“
There's a slope down toward evil, a gentle gradient that can be ignored at each step, unfelt. It's not until you look back, see the distant heights where you once lived, that you understand your journey.
”
”
Mark Lawrence (Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, #3))
“
The path ahead may present you with a variety of obstacles, some with steep gradients and others more level. Such diversity is inherent in any journey.
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”
Sanu Sharma
“
If you give, you must demand, on a gradient scale, to be paid back.
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Meir Ezra
“
I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
”
”
David Pearce (The Hedonistic Imperative)
“
The beauty of quantum machine learning is that we do not need to depend on an algorithm like gradient descent or convex objective function. The objective function can be nonconvex or something else.
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”
Amit Ray (Quantum Computing Algorithms for Artificial Intelligence)
“
The ignorance of the world often makes people believe that life should be black and white – that you must choose sides – and so the world of colourful gradients goes unadmired.
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A.J. Darkholme (Rise of the Morningstar (The Morningstar Chronicles, #1))
“
At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. …
”
”
Dennis E. Taylor (We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1))
“
Life was fluid, gradient, ever shifting
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”
Becky Chambers (The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4))
“
When I dream of her, it’s in vibrant color, unlike the gradients of gray of my monochrome days. But everything is hazy when I wake. The details merge. The colors fade.
”
”
Joan He (The Ones We're Meant to Find)
“
This usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and … I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes, or shadows of shapes, or an item from an image, such as grass from a landscape or wood grain, wavelets or raindrops … transformed in the most extraordinary ways at a great speed. Shapes are replicated, multiplied, reversed in negative, etc. Color is added, tinted, subtracted. Textures are the most fascinating; grass becomes fur becomes hair follicles becomes waving, dancing lines of light, and a hundred other variations and all the subtle gradients between them that my words are too coarse to describe.
”
”
Oliver Sacks (Hallucinations)
“
Before the blue of night meets the pink of sunrise, there is a transition of lavender. It's a gradient of color that stretches its fade through time, and that gives each moment a unique and exquisite existence.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks)
“
The women here are so white,” Rin marveled. “Like the girls in wall paintings.” The skin tones she observed from the caravan had moved up the color gradient the farther north they drove. She knew that the people of the northern provinces were industrialists and businessmen. They were citizens of class and means; they didn’t labor in the fields like Tikany’s farmers did. But she hadn’t expected the differences to be this pronounced. “They’re pale as their corpses will be,” Tutor Feyrik said dismissively. “They’re terrified of the sun.
”
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R.F. Kuang (The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1))
“
Anarchy and Liberty are synonymous. Anything less is merely gradient levels of slavery.
”
”
Dane Whalen
“
Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
Duck farming has taught me that my day-to-day thinking changes in a gradient that's subtle and unnoticeable when observed in 24-hour blocks, but becomes obvious when seen in longer time frames. In the past two years I've changed from pink to blue, but it was all purple to me.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
“
March is when some days are winter and some days are spring, but it's not a smooth gradient from the beginning of the month to the end. Good thing my ducks love the merging of the two seasons.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world (A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production))
“
He picked at the thick rims of dirt under his nails. This decline, both of himself and his surroundings, was almost to be welcomed. In a way he was forcing himself down these steepening gradients, like someone descending into a forbidden valley. The dirt on his hands, his stale clothes and declining hygiene, his fading interest in food and drink, all helped to expose a more real version of himself.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (High-Rise)
“
Politically oriented scientists often proclaim that there are no distinct human races, seeking to imply, without actually saying so, that races do not exist. One reason that races exist, though not distinctly, is that the features characteristic of a race are often distributed along a gradient. Almost all northern Chinese have the sinodont pattern of dentition, but the farther one goes toward southern China and Southeast Asia, the greater the percentage of people who are sundadonts and the fewer who are sinodonts.
”
”
Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
“
I chug duck soup like a giraffe that has a tornado for a neck. I’m sure you can relate. I've captured the whole experience in my newest gender-gradient fragrance that has so many notes I call it Liquid Saxophone Romance.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
“
(Q: From an outsider’s perspective, what you call “chaos magick” has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn’t seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?)
A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations.
”
”
Peter J. Carroll
“
Being isolated and alone and hurt day after day changes a person, Aden. It turns a child into . . . into a thing that isn’t quite human and not quite animal. Like any trapped creature, that child will gnaw off its own limb to escape—but if that child is a Gradient 9.8 combat-grade telepath named Zaira Neve, it’ll first ask if it can gnaw off its attackers’ limbs instead.
”
”
Nalini Singh (Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling, #14))
“
Space is so dark that looking out at it confounds the brain. The more you stare at the vastness of it, at the hanging stars and the swirling galaxies, the more you start to notice how imprecise words like 'dark' and 'black' and 'endless' are. There are so many gradients of shadow, all of them terrifying to me. That's why I keep the lights on.
”
”
Holly Black (Doctor Who: Lights Out (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E-Shorts, #12))
“
Every disorder is either too much or too little.
But.
Often we are unable to see when an ocean is just a glass.
”
”
Monaristw
“
A smile keeps the face round. It makes a perfect gradient in time that transforms the rigid into the pleasing.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (A Memoir of Memories and Memes)
“
There can occur in lives a subsidence under the soil, so that, without the surface having been visibly broken, gradients alter, uprights cant a little out of the straight.
”
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Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day)
“
Just as energy gradients are seen as the driver of the ecological system, perceived value gradients can be seen as the driver of the economic system.
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”
Nick Gogerty (The Nature of Value: How to Invest in the Adaptive Economy (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.
”
”
Gary Shteyngart
“
Trust has no gradient.
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”
Toba Beta (My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut)
“
Though there is only a slight gradient from our house to the main road, it could have been the North face of the Eiger. I just could not get up it.
”
”
Brynmor John
“
A solitary keenspren, like a marvelous three-dimensional gradient of color, appeared above her.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5))
“
The basic training procedure for the perceptron, as well as its many contemporary progeny, has a technical-sounding name—“stochastic gradient descent”—but the principle is utterly straightforward. Pick one of the training data at random (“stochastic”) and input it to the model. If the output is exactly what you want, do nothing. If there is a difference between what you wanted and what you got, then figure out in which direction (“gradient”) to adjust each weight—whether by literal turning of physical knobs or simply the changing of numbers in software—to lower the error for this particular example. Move each of them a little bit in the appropriate direction (“descent”). Pick a new example at random, and start again. Repeat as many times as necessary.
”
”
Brian Christian (The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values)
“
In 2005 software actually had designs. Now everything is flat, colorless, without icons, without borders, gradients, just horrible. Mobile ruined everything, everything is just practical now.
”
”
stained hanes (94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat)
“
Like most people, I acquired my initial sense of the era from books and photographs that left me with the impression that the world of then had no color, only gradients of gray and black. My two main protagonists, however, encountered the fl esh-and-blood reality, while also managing the routine obligations of daily life. Every morning they moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white, and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they caught sight of Hitler himself, a smallish man in a large, open Mer-cedes. But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums; they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tier-garten, Berlin’s main park. They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced, and joked—until, as their fi rst year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most signifi cant in revealing the true character of Hitler and that laid the keystone for the decade to come. For both father and daughter it changed everything.
”
”
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
“
I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available.
And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like.
And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction.
And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.
”
”
Joscha Bach
“
Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapors. The ball of her foot was glass too, but murkier, losing its transparency in a gradient until, near her ankle, it reached skin: matte and flesh toned like any other.
”
”
Ali Shaw (The Girl With Glass Feet)
“
thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension. Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.
”
”
Robert A. Heinlein (Friday)
“
We all see very clearly in others tendencies which we, ourselves, have overcome. The older and wiser we grow, the more we can see the arrogance of youth. The more authentic we become, the more we can see the lies of insecurity. The more vulnerable we allow ourselves to be, the more we see the dangerous symptoms of unexpressed emotions.
There is no finish line to learning.
There is no point where we're done growing, and all we will ever do is look down upon others who are behind us. No one is ever at the top. We are all growing at our own rates, and no matter how terrible or how enlightened we fancy ourselves to be today, the future will be sure to give us a different perspective.
There is really no use in comparing yourself to others. There will always be someone ahead and someone behind, and there will be dozens (if not hundreds) of different scales and gradients to be behind and ahead on.
To be number one is never final. It is and always will be a momentary, fleeting instant. But to be a growing version of yourself? That, you can be. You can be that every single day.
”
”
Vironika Tugaleva
“
In the story of cancer and chemistry, the harm comes from exposure, and exposure inversely follows gradients of social power. Disproportionate harm is wrought on liberalism’s second-class citizens: the working class, women and children, the disabled, the colonized.
”
”
Rupa Marya (Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice)
“
The proteins create a gradient within the egg. Like sugar diffusing out of a cube in a cup of coffee, they are present at high concentration on one end of the egg, and low concentration on the other. The diffusion of a chemical through a matrix of protein can even create distinct, three-dimensional patterns-like a pool of syrup ribboning into oatmeal. Specific genes are activated at the high-concentration end versus at the low-concentration end, thereby allowing the head-tail axis to be defined, or other patterns to be formed.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Gravity is not a force, it is emergent. A region of space with less matter has denser time and a region of space with more matter has denser space, a pressure gradient. You can't unify gravity with the other three forces. The other three forces are probably emergent as well.
”
”
R.A. Delmonico
“
Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry”
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
”
”
Howard Nemerov (Sentences (Phoenix Poets))
“
The light walls and ceilings that make a room seem taller are also naturally more reflective, mimicking the diaphanous quality of light at elevation. Gradient washes (also called ombré) in pale colors evoke the way the sky’s hue naturally fades toward the horizon. Blue, as the color of the sky, is especially conducive to creating a transcendent feeling.
”
”
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
“
Kelly, these are gamers discussing the maximum theoretical efficiency of mass transference weapons within a steep gravitational gradient. If you danced naked on the table, maybe one or two of the humanoids might look in your direction, but I wouldn’t bet on it. If all you want to do is leave unnoticed, just don’t hit anybody over the head with your chair after you stand up.” Kelly
”
”
E.M. Foner (Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador #1))
“
Todo el verano,
junto a la luz gradiente de escofina
de estas manos oscuras, procreadoras de dunas: tus piedras,
derrumbándose y volviendo a la vida
alrededor de ti.
Tras la fina negrura de mi párpado
una estrella temprana, despedida
desde un infierno de maleza,
te incorpora, inocente,
hacia el amanecer y puebla
tu sombra de nombres.
Rimados por la noche. Profundos como gradas.
Cercanos.
”
”
Paul Auster (Poesía completa)
“
My last Christmas toy drive in Compton handed out eulogies
Not because the rags in the park had red gradient
But because the high blood pressure flooded the caterin'
So what's the difference 'tween your life when hidin' motives?
More fatalities and reality brung you closure
The noble person that goes to work and pray like they 'posed to?
Slaughter people too, your murder's just a bit slower
”
”
Kendrick Lamar
“
The acceleration of gravity g is a measure of cumulative effect of change in energy density per odd frequency mode summed over the gravitational frequency bandwidth. Modification of the naturally occurring spectral energy density profile enables a change in the local acceleration of gravity. Acceleration is proportional to the frequency differential which is a function of the gradient in EM energy density.
”
”
Larry Reed (Quantum Wave Mechanics)
“
Full-scale river systems mature the same way, carving out large, varying paths over thousands of years. Geologically young rivers flow straight and fast, whereas older rivers adapt to have more turns and twists. The changing shape of the river represents the patterned “knowledge” embedded in it from thousands of years of resolving gradient flows, with the prior shape providing the guide for how to “capture” more of the flowing water’s potential energy and dissipate more energy into the surrounding system.
”
”
Nick Gogerty (The Nature of Value: How to Invest in the Adaptive Economy (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
Life was fluid, gradient, ever shifting. People – a group comprised of every sapient species, organic or otherwise – were chaos, but chaos was good. Chaos was the only sensible conclusion. There was no law that was just in every situation, no blanket rule that could apply to everyone, no explanation that accounted for every component. This did not mean that laws and rules were not helpful, or that explanations should not be sought, but rather that there should be no fear in changing them as needed, for nothing in the universe ever held still.
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”
Becky Chambers (The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4))
“
We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’ Let
”
”
Nick Lane (The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?)
“
What I like about stochastic gradient descent is how nuts it sounds. Imagine, for instance, that the president of the United States made decisions without any kind of global strategy; rather, the nations chief executive is surrounded by a crowd of shouting subordinates, each hollering for policy to be tweaked in a way that suits their own particular interest. And the president, every day, chooses one of those people at random to listen to, and changes course accordingly. That would be a ridiculous way for a person to run major world government, but it works pretty well in machine learning!
”
”
Jordan Ellenberg (Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and EverythingElse)
“
Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mess over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being.
Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.
”
”
Alan Moore (Jerusalem)
“
Much like his fangs, he had folded spines under the base of his cock. They were almost perfectly matched to his skin, except the black gradient at the sharp point, like small porcupine quills. They folded flush to his skin. I could not even feel them when touching him. “What’s this?” I ran my finger over them. “I wasn’t going to.” He flinched again. “What are they?” “I don’t use them.” He looked away. “I did not want you to think I would use them—” “What are they for?” I asked once more. “Don’t make me repeat myself again.” My eyes narrowed at him. “They’re for…” he mumbled, something I could not hear. “I didn’t quite get that.”
”
”
I.V. Ophelia (The Poisoner (The Poisoner #1))
“
With a sharp inhale, Bryce rallied her magic. On the exhale, she sent a stream of her starlight into the prism, her power faster than ever before. Starlight hit the prism, passed through it, and— “Huh.” It wasn’t a rainbow that emerged from the other side. Not even close. It took her a moment to process what she was seeing: a gradient beam of starlight. Where the rainbow would have been full of color, this one began in shimmering white light and descended into shadow. An anti-rainbow, as it were. Light falling into darkness, droplets of starlight raining from the highest beam into the shadowy band at the bottom, devoured by the darkness below.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3))
“
On 13th December 1988 Brynmor John MP died from ME/CFS. His experience of the illness was all too familiar:
‘Though there is only a slight gradient from our house to the main road, it could have been the North face of the Eiger. I just could not get up it’.
He found himself unable to dress; the slightest exertion exhausted him and it took days to regain his strength. He was irritated by the profusion of psychiatric comment and was trying to ensure better understanding of ME/CFS (Perspectives, Summer 1991:28‐30).
Brynmor John suddenly collapsed and died as he was leaving the House of Commons gym after having been advised to exercise back to fitness.
”
”
Malcolm Hooper
“
At one time, we thought that the way life came together was almost completely random, only needing an energy gradient to get going. But as we’ve moved into the information age, we’ve come to realize that life is more about information than energy. Fire has most of the characteristics of life. It eats, it grows, it reproduces. But fire retains no information. It doesn’t learn; it doesn’t adapt. The five millionth fire started by lightning will behave just like the first. But the five hundredth bacterial division will not be like the first one, especially if there is environmental pressure. That’s DNA. And RNA. That’s life. … Dr. Steven Carlisle, from the Convention panel Exploring the Galaxy
”
”
Dennis E. Taylor (We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse, #1))
“
negative entropy’ in the sense of organisation, or simply ‘entropy with the sign reversed’ has not so much to do with free energy (as Schrödinger also indicates), but with the way energy is trapped, stored and mobilised in the living system. Energy is trapped directly at the electronic level. It is stored not only as vibrational and electronic bond energies, but also in the structure of the system: in gradients, fields and flow patterns, compartments, organelles, cells and tissues. All this in turn enables organisms to mobilise their energies coherently and hence make available the entire spectrum of stored energies for work, most efficiently and rapidly, whenever and wherever energy is required.
”
”
Mae-Wan Ho (The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms)
“
Those who saw the true beauty, complexity and the very nature of Nature are [all] incapable of using their intelligence for conciously evil acts, furthermore, the eyes will see violence buried underneath millions of other viable solutions.
Rational good radiates, and inspires more rational good.
As each ray of the sun harmless [but] in great numbers.
”
”
Xilaristw
“
There is a “continual dance between intellect and emotions, feeling and reason, which is essential to the proper functioning and maintenance of both.”15 In a sense we do have two different ways of knowing the world and interacting with it, the rational and the emotional. This distinction roughly approximates to the folk distinction between heart and head; “knowing something is right in your heart is a different order of conviction, somehow a deeper kind of certainty, than thinking so with your rational mind.”16 There is a steady gradient in the ratio of rational to emotional control over the mind; the more intense the feeling, the more dominant the emotional mind becomes and more ineffectual the rational.
”
”
Ken Robinson (Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative)
“
The 'magic' of organ-regenerations, and of unconscious guidance in creativity, both owe their striking character to the sudden re-activation of (morphogenetic or psychogenetic) potentials which are normally under restraint in the adult individual. The period of incubation may be compared to the catabolic phase in organ-regeneration: the former releases pre-conceptual, intuitive modes of ideation from the censorship imposed by the conscious mind; the latter triggers off embryonic growth-processes equally inhibited by the mature organism. The contact-guidance of nerves towards their end-organs and the revival of other pre-natal skills, provide enticing parallels to the unconscious gradients and ancient 'waterways' which mediate the underground rendezvous of ideas.
”
”
Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation)
“
The infamous South Col awaited me over the top.
I longed to see this place I had heard and read so much about. The highest camp in the world at twenty-six thousand feet--deep in Everest’s Death Zone.
I had always winced at the term Death Zone. Mountaineers are renowned for playing things down, yet mountaineers had coined the phrase--I didn’t like that.
I put the thought aside, pulled the last few steps over the spur, and the gradient eased. I turned around and swore that I could see halfway around the world.
A think blanket of cloud was moving in beneath me, obscuring the lower faces of the mountain. But above these, I could see a vast horizon of dark blue panned out before me.
Adrenaline filled my tired limbs, and I started to move once more.
I knew I was entering another world.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
The instincts operate most smoothly when there is no consciousness to conflict with them, or when what consciousness there is remains firmly attached to instinct. This condition no longer applies even to primitive man, for everywhere we find psychic systems at work which are in some measure opposed to pure instinctuality. And if a primitive tribe shows even the smallest traces of culture, we find that creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it towards analogical ideas. These systems have to be constituted in such a way that they offer the libido a kind of natural gradient. For the libido does not incline to anything, otherwise it would be possible to turn it in any direction one chose. But that is the case only with voluntary processes, and then only to a limited degree. The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow. The nature of these analogies is therefore a serious problem because, as we have said, they must be ideas which attract the libido. Their special character is, I believe, to be discerned in the fact that they are archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious. When Christ, for instance, speaks to Nicodemus of spirit and water, these are not just random ideas, but typical ones which have always exerted a powerful fascination on the mind. Christ is here touching on the archetype, and that, if anything, will convince Nicodemus, for the archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
Vitality, understood both somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them.
Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural representation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the vertical dimension without God.
”
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Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
“
According to a classic experiment by Wolfgang Kohler, you can take two gray pieces of paper-one dark, one bright-and teach the chickens to expect food on the brighter of the two. If you then remove the darker piece and replace it by one brighter than the other one, the deluded creatures will look for their dinner, not on the identical gray paper where they have always found it, but on the paper where they would expect it in terms of relationships-that is, on the brighter of the two. Their little brains are attuned to gradients rather than to individual stimuli. Things could not go well with them if nature had willed it otherwise. For would a memory of the exact stimulus have helped them to recognize the identical paper? Hardly ever! A cloud passing over the sun would change its brightness, and so might even a tilt of the head, or an approach from a different angle. If what we call "identity" were not anchored in a constant relationship with environment, it would be lost in the chaos of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves.
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E.H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation)
“
Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
Much of our internal heat is generated by dissipating the proton gradient across the mitochondrial membranes (see page 183). Since the proton gradient can either power ATP production or heat production, we are faced with alternatives: any protons dissipated to produce heat cannot be used to make ATP. (As we saw in Part 2, the proton gradient has other critical functions too, but if we assume that these remain constant, they don’t affect our argument.) If 30 per cent of the proton gradient is used to produce heat, then no more than 70 per cent can be used to produce ATP. Wallace and colleagues realized that this balance could plausibly shift according to the climate. People living in tropical Africa would gain from a tight coupling of protons to ATP production, so generating less internal heat in a hot climate, whereas the Inuit, say, would gain by generating more internal heat in their frigid environment, and so would necessarily generate relatively little ATP. To compensate for their lower ATP production, they would need to eat more. Wallace set out to find any mitochondrial genes that might influence the balance between heat production and ATP generation, and found several variants that plausibly affected heat production (by uncoupling electron flow from proton pumping). The variants that produced the most heat were favoured in the Arctic, as expected, while those that produced the least were found in Africa.
”
”
Nick Lane (Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Oxford Landmark Science))
“
An extensive biomedical literature has established that individuals are more likely to activate a stress response and are more at risk for a stress-sensitive disease if they (a) feel as if they have minimal control over stressors, (b) feel as if they have no predictive information about the duration and intensity of the stressor, (c) have few outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, (d) interpret the stressor as evidence of circumstances worsening, and (e) lack social support-for the duress caused by the stressors. Psychosocial stressors are not evenly distributed across society. Just as the poor have a disproportionate share of physical stressors (hunger, manual labor, chronic sleep deprivation with a second job, the bad mattress that can't be replaced), they have a disproportionate share of psychosocial ones. Numbing assembly-line work and an occupational lifetime spent taking orders erode workers' sense of control. Unreliable cars that may not start in the morning and paychecks that may not last the month inflict unpredictability. Poverty rarely allows stress-relieving options such as health club memberships, costly but relaxing hobbies, or sabbaticals for rethinking one's priorities. And despite the heartwarming stereotype of the "poor but loving community," the working poor typically have less social support than the middle and upper classes, thanks to the extra jobs, the long commutes on public transit, and other burdens. Marmot has shown that regardless of SES, the less autonomy one has at work, the worse one's cardiovascular health. Furthermore, low control in the workplace accounts for about half the SES gradient in cardiovascular disease in his Whitehall population.
”
”
Anonymous
“
The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are:
1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest.
2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle.
3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term.
4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks.
5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields.
6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs.
7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved.
8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders.
9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors.
10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns.
11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success.
12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity)
“
What is the use of half an eye?’ and ‘What is the use of half a wing?’ are both instances of the argument from ‘irreducible complexity’. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment’s thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can’t see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey – or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus ‘pinhole camera’ eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak – not the highest peak but a high one.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion: 10th Anniversary Edition)
“
Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life, each is caught up in the vortex in which he first committed
only measured stakes, each is led on by what he said and the response he received, led on by his own thought of which he is no longer the sole thinker. No one thinks any more, everyone speaks, all live and gesticulate within Being, as I stir within my landscape, guided by gradients of differences to be observed or to be reduced if I wish to remain here or to go yonder. Whether in discussion or in monologue, the essence in the living and active
state is always a certain vanishing point indicated by the arrangement of the words, their "other side," inaccessible, save for him who accepts to live first and always in them.
As the nervure bears the leaf from within, from the depths of its flesh, the ideas are the texture of experience, its style, first mute, then uttered. Like every style, they are elaborated within the thickness of being and, not only in fact but also by right, could not be detached from it, to be spread out on display under the gaze.
”
”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
“
half-life. Preparations with high lipid solubility, such as diazepam and alprazolam, are absorbed rapidly from the GI tract and distribute rapidly to the brain by passive diffusion along a concentration gradient, resulting in a rapid onset of action. However, as the concentration of the medication increases in the brain and decreases in the bloodstream, the concentration gradient reverses itself, and these medications leave the brain rapidly, resulting in fast cessation of drug effect.
”
”
Benjamin James Sadock (Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry)
“
Two kingfishers frolicking amidst branches of a small fig tree. Fleshy petals with streaks of pale yellow hiding a spread of fine black dots, embroidered in gradient with dark shades of saffron gradually giving way to yellow. Two birds alighting from the flower bush: one with its spindly beak , looking upwards- wings spread out, over sized head with a gay blue breast. The creature looked skywards, poised for a higher flight. The one below hovered over stalks of lilies. Its prussian blue head highlighted with lighter shades of blue and its orange body tapering in a stubby tail. One more fig blossom seemingly at a distance from the main frame looked more of a spectral double of its full bodied cousin, while a whole array of vegetation with stalky leaves seen two notches away as shadows embroidered in grey.
”
”
Sakoon Singh (In The Land of The Lovers)
“
The precise Geography of the Water-shed was now primary,— where Races might go, for Wheels to be driven and Workshops to be run from them . . . ’twas like coming before the Final Judge and discovering that good and useful Lives, innocence of Wrong-doing, purity of Character, count for far less, than what He really wishes of us, something we have no more suspected than anyone in the Valley had ever imagin’d that the Flow of Water through Nature, along a Gradient provided free by the same Deity, might be re-shap’d to drive a Row of Looms, each working thousands of Yarns in strictest right-angularity,— as far from Earthly forms as possible,— nor that ev’ry stage of the ’Morphosis, would have its equivalent in Pounds, Shillings, and Pence.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon)
“
However, it was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo.
”
”
J.G. Ballard (The Drought)
“
Calmer again, he looked out to see he was sandwiched below the cloud and above the fog. There was no way the helicopter would see him here. The cabin was nearer, but he was still too far above it and night was getting closer. He had to keep going. He plucked another couple of limbs from a tree. The pine scent thrilled his senses. He was alive. Norman half walked, half skidded down the slope until eventually it began to widen and the gradient relaxed. He found Sandra a little further down, tall spruces surrounding the patch of snow where she lay. Norman’s seat from the plane was just above her. Her eyes were open but she was stiff and dead. He covered her body with twigs then moved on. Now that the slope was shallow enough for him to control his descent, he slid on his bottom down the apron for at least 300 m (1,000 ft). He made his way down into a narrow and twisted gulch in front of the huge ridge he had seen earlier. Carefully he avoided the ice-covered stream that snaked below him. Get wet, you get hypothermia, you die.
”
”
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
“
Color, the principle: First, you should think about how color affects the psychology of the user. Then, you should think about the role of color in the product. Finally, you should think about the color itself. According to the theory of static and dynamic, usually colors like static world, the new colors like dynamic elements, new colors will instantly become the focus while ordinary colors will not attract too much attention. For product design, you should aim for a continuous and integrated appearance of the elements, or avoid any interruptions or breaks. This includes the colors of the front panel, frame, and rear panel. For color itself, there are different levels of colors based on how often humans see them. The highest level color is the air, which is the most seen color by humans, but humans cannot make it. The closest thing to air is glass, which can create a 3D color effect by superimposing on other colors. This is a miracle that breaks the common sense that the eye can only see 2D colors. The second level color is the sky, which is the second most seen color by humans, especially during the day. The third level color is the human body, which is the most familiar color to humans, such as skin and hair. The fourth level color is nature, which is the second most familiar color to humans. The fifth level color is artificial. Monochrome is the cornerstone, and the color combination (the same color system can reduce the sense of abruptness, the near color secondary) and the gradient aesthetics are stricter. The more the style focuses on minimalism, the more it favors monochrome.
”
”
Shakenal Dimension (The Art of iPhone Review: A Step-by-Step Buyer's Guide for Apple Lovers)
“
What Does It Mean to Be a Villain?” in yellow, on a blue gradient background. “Do they give this presentation to all the new hires?” I whispered to Morrison. “Executives and managers, yes,” Morrison said. “Shut up and listen.” I shut up and listened. And what I heard was that villains, at least for the purposes of this particular human resources presentation, were not bad people, and not evil people. What they were, were professional disrupters: the people who looked at systems and processes; found the weak spots, loopholes and unintended consequences of each of them; and then exploited them, either for their own advantage or the advantage of their client base. These activities, Yang explained, were neither inherently good nor bad in themselves—their “goodness” or “badness” was entirely dependent on the perspective of the observer.
”
”
John Scalzi (Starter Villain)
“
The next night, I saw the red kemboja tree and I held my breath. Bright and bold, like the flames of a forest, its petals layered each other in oblongs of five. Their centre was dark plum, and the colour gradient paled to mauve as they bloomed outwards from the core, forming a perfect symmetry of five round and robust petals.
”
”
Wan Phing Lim (Two Figures in a Car and Other Stories)
“
To meet halfway may not end in harmony, but it is still harmonic.
”
”
Monaristw
“
[Floating in an isolation tank] is the first time that we’ve been without sensory experience, sensory environmental stimuli, since we were conceived. There is no sound, no sight, no temperature gradient, and no gravity. So all of the brain’s searching and gating information from the environment is relaxed. Everything that was in the background—kind of ‘behind the curtain’—can now be exposed. When done consistently over time, it’s essentially like meditation on steroids. It starts to recalibrate the entire neuroendocrine system. People who are running in stress mode or sympathetic overdrive start to relax that over time, and you get this bleed-over effect into everyday life. It’s not just what happens in the tank. It continues outside of the tank. You see heart rate normalize, hypertension normalize, cortisol normalize. Pain starts to resolve. Metabolic issues start to resolve. “Anxiety, insomnia, and mental chattering can be significantly improved in [2 to 3 times per week for a total of] anywhere between 3 and 7 sessions. For pain, it’s normally 7 to 10 sessions. I recommend doing a 2-hour float if people are able.” TF: According to Dan, most people get exponentially more benefit from a single 2-hour session than 2 separate 1-hour sessions. Nonetheless, 2-hour floats still make me fidgety, so I routinely do 1-hour sessions.
”
”
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
“
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaos most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive than others and even if a word translates, the true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast.
Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds.
//Easy is a tree, challenging is analysis.
”
”
Monaristw
“
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaps most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive and even if a word translates - true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast.
Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds.
//Easy is a tree, challenging is analysis.
”
”
Monaristw
“
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaps most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive and even if a word translates - true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast.
Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds.
Touchable or not.
”
”
Monaristw
“
Più i membri sono vicini alla ricompensa, più spesso acquistano per raggiungerla. In psicologia questo fenomeno è noto come “ipotesi dell’obiettivo gradiente” ed è stato studiato sin dagli anni Trenta. Pertanto dare ai membri obiettivi realistici e un modo trasparente per monitorare i loro progressi li farà acquistare sempre più spesso.
”
”
Simone Puorto (Hotel Distribution 2050. (Pre)visioni sul futuro di hotel marketing e distribuzione alberghiera)
“
As the days began to feel like they were all bleeding into one another, the lines separating them becoming but a blurred gradient resembling lines not at all, with the world continuing to spin regardless of mortal toil, the tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet, and people growing everywhere around, for him, at least one thing remained constant: the aromatic scent of coffee tinging the air, kissing his nostrils. Some say that no true satisfaction could be found in instant gratification. Danny begged to differ as he moved to pour his first cup. Coffee, our way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.
Sipping the hot bean water, he felt ready~
”
”
Kyle St Germain (Dysfunction)
“
The first hint of dawn kissed the indigo sky; thin seams in gradients of watermelon pink ran between towering skyscrapers.
”
”
Al Hess (Neuro Noir (A World Running Down Prequel))
“
Let’s imagine that one of the two-dimensional creatures was able to switch planes and see the other one and see that there was some truth in both of them. Then they could flip-flop between perspectives at different times or they could say we just need to hold paradox. It’s both and neither, which mostly means giving up on making sense of reality. Or they say it’s a middle path that’s somewhere between the two. And a middle path in two dimensions is like a rounded rectangle where you kind of do something that’s a little bit circle-ish and a little bit rectangle-ish which isn’t even any true part of what a cylinder is. And the thing is that they’re just at too low of a dimensional perspective to properly understand the nature of the cylinder which is actually a very simple thing. It doesn’t require holding paradox. It doesn’t require a middle path in that way. And it’s because when we think of a middle path oftentimes we’re thinking of extremes on left or right in a gradient. But sometimes the two different perspectives aren’t on a gradient on a single axis. They’re orthogonal to each other. And the reason why this is kind of actually an interesting example is because perception itself, a perspective on something defined by perception is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going to be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. So I can look at the object from the east side, or the west, or the top, or the north side, or the inside, microscopically, telescopically. They’ll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. And so there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about really almost any situation. And so what this means is that reality itself is trans-perspectival. It can’t be captured in any perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken, all of which will have some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fisheye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion.
But then let’s say, I’m looking at a building and the picture, the 2D picture from the east and from the west side and from inside a particular room and the aerial view are all, obviously, very different pictures and it’s because the 3D complex building actually can’t be seen in a 2D process. So I could take a lot of pictures and I could seam them together into a kind of video that moves through the building. Now by having a video, I added the dimension of time and I go back to kind of the right dimensionally to be able to understand the thing. But that’s not a perspective. That’s a lot of perspectives that we’re able to put together. So why does this matter?
”
”
Daniel Schmachtenberger
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And it’s because when we think of the middle path oftentimes we’re thinking of extremes on left or right in a gradient. But sometimes the two different perspectives aren’t on a gradient on a single axis. They’re orthogonal to each other. And the reason why this is actually an interesting example is because perception itself, a perspective on something defined by perception is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it it is going to be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. So I can look at the object from the east side or the west side or the top or the north side or the inside, microscopically, telescopically. They’ll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. And so there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about really almost any situation. And so what this means is that reality itself is trans-perspectival. It can’t be captured in any perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken all of which will have some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fisheye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion.
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Daniel Schmachtenberger
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The music of Stevie Wonder joins forces with a receptive heart to transform your delicate ennui into a wind-graced moment of relaxation. Exceeding the recommended girth of your mirth, his voice seems to stem from the open-mouthed gargoyles above churches of a village reclining on the gradient of eternal bliss. His epic song I JUST CALLED TO SAY I LOVE YOU leaves me with the desire to romp among the Eurus of distant clouds.
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Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
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Gradient Softech is a Computer and Internet based Electronic Company with a team of highly qualified professionals and has been working since last Twelve years. We are an organization engaged in the business of software development, website development, mobile application development, email marketing, PHP development, seo services, bulk sms solutions, web marketing, internet marketing etc using various Open Source as well as Microsoft Technologies.
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Gradient Softech
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We didn't do that in the Navy, you know." "Doesn't matter; you're in the Army now, hoss.
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Jim McCulloch (Fracture Gradient)
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The use of cross-membrane proton gradients to power cells was utterly unanticipated. First proposed in 1961 and developed over the ensuing three decades by one of the most original scientists of the twentieth century, Peter Mitchell, this conception has been called the most counterintuitive idea in biology since Darwin, and the only one that compares with the ideas of Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger in physics.
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Nick Lane (The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?)
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Binary thinking is human nature:
Light/Dark, Beautiful/Ugly,
Full/Empty, Male/Female.
But NONE of those are binary—they’re all gradients.
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Jimbeaux Dean (Chrome Cady)
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Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him.
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Ian Tregillis (The Mechanical (The Alchemy Wars, #1))
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The environment most realistically capable of giving rise to life, whether here or anywhere else in the universe, is alkaline hydrothermal vents. Such vents constrain cells to make use of natural proton gradients, and ultimately to generate their own.
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Nick Lane (The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?)
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View the gradients of adversity as the colors that paint your story, and the power of experience as what makes you a great teacher, creator, philosopher, entrepreneur, artist, and human.
Everything works out eventually.
I promise.
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Jennifer Sodini
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EUPHORIA
Holding her in my arms makes me feel young and makes me feel old. Here there is no question as to how strong our love is and always will be. Reaching for her face, both my hands now caress her above the eyes before drawing a single finger down the side of her face in close examination of her perfect beauty. She now takes each breath in congruence to my every touch. Holding her close to me I follow the main artery reaching up into her brain cavity, ever so gently grabbing a hold of her shape with each amalgamating crimp of my lip’s kiss. Her honeyed lips now overlap in a mesmerizing sequence of twists and turns defining all of nature within this gravitating romance. Beautifully naked in a sciatic squirm of innate belonging her igneous hourglass-like figure curls up against mine in a deliquescent manner formulating the equilibrium of our edifying.
She woos me with her altruism and her childlike glow. Gliding over the emollient ewer of her extricating kiss our hearts conjoin in this luminescent rectitude of irrepressible euphoria. Sketching down her solar plexus by my touch abreast we bask in the bounteous espy of everlasting jubilance. When we kiss it’s as if we are dancing in the serene existence of Mother Nature’s melody. Her slender arms and hands revolve around my face and shoulders with an enchanting gentleness like gracious fireflies gleaming against the starry dusk of a fervid fantasia. Intertwined within the gradient of our love’s desiderated gavotte her second nature becomes aware of herself in me–and I in her.
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Luccini Shurod
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Once you acknowledge the scientific fact that humans vibrate on a lower gradient of the whole spectrum of possibilities, it becomes obvious that Earth is a big colony of prisoners expelled from other galaxies. And then you will know that while you can't trust anyone, some people are nearer redemption and forgiveness than many others. But you will also know that to love the world is to forget your real home. That home is not Earth. Earth does not belong to humans and never did.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Essentially all life uses redox chemistry to generate a gradient of protons across a membrane. Why on earth do we do that?
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Nick Lane (The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?)
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For many English speakers up is synonymous with north, and down with south; you go up to Scotland or Canada and down to Devon or Florida. For the Swiss it’s about gradient not direction, making up short for uphill or upstream, which is logical for a mountainous country. So the Bernese talk about going down (north) to Basel but up (south) to Interlaken.
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Diccon Bewes (Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money)