Flux Direct Quotes

What someone may lack in talent can be more than made up for in self-motivation, self-direction, and follow-through.

One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures.

People would rather walk off the cliff than admit they're walking in the wrong direction.

My aunt Déméré was shocked. Her husband, my uncle Déméré, was one of the foremost important men in the foundry. He was a master melter, that is to say he prepared the mixture for the pots, and saw to it that the pots were filled with the right amount for the furnaces before the day’s melt, and never, since they had been married, had my aunt Déméré watched the potash being prepared by the flux-burner. “The first duty of a master’s wife is to have food ready for her husband between shifts,” she told my mother, “and then to attend to any women or children directly employed by her husband who may be sick. The work in the furnace house, or outside it, is nothing to do with

Ironically, in an age of instant global connection, my certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling my own certainty from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web. Truth, with a capital T, becomes truths, plural. I have to sort the truths not just about things I care about, but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge. That means that in general I have to constantly question what I think I know. We might consider this state perfect for the advancement of science, but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, nontruths, and some noble truths scattered in the flux, I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief, subjective hunches) and toward fluid media like mashups, twitterese, and search. But as I flow through this slippery web of

If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.

Human cultures are in constant flux. Is this flux completely random, or does it have some overall pattern? In other words, does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures, each of which is bigger and more complex. This is of course a very crude generalisation, true only at the macro level. At the micro level, it seems that for every group of cultures that coalesces into a mega-culture, there’s a mega-culture that breaks up into pieces. The Mongol Empire expanded to dominate a huge swathe of Asia and even parts of Europe, only to shatter into fragments. Christianity converted hundreds of millions of people at the same time that it splintered into innumerable sects. The Latin language spread through western and central Europe, then split into local dialects that themselves eventually became national languages. But these break-ups are temporary reversals in an inexorable trend towards unity.

Nothing in life stands still. Movement and change are the very essence of life and yet our normal tendency is to believe that everything is fixed and solid. We wish to believe that all we see is real and secure, even though our ordinary experience tells us that nothing remains unchanged and nothing lasts forever. On the contrary, everything in the world around us is constantly falling apart and requires a great deal of maintenance on our part if we wish to hold it together. What happens during this process of change is the great mystery revealed in symbolic form within this book. The state called here the "transitional phase" (Tibetan: "bardo") is the actual moment of change, occurring at the end of one phase and the beginning of the next. It is the state of flux itself, the only state that can really be called "real." It is a condition of great power and potential within which anything could happen. It is the moment between moments. It may seem to span an entire lifetime, like the moment between being born and dying, or it may be imperceptibly short and fleeting, like the moment between one thought and the next. Whatever its duration, however, it is a moment of great opportunity for those who perceive it. Anyone who can do this is called a yogin. Such a person has the power of destiny in their hands. He or she has no need of a priest to guide him towards the clear light of truth, for he sees already the clear light of truth in the intermediate phases that occur between all other states. Refusing to become trapped in the false belief that all about him is fixed and solid, the yogin moves with calm and graceful ease through life, confident that changes are now under his own direction. He becomes the master of change instead of its slave.....Similarly, between any encounter and one's reaction to it, there is an intermediate space that offers choice to those who can see it. One is not obliged to react on the basis of habit or prejudice. The opportunity for a fresh approach is always there in the intermediate state for those who have learned to recognize it. Such recognition is the essential message of this ancient and profound book.

Here's a simplified version of what the Stanford group did. They started with a much-studied kind of string theory-a flat four-dimensional spacetime with a small six-dimensional geometry over each point. They chose the geometry of the six wrapped-up dimensions to be one of the Calabi-Yau spaces (see Chapter 8). As noted, there are at least a hundred thousand of these, and all you have to do is pick a typical one whose geometry depends on many constants. Then they wrapped large numbers of electric and magnetic fluxes around the six-dimensional spaces over each point. Because you can wrap only discrete units of flux, this tends to freeze out the instabilities. To further stabilize the geometry, you have to call on certain quantum effects not known to arise directly from string theory, but they are understood to some extent in supersymmetric gauge theories, so it is possible that they play a role here. Combining these quantum effects with the effects from the fluxes, you get a geometry in which all the moduli are stable. This can also be done so that there appears to be a negative cosmological constant in the four-dimensional spacetime. It turns out that the smaller we want the cosmological constant to be, the more fluxes we must wrap, so we wrap huge numbers of fluxes to get a cosmological constant that is tiny but still negative. (As noted, we don't know explicitly how to write the details of a string theory on such a background, but there's no reason to believe it doesn't exist.) But the point is to get a positive cosmological constant, to match the new observations of the universe's expansion rate. So the next step is to wrap other branes around the geometry, in a different way, which has the effect of raising the cosmological constant. Just as there are antiparticles, there are antibranes, and the Stanford group used them here. By wrapping antibranes, energy can be added so as to make the cosmological constant small and positive. At the same time, the tendency of string theories to flow into one another is suppressed, because any change requires a discrete step. Thus, two problems are solved at once: The instabilities are eliminated and the cosmological constant is small and positive.

One may perhaps usefully consider here the image of a radio receiver. When the output of the receiver 'feeds back' into the input, the receiver operates on its own, to produce mainly irrelevant and meaningless noise, but when it is sensitive to the signal on the radio wave, its own order of inner movement of electric currents (transformed into sound waves) is parallel to the order in the signal and thus the receiver serves to bring a meaningful order originating beyond the level of its own structure into movements on the level of its own structure. One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures. Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of the universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement. (This notion is discussed further in chapter 7.) It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony or fitting between mind and matter.

The balance of nature’ does not exist, and perhaps never has existed. The numbers of wild animals are constantly varying to a greater or lesser extent, and the variations are usually irregular in period and always irregular in amplitude. Each variation in the numbers of one species causes direct and indirect repercussions on the numbers of the others, and since many of the latter are themselves independently varying in numbers, the resultant confusion is remarkable.”30 These were rumblings in what was soon to become a major paradigm shift in ecology from the balance of nature to the flux of nature.

My mind has evolved from that of a child to that of an adult and passed through countless changes along the way. My heart has known great love, heartache, joy, and anger—it has shifted directions more often than the wind. My body began as two cells, has grown, aged, and passed through sickness and health. Even the face in my mirror is far different than the one that once stared back at me just a few months ago. But through this state of flux that has defined my life, there is a part of me that has been entirely the same throughout. This changeless part of me has sat quietly witnessing, at peace and smiling softly.

Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.

Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it. She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

It has been said that what is called unconsciousness is only an inapperceived signification: it may happen that we ourselves do not grasp the true meaning of our life, not because an unconscious personality is deep within us and governs our actions, but because we understand our lived states only through an idea which is not adequate for them. But, even unknown to us, the efficacious law of our life is constituted by its true signification. Everything happens as if this signification directed the flux of mental events. Thus it will be necessary to distinguish their ideal signification, which can be true or false, and their immanent signification, or--to employ a clearer language which we will use from now on--their ideal signification and their actual structure ...We are not reducible to the ideal consciousness which we have of ourselves any more than the existent thing is reducible to the signification by which we express it.

air gap without the flux which creates a repeating series of EM waves moving through the atmosphere which push the electrons incrementally through the conductors in the receiving radio’s antenna and circuitry. Radio receivers also have diodes / rectifiers to make the alternating current directional in the receiver circuitry. This current-inducing EM flux has not been demonstrated in a nuclear EMP. A directional electrical force cannot be induced in wires from photons arriving from high-altitude (after a nuclear burst) without EM flux or something to inhibit backwards flow

Clausius also extended Bernoulli’s theory about the particulate nature of gases to liquids and solids, reasoning that all matter consists of trillions of particles in constant motion. In solids, these molecules vibrate around a fixed position. In liquids, Clausius theorized, the particles are in a constant flux, making bonds and breaking them at the same rate to produce the fluid form. In a gas, the molecules are completely free to move independently and in any direction.

Urbain VIII fit alors envoyer par l'ambassade une note destinée à l'inquisiteur et à Galilée, répétant les conditions auxquelles le livre devait répondre pour que l'imprimatur lui soit octroyé. J'ai reproduit cette note autrefois. Elle est remarquable. Dans l'état des connaissances du temps, un scientifique d'aujourd'hui ne pourrait donner de meilleurs conseils. En voici l'essentiel: « L'inquisiteur pouvait permettre la publication à Florence, s'il s'agissait de considérations purement mathématiques sur le système de Copernic. En aucun cas, ce livre ne pourrait admettre d'allégations absolues, mais il devait se maintenir dans les limites de l'hypothèse; surtout il n'y serait pas question de l'Écriture Sainte. « Il ne doit pas avoir pour titre et pour sujet le flux et le reflux de la mer ... mais l'examen mathématique de l'hypothèse copernicienne relative au mouvement de la Terre, en vue de prouver que (la rélévation divine et la doctrine sacrée étant réservées) cene hypothèse se concilie avec les phénomènes apparents et n'est pas détruite par les arguments contraires qui peuvent être empruntés à l'expérience et à la philosophie péripatéticienne» (c'est-à-dire celle d'Aristote et de Ptolémée)." « Le but de l'ouvrage doit être surtout de faire voir que I'on connaît toutes les raisons qui peuvent être invoquées en faveur de la doctrine» (copernicienne - c'est moi qui souligne), et que ce n'est pas pour les avoir ignorées qu'a été promulgué à Rome le décret (de 1616) «auquel l'ouvrage devra se conformer dans son commencement et dans sa fin, qui seront envoyés à l'inquisiteur ... Après ces précautions, le livre ne rencontrera aucun obstacle à Rome et l'inquisiteur pourra donner satisfaction à l'auteur ... ». Quand on lit sans parti pris ces directives du pape, écrit Aubanel, «on ne peut qu'être frappé de sa sagesse et de la liberté qu'il donne à Galilée. Que lui demande-t-on ? De ne pas enseigner comme une vérité absolue une théorie gu'il n'appuie que sur des probabilités; de laisser de côté l'Ecriture Sainte; de ne point faire dépendre toute la question de sa preuve fameuse - et fausse - du flux et du reflux. Il a même la permission - et ceci est à retenir - de combattre Aristote et de montrer l'impuissance de sa philosophie à démentir la doctrine qu'il préconise. Où donc trouver dans ces lignes la moindre entrave à la science? Il n'yen a aucune ».

Your self-esteem--how you feel about yourself--is directly affected by self-talk. Whether you realize it or not, your mental conversation is constantly in a state of flux between supportive and unsupportive thoughts. When you notice that your self-talk is tending toward unsupportive, cut yourself off and re-state your thoughts and words so they speak highly of you. A heightened sense of awareness of self-talk is crucial to making this happen.