Generate String Quotes

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

And I think that's the story of our generation's pursuit of fulfillment in relationships. We wished for intimacy without obligation. We wished for sex with no strings attached. We wished for the pleasure of love with none of work, none of the vows, none of the sacrifice. And we got it. But the results aren't what we hoped for. And we're left feeling emptier than before. The intimacy is superficial. The sex leaves us dissatisfied and hungry for something real, something true. Where is true joy? It's found in God's brand of love - love founded on faithfulness, rooted in commitment. The joy of intimacy is the reward of commitment.

Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family's tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.

And she felt the beauty in the music now, drank it in with tears streaming down her face. Never had she been so naked in worship before her Creator, allowing the adoration to bleed out her very fingertips onto the strings, playing her heart's cry for every single lost soul, for the loss of innocence every generation to come would possess as a result of what happened at the killing fields of Auschwitz.

This is how talents weave from generation to generation, how the shadow stretches, and how an artist born nearly a hundred years earlier begins to fill the soul of a child who shares his name.

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

I believe in equality. The civil rights activists and women’s rights activists and gay rights activists have all been fighting this fight for generations. And while those of us with short strings may not measure as large in number as those communities, we are not insignificant. And we will not stop fighting, either.

The traditions of . . . bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances with contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes - when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone.

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?... Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening... Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

Equality is the tune of our generation. Together as one. Let's pull the strings in our togetherness to make good music.

One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.

It is interesting to note that the quantum-mechanical revolution was made by a virtually orphaned generation of scientists. Many members of the generation above them had been slaughtered in World War I. There simply weren't many senior scientists around to tell them they were crazy.

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree... ...The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.

The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification. I’d had fun watching Manual Mutants and Oddfellas when they first started, but then The League of Zeroes came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery.

As we sped downhill past my spot, past the olive groves and the sunflowers that turned their startled faces to us as we glided past the marine pines, past the two old train cars that had lost their wheels generations ago, but still bore the royal insignia of the House of Savoy, past the string of gypsy vendors screaming murder at us for almost grazing their daughters with our bikes, I turned to him and yelled, "Kill me if I stop.

It will just upset you." No my freaking way! He didn't just tell me I'm weak to him, did he? "Yes, Ian. Thanks for reminding me I am just a dang girl in your eyes." A string of not ladylike curse words went across the marquee of my brain. "Be reasonable," he snipped out at me. Oh.No.He.Didn't. "Reasonable caught a train to Canada. Meet her peeved counterpart who wants to snap boy parts off and sterilize them to spare the future generations of learning that equal doesn't mean jack squat." - Grace

In many prehistoric societies the mean human generation time—average number of years between births of parents and of their children—was only a few decades. Hence towards the end of a string of wet decades, most people alive could have had no firsthand memory of the previous period of dry climate. Even today, there is a human tendency to increase production and population during good decades, forgetting (or, in the past, never realizing) that such decades were unlikely to last. When the good decades then do end, the society finds itself with more population than can be supported, or with ingrained habits unsuitable to the new climate conditions.

What is there about our generation, man, that makes us sweat this root scene so much? Look at us. We wander across America in dedicated droves. Equipped with sideburns, sandals, and a steel string guitar. Relentlessly tracking our lost root beds. Yet all the while guarding against that most ignoble of ends, becoming root bound. What, pray, is it we hope to do with the object of our search if we succeed? If we have no intention of attaching ourselves to these roots. What use do you suppose we have in mind? Boil us up a tea and use them like sassafras as a purgative? Stash them away in our cedar chest with our high school diploma and prom programs? It's always been a mystery to me.

The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall within the span of the almanac’s illumination. The men who might have been lord or baronet. And, though it was not said, the men who still might, if the right string of tragedies were to occur. But after a certain number of branchings in the family tree, the names fell out of the margins and into the ether. No combination of shipwreck, plague and earthquake would be powerful enough to restore these third cousins to prominence. The almanac had its limits.

All about them the golden girls, shopping for dainties in Lairville. Even in the midst of the wild-maned winter's chill, skipping about in sneakers and sweatsocks, cream-colored raincoats. A generation in the mold, the Great White Pattern Maker lying in his prosperous bed, grinning while the liquid cools. But he does not know my bellows. Someone there is who will huff and will puff. The sophmores in their new junior blazers, like Saturday's magazines out on Thursday. Freshly covered textbooks from the campus store, slide rules dangling in leather, sheathed broadswords, chinos scrubbed to the virgin fiber, starch pressed into straight-razor creases, Oxford shirts buttoned down under crewneck sweaters, blue eyes bobbing everywhere, stunned by the android synthesis of one-a-day vitamins, Tropicana orange juice, fresh country eggs, Kraft homogenized cheese, tetra-packs of fortified milk, Cheerios with sun-ripened bananas, corn-flake-breaded chicken, hot fudge sundaes, Dairy Queen root beer floats, cheeseburgers, hybrid creamed corn, riboflavin extract, brewer's yeast, crunchy peanut butter, tuna fish casseroles, pancakes and imitation maple syrup, chuck steaks, occasional Maine lobster, Social Tea biscuits, defatted wheat germ, Kellogg's Concentrate, chopped string beans, Wonderbread, Birds Eye frozen peas, shredded spinach, French-fried onion rings, escarole salads, lentil stews, sundry fowl innards, Pecan Sandies, Almond Joys, aureomycin, penicillin, antitetanus toxoid, smallpox vaccine, Alka-Seltzer, Empirin, Vicks VapoRub, Arrid with chlorophyll, Super Anahist nose spray, Dristan decongestant, billions of cubic feet of wholesome, reconditioned breathing air, and the more wholesome breeds of fraternal exercise available to Western man. Ah, the regimented good will and force-fed confidence of those who are not meek but will inherit the earth all the same.

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

It was now 1952, so some of the claims had been held by a string of disconnected, unrecorded persons for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog. Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws—not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.

It was the magnesium. The addition of the ion was critical: with the solution supplemented with magnesium, the ribosome remained glued together, and Brenner and Jacob finally purified a miniscule amount of the messenger molecule out of bacterial cells. It was RNA, as expected-but RNA of a special kind. The messenger was generated afreah when a gene was translated. Like DNA, these RNA molecules were built by stringing together four bases-A,G,C, and U (in the RNA copy of a gene, remember, the T found in DNA is substituted for U). Notably, Brenner and Jacob later discovered the messenger RNA was a facsimile of the DNA chain-a copy made from the original. The RNA copy of a gene then moved from the nucleus to the cytosol, where its message was decoded to build a protein. The messenger RNA was neither an inhabitant of heaven nor of hell-but a professional go-between. The generation of an RNA copy of a gene was termed transcription-referring to the rewriting of a word or sentence in a language close to the original. A gene's code (ATGGGCC...) was transcribed into an RNA code (AUGGGCC...).

The next morning I took the screen out of that window, and hid it in the back of my closet, where it remains. I took an elective in poetry my sophomore year because I heard that Margo was taking it. By then we weren't friends really, because she was already the high priestess of Winterpark High School. She was friendly to me, but I never really had anything to say to her really, except occasionally during classes. The great surprise of that class was that I actually like poetry. At least some of it. There's this one poem we read called "Howl", and it starts out: "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness. Starving, hysterical, naked." I've never seen Margo starving, or hysterical, and God knows I've never seen her naked. But somehow -- and this is why I like poetry -- those words still describe her as she stood outside my window. Her blinkless blue eyes, starving, and hysterical, and naked, staring back at me. I think she was still trying to piece it together - how the strings break, I mean - as she stared at me. Margo always loved mysteries, and in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

The secret of life, the garden of blissful hopes The token of reliance, the bliss of all generations The hymn of the soul, striking the strings of the hearts when children sing it, like nightingales The song of life, that makes flower buds open towards life, smiling, full of hope O my Mother, how sweet is (the taste of) mentioning you on my tongue Whenever you are mentioned, I begin to chant, raising you above the skies How often did you wake until dawn the night, so that I may spend the night in comfort How much efforts tired you so that I may be safe and well guided. This is an excerpt from a poem that the great scholar Sheikh Ibrahim al-Yaqoubi wrote for his children in the year 1970, and taught his som Muhammad Abul Huda al-Yaqoubi when he was in 3rd grade, on the occasion of a school celebration for the wefare of the children, held in the vecinity of the Umaya Mosque in Damascus. سر الحياة وروضةُ الآمال رمزُ الوفاء سعادة الأجيال أنشودةٌ للروح رددها على وتر الفؤاد بلابلُ الأطفال نغمُ الحياة به تفتّح زهرُها في الكون مبتسما عن الآمال أمي فما أحلاك لفظا في فمي أشدو بذكرك دائما وأغالي كم قد سهرت لكي أبيت منعما كم قد تعبت لراحتي ودلالي وهي قطعة من قصيدة نظمها العلامة الكبير سنة ١٩٧٠ لأولاده، وألقاها ابنه الشيخ محمد أبو الهدى وكان في الصف الثالث آنذاك في احتفال المدرسة الغراء سعادة الأبناء بجوارالجامع الأموي

Yet another study by the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich in 2011 exposed baby mice to stressful situations by separating them from their mothers. The abandoned mice experienced anxiety and depression—which, right, seems obvious. What was shocking was how this separation affected future generations of mice. When the traumatized mice had babies, and then when their babies had babies, the scientists never separated them from their parents. They led perfectly content, nurtured little mouse lives. But for three subsequent generations, the anxiety and depression persisted. There is real scientific evidence that the traumas we experience can be passed on to our children and even our grandchildren. DNA, of course, is the genetic code that determines the shape of our nose, our eye color, our likelihood to contract certain diseases. So when our body is making and remaking itself, every cell in our body actually “reads” our DNA and uses it as a blueprint for what to build. But not every cell reads the entire blueprint—the whole, long string of DNA. Inside each cell is both our DNA—or our genome—and the epigenome, a layer of chemical markers that sits on top of our DNA. The epigenome is like a SparkNotes for the cells—it flags which genes our cells really need to read. So the epigenome helps decide which genes actually get represented by our bodies. It turns certain genes on and other genes off. Both the genome and our epigenome are passed down generationally.

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

The true turning point came when I was about fourteen years old. I bought a copy of PC Plus magazine which included a cover CD featuring a full version of Borland C++ Builder. I installed it and carefully followed the "hello world" tutorial which was helpfully included in the magazine. This was it. A new world opened up before me. The restrictions imposed upon my imagination by the material world were gone. My creativity unshackled, the cathedrals in my mind would be made manifest! To what lofty end should I put this new-found tool? It was obvious. The Fuck Generator. As simple as it was elegant, the Fuck Generator (fgen.exe) was a command-line program, and my first advance beyond "hello world." Upon starting, it would prompt the user for a number. With this number n, it would then print out the string "fuck," n times. Finally the user was given the option to repeat the exercise, or quit. Perhaps a little limited in use, I nevertheless was hooked on the power that I had tasted. It is a particular joy that any programmer will know well, to see the machine do your bidding, no matter how simple a task that may be. It works, and it works because you understand how to make it work.

The US military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of US troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a bargepole. They all kept saying, “We’ll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?” ‘The job was priced at between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but one day there’s a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, “We’ll do it, but it’ll cost you two million dollars, in advance.” The Americans didn’t really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke. ‘Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there’s a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke – and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, “Hey, how will you get the plane back?” And the crew just said, “We won’t. It’s an old one – we only bought it for this job, and we’re ditching it here.” Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off one and a half million dollars in profit and left it to rust. It’s still there.

Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the last few years, they believed that the entire universe, the one universe, was generated from a few principles of symmetry and mathematical truths, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood. However, two theories in physics, called “eternal inflation” and “string theory,” now

God, the Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes his reach. Every king, despot, weather pattern, and molecule are at his command. He passes the shuttle back and forth across the generations, and as he does, a design emerges. Satan weaves; God reweaves.

Digital computers have either two states, on or off, and so respond only to binary messages, which consist of ones (on) and zeros (off). Every term in a program ultimately must be expressed through these two numbers, ensuring that ordinary mathematical statements quickly grow dizzyingly complex. In the late 1940s, programming a computer was, as one observer put it, “maddeningly difficult.” Before long programmers found ways to produce binary strings more easily. They first devised special typewriters that automatically spit out the desired binary code. Then they shifted to more expansive “assembly” languages, in which letters and symbols stood for ones and zeros. Writing in assembly was an advance, but it still required fidelity to a computer’s rigid instruction set. The programmer had to know the instruction set cold in order to write assembly code effectively. Moreover, the instruction set differed from computer model to computer model, depending on its microprocessor design. This meant that a programmer’s knowledge of an assembly language, so painfully acquired, could be rendered worthless whenever a certain computer fell out of use. By

In 1951, Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician with the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance Naval Reserve, conceived of a program called a compiler, which translated a programmer’s instructions into the strings of ones and zeroes, or machine language, that ultimately controlled the computer. In principle, compilers seemed just the thing to free programmers from the tyranny of hardware and the mind-numbing binary code. Hopper

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

It was W. Ernest Freud who at eighteen months of age captured his grandfather’s interest while playing with a wooden reel on the end of a string. Throwing the reel while holding onto the string, Ernst—as he was known then—would say “fort,” which in German means “gone.” Pulling it back, he would say “da,” meaning “there.” Freud interpreted this game as Ernst’s effort to come to terms with the distressing absences of his mother when she left the apartment. With the wooden reel symbolizing his mother, he sent her away and brought her back at will. Instead of being a passive victim of loss—being left by his mother—he turned his passive role into an active

The Leyden jar was the first electrical storage device, invented independently in Pomerania and in Leyden, Holland, in 1745. It stored electrical charge generated by contact, the kind we call static electricity today. In his famous kite experiment of 1752, Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm to collect electrical charge, which he transferred from his wet kite string into a Leyden jar. The experiment demonstrated that the modest sparks and shocks of static electricity were identical with the great bursts of lightning that split the sky in storms. For such “discoveries in electricity,” the Royal Society of London elected Franklin to membership in 1753 and awarded him the Copley Medal, its highest honor.

World events do not occur by accident. They are made to happen, whether it is to do with national issues or commerce; and most of them are staged and managed by those who hold the purse strings.” — Dennis Healy, UK Secretary of State for Defense from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979

There is perhaps no more heartening proof of the role of environment in human intelligence than the Flynn effect, the worldwide phenomenon of upwardly trending IQ, named for the New Zealand psychologist who first described it. Since the early years of the twentieth century, gains have ranged between nine and twenty points per generation in the United States, Britain, and other industrialized nations for which reliable data-sets are available. With our knowledge of evolutionary processes, we can be sure of one thing: we are not seeing wholesale genetic change in the global population. No, these changes must be recognized as largely the fruits of improvement in overall standards both of education and of health and nutrition. Other factors as yet not understood doubtless play a role, but the Flynn effect serves nicely to make the point that even a trait whose variation is largely determined by genetic differences is in the end significantly malleable. We are not mere puppets upon whose strings our genes alone tug.

Coding Sonnet One of the most powerful tools of science is coding, A string of illegible characters can make or break a society. 145,000 lines of code landed Armstrong 'n Aldrin on the moon, And 2 billion of them are working to satisfy everyday curiosity. But this awesome force is still used mostly to generate revenue, Welfare of humanity isn't a priority here, but a mere suggestion. That's why the coding marvel that set out to connect the world, Has become a playground for conspiracy, bigotry and division. Learn from the horrific blunders of society's founding coders, Make humanity the primary command of every code you write. A code that doesn't lift the society is nothing but a hideous bug, Zeros and Ones know no good or bad, unless by you it is defined. Uncle Ben once said, with great power comes great responsibility. I say to you today, a humane code facilitates a humane society.

Today it is considered bad manners to point to any Soviet source of American anti-Americanism. But throughout their history, Americans had never before been anti-American. They voluntarily came to the US. They were always a proud and independent people who loved their country. Ares is the Greek god of war. He was usually accompanied in battle by his sister Eris ( goddess of discord ) and by his 2 sons, Deimos ( fear ) and Phobos ( terror ). Khrushchev and Ceausescu. Both men rose to lead their countries without ever having earned a single penny in any productive job. Neither man had the slightest idea about what made an economy work and each passionately believed that stealing from the rich was the magic wand that would cure all his country's economic ills. Both were leading formerly free countries, transformed into Marxist dictatorships through massive wealth redistribution, which eventually made the government the mother and father of everything. Disinformation has become the bubonic plague of our contemporary life. Marx used disinformation to depict money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation. Lenin's disinformation brought Marx's utopian communism to life. Hitler resorted to disinformation to portray the Jews as an inferior and loathsome race so as to rationalize his Holocaust. Disinformation was the tool used by Stalin to dispossess a third of the world and to transform it into a string of gulags. Khrushchev's disinformation widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism. Andropov's disinformation turned the Islamic world against the US and ignited the international terrorism that threatens us today. Disinformation has also generated worldwide disrespect and even contempt for the US and its leaders.

I commenced writing this scroll in a frenzied attempt to find myself. I wished to ascertain how the concertina wire that cinches the plasma pool of my biological capsule together stitches a person into the vacillating web of eternity. Instead of my wild ravings spooling out answers, the act of writing nonstop in the midst of my darkest hours triggered a torrent of questions to examine. Each adamant question posed led to a baffling string of insistent conundrums. I orchestrated an urgent caucus, and tenaciously conducted a fact-finding mission. I held a self-questioning klatch attempting to pierce a spool of secular inquiries, a series of pious and profane questions that compressed upon my confused mind. The resultant positive displacement and negative displacement of febrile energy generated from this disorientating and mind-numbing process of rigorous self-scrutiny spun me akin to a crazed top. Unsure of my destiny, I lunged into the unknown, diving headfirst into the indecipherable parts of my reeling existence. I asked questions and sought answers, examined a sundry of personal experiences, and listened to my inner vibrations. How does a person square their mystical self to the undulating camber of life? How does anyone face the deflating specter of the impending death of his or her beloved? I seek to develop a desirable quotient of self-confidence and gain the needed degree of brio to tackle life. I wish to learn how to savor every moment, come to terms with impairing personal fears, blighting uncertainty, and caustic self-doubt. I aspire to overcome the disfiguring emotional liabilities harvested during my troubled past, develop healthful new habits, and brace myself against the irreducible fact of human mortality.

Books, in their purest form, are vessels of knowledge, gateways to imagination, and catalysts for learning. They possess the incredible power to educate, inspire, and empower individuals, transcending boundaries of time, space, and culture. Books are not mere tools of manipulation or grooming; they are beacons of enlightenment, guiding us towards a deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. To claim that books groom or indoctrinate individuals is to undermine the inherent intelligence and discernment of humanity. Books are not puppet masters pulling the strings of our minds; they are companions on our journey, offering insights, perspectives, and narratives that expand our horizons and challenge our preconceived notions. In the realm of literature, we find the freedom to explore diverse ideas, to question authority, and to engage in critical thinking. It is through books that we encounter heroes who teach us about courage, compassion, and resilience. We discover worlds beyond our own, cultures we may never experience firsthand, and histories that shape our present. Books are a refuge for the marginalized, a voice for the silenced, and a catalyst for social change. They have the power to ignite revolutions, dismantle oppressive systems, and inspire generations to fight for justice. To accuse books of grooming is to ignore the countless individuals who have been transformed by the written word. From the abolitionist movements fueled by slave narratives to the civil rights movement propelled by the works of Martin Luther King Jr., books have consistently been at the forefront of societal transformation. They have the ability to challenge the status quo, dismantle stereotypes, and empower individuals to think critically and act conscientiously. In a world where disinformation and manipulation are rampant, books provide a sanctuary of truth, authenticity, and intellectual rigor. They encourage us to question, to seek evidence, and to seek multiple perspectives. Books cultivate empathy, broaden our understanding of diverse experiences, and foster a sense of connection that transcends borders. Therefore, let us not succumb to the fallacy that books groom or brainwash individuals. Instead, let us celebrate the power of literature to uplift, to enlighten, and to ignite the flames of curiosity. Let us embrace the freedom to read, to explore ideas that challenge us, and to engage in open dialogue that fosters understanding and unity. In the words of Frederick Douglass, 'Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.' Books are the keys that unlock the doors of knowledge, emancipation, and liberation. They are not tools of manipulation but instruments of empowerment. Let us cherish them, protect them, and ensure that their transformative power continues to shape our world for the better.

I got to the end of the string [of industrial farming] and discovered that on the relentless quest of efficiency, I had given up resiliency, something much, much more important. The inconvenient truth is that efficiency and resilience are almost mutually exclusive. The more you strive for efficiency, the less resilience you’ll have.

Psalm 12 For the choir director: A psalm of David, to be accompanied by an eight-stringed instrument.* 1 Help, O LORD, for the godly are fast disappearing! The faithful have vanished from the earth! 2 Neighbors lie to each other, speaking with flattering lips and deceitful hearts. 3 May the LORD cut off their flattering lips and silence their boastful tongues. 4 They say, “We will lie to our hearts’ content. Our lips are our own—who can stop us?” 5 The LORD replies, “I have seen violence done to the helpless, and I have heard the groans of the poor. Now I will rise up to rescue them, as they have longed for me to do.” 6 The LORD’s promises are pure, like silver refined in a furnace, purified seven times over. 7 Therefore, LORD, we know you will protect the oppressed, preserving them forever from this lying generation, 8 even though the wicked strut about, and evil is praised throughout the land.

Mother's Apron There's a great old skit called "Mother's Apron" that touts the many household uses of the apron. This basic skit, with its infinite individual variations, has been performed by women's church and community clubs for generations. Below is a version remembered by Bernice Esau that was presented by her mother, probably originally in Low German, the common language of the rural Minnesota community where it was performed, hence the slightly lilting, old-fashioned sound to it: Do you remember Mother's aprons? Always big they were, and their uses were many. Besides the foremost purpose, the protection of the dress beneath, it was a holder for removal of hot pans from the oven. It was wonderful for drying children's tears and, yes, even for wiping small noses. From the henhouse it carried eggs, fuzzy chicks, ducklings, or goslings, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven. Its folds provided an ideal hiding place for shy children, and when guests lingered on chilly days, the apron was wrapped about Mother's arms. Innumerable times it wiped a perspiring brow bent over a hot wood-burning stove. Corncobs and wood kindlings came to the kitchen stove in that ample garment, as did fresh peas and string beans from the garden. Often they were podded and stemmed in the lap the apron covered. Windfall apples were gathered in it, and wildflowers. Chairs were hastily dusted with its corners when unexpected company was sighted. Waving it aloft was as good as a dinner bell to call the men from the field. Big they were, and useful. Now I wonder, will any modern-day apron provoke such sweet and homesick memories?

This “vulnerability” has been ideologically harnessed to generate a string of political consequences: fear of becoming irrelevant to the global market, thus constantly in search of niches of opportunities for economic growth; fear of fragmentation, thus an insistence on tight social control to ensure social cohesion; fear of political polarization by different political parties with different ideologies that might jeopardize national development, thus an emphasis on the administrative advantages of a one-party dominant government.

Particle theory explains that all matter is made of many small particles that are always moving. There are particles in solids, liquids, and gases, and all of them continually vibrate, in varying directions, speeds, and intensities.17 Particles can only interact with matter by transferring energy. Waves are the counterpart to particles. There are three ways to regard waves: •​A disturbance in a medium through which energy is transferred from one particle within the medium to another, without making a change in the medium. •​A picture of this disturbance over time. •​A single cycle representing this disturbance. Waves have a constructive influence on matter when they superimpose or interact by creating other waves. They have a destructive influence when reflected waves cancel each other out. Scientists used to believe that particles were different from waves, but this is not always true, as you will see in the definition of wave-particle duality in this section. Waves, or particles operating in wave mode, oscillate, or swing between two points in a rhythmic motion. These oscillations create fields, which can in turn create more fields. For instance, oscillating charged electrons form an electrical field, which generates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electrical field. Superposition in relation to waves means that a field can create effects in other objects, and in turn be affected itself. Imagine that a field stimulates oscillations in an atom. In turn, this atom makes its own waves and fields. This new movement can force a change in the wave that started it all. This principle allows us to combine waves; the result is the superposition. We can also subtract waves from each other. Energy healing often involves the conscious or inadvertent addition or subtraction of waves. In addition, this principle helps explain the influence of music, which often involves combining two or more frequencies to form a chord or another harmonic. A harmonic is an important concept in healing, as each person operates at a unique harmonic or set of frequencies. A harmonic is defined as an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency. This means that a fundamental tone generates higher-frequency tones called overtones. These shorter, faster waves oscillate between two ends of a string or air column. As these reflected waves interact, the frequencies of wavelengths that do not divide into even proportions are suppressed, and the remaining vibrations are called the harmonics. Energy healing is often a matter of suppressing the “bad tones” and lifting the “good tones.” But all healing starts with oscillation, which is the basis of frequency. Frequency is the periodic speed at which something vibrates. It is measured in hertz (Hz), or cycles per second. Vibration occurs when something is moving back and forth. More formally, it is defined as a continuing period oscillation relative to a fixed point—or one full oscillation.

got to the end of the string and discovered that on the relentless quest for efficiency, I had given up resiliency, something much, much more important. The inconvenient truth is that efficiency and resilience are almost mutually exclusive.