadium), average-case latency (how long it takes, on average, to get from your house to downtown), and worst-case latency (how long does it take an emergency vehicle to get you to the hospital). What are these tricks? None other than our good old buddies, tactics. Let’s consider some examples: • Manage event rate. Lights on highway entrance ramps let cars onto the highway only at set intervals, and cars must wait (queue) on the ramp for their turn. • Prioritize events. Ambulances and police, with their lights and sirens going, have higher priority than ordinary citizens; some highways have high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, giving priority to vehicles with two or more occupants. • Maintain multiple copies. Add traffic lanes to existing roads, or build parallel routes. In addition, there are some tricks that users of the system can employ: • Increase resources. Buy a Ferrari, for example. All other things being equal, the fastest car with a competent driver on an open road will get you to your destination more quickly. • Increase efficiency. Find a new route that is quicker and/or shorter than your current route. • Reduce computational overhead. You can drive closer to the car in front of you, or you can load more people into the same vehicle (that is, carpooling). What is the point of this discussion? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: performance is performance is performance. Engineers have been analyzing and optimizing systems for centuries, trying to improve their performance, and they have been employing the same design strategies to do so. So you should feel some comfort in knowing that when you try to improve the performance of your computer-based system, you are applying tactics that have been thoroughly “road tested.” —RK
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Len Bass (Software Architecture in Practice)
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Why’d you go this way?” he asked the driver angrily. “You know this road’s a mess.” “I was following them,” the driver said, pointing at the big black SUV in front of us. “If you’ve got a problem with the route, talk to those guys.” “There’s like a hundred apps that tell you the fastest way from place to place,” the older agent griped. “Those guys can’t figure out how to use one of them? There’s a national security crisis happening and we’re stuck in traffic.
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Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Secret Service)
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As a result, we now see a plethora of MBA-holders mushrooming in and infiltrating every sector, company and corporation, no matter how large or small. With rare exceptions, these MBA-holders hardly bring any creativity or depth to the table. For them, everything is about profits and building their own image and profile. They seldom care about the well-being and advancement of those who fall under the mercy of their business ideas. They are usually people who, like a herd of sheep, have been told that an MBA is the easiest and fastest route to prosperity and advancement, so they go to school, get that MBA, and from there wreak havoc in every place they set their foot on. With their mediocrity and strong desire to advance at any cost, their management styles often create a culture of fear and intimidation among employees. This culture is usually characterized by serious retaliation if anyone dares to open their mouth to challenge their authority or critique their ideas.
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Louis Yako
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The fastest route to a lifetime of dependence is withholding the support that is needed when it is needed.
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Daniel Franklin (Helping Your Child with Language-Based Learning Disabilities: Strategies to Succeed in School and Life with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, ADHD, and ... ADHD, and Auditory Processing Disorder))
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The fastest way to earn a person respect is to show them your work ethic. The fastest way to develop a friend is to show them that you genuinely care about them as a person.
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Wallace Miles (UNDERR8TED: The Route That Caught an NFL Dream)
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The shortest route isn't always the fastest.
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Sandra Golden