Incomplete Drawing Quotes

In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma. The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.

Think of the purest, most all-consuming love you can imagine. Now multiply that love by an infinite amount—that is the measure of God’s love for you. God does not look on the outward appearance. I believe that He doesn’t care one bit if we live in a castle or a cottage, if we are handsome or homely, if we are famous or forgotten. Though we are incomplete, God loves us completely. Though we are imperfect, He loves us perfectly. Though we may feel lost and without compass, God love encompasses us completely. He loves us because He is filled with an infinite measure of holy, pure, and indescribable love. We are important to God not because of our résumé but because we are His children. He loves every one of us, even those who are flawed, rejected, awkward, sorrowful, or broken. God’s love is so great that He loves even the proud, the selfish, the arrogant, and the wicked. What this means is that, regardless of our current state, there is hope for us. No matter our distress, no matter our sorrow, no matter our mistakes, our infinitely compassionate Heavenly Father desires that we draw near to Him so that He can draw near to us.

But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

It would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work.

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

John's eyes turned to me...I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no drawing peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. How I would love to tell myself that. What I saw was misery...fear, incompletion and incomprehension. They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal. (The Green Mile/Paul Edgecomb character)

Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses.

In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology.* A single Greek root, oekos, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP.

Imagine you're sitting having dinner in a restaurant. At some point during the meal, your companion leans over and whispers that they've spotted Lady Gaga eating at the table opposite. Before having a look for yourself, you'll no doubt have some sense of how much you believe your friends theory. You'll take into account all of your prior knowledge: perhaps the quality of the establishment, the distance you are from Gaga's home in Malibu, your friend's eyesight. That sort of thing. If pushed, it's a belief that you could put a number on. A probability of sorts. As you turn to look at the woman, you'll automatically use each piece of evidence in front of you to update your belief in your friend's hypothesis Perhaps the platinum-blonde hair is consistent with what you would expect from Gaga, so your belief goes up. But the fact that she's sitting on her own with no bodyguards isn't, so your belief goes down. The point is, each new observations adds to your overall assessment. This is all Bayes' theorem does: offers a systematic way to update your belief in a hypothesis on the basis of the evidence. It accepts that you can't ever be completely certain about the theory you are considering, but allows you to make a best guess from the information available. So, once you realize the woman at the table opposite is wearing a dress made of meat -- a fashion choice that you're unlikely to chance up on in the non-Gaga population -- that might be enough to tip your belief over the threshold and lead you to conclude that it is indeed Lady Gaga in the restaurant. But Bayes' theorem isn't just an equation for the way humans already make decisions. It's much more important that that. To quote Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, author of The Theory That Would Not Die: 'Bayes runs counter to the deeply held conviction that modern science requires objectivity and precision. By providing a mechanism to measure your belief in something, Bayes allows you to draw sensible conclusions from sketchy observations, from messy, incomplete and approximate data -- even from ignorance.

After a careful look up and down the corridor, James ushered Cordelia down the stairs. But their covert escape was not to be: Will appeared suddenly on the landing, in the midst of fixing his cuff links, and beamed with delight to see Cordelia. “My dear,” he said. “A pleasure to see you. Have you come from Cornwall Gardens? How is your mother?” “Oh, very well, thank you,” Cordelia said, then realized that if her mother really were in peak condition, she had little excuse for staying away from James and the Institute. “Well, she has been very tired, and of course we are all concerned that she get her energy back. Risa has been trying to build her back up again with many…soups.” Soups? Cordelia was not at all sure why she’d said that. Perhaps because her mother had always told her that ash-e jo, a sour barley soup, could cure anything. “Soups?” “Soups,” Cordelia said firmly. “Risa’s caretaking is very thorough, though of course, my mother wishes me to be by her side as much as possible. I have been reading to her—” “Oh, anything interesting? I’m always seeking a new book,” said Will, having finished with the cuff links. They were studded with yellow topaz. The color of James’s eyes. “Ah—no,” said Cordelia. “Only very boring things, really. Books about…ornithology.” Will’s eyebrows went up, but James had already thrown himself into the fray. “I really must get Cordelia back home,” he said, laying a hand on her back. It was an entirely ordinary husbandly gesture, not at all remarkable. It felt to Cordelia like being struck by lightning between her shoulder blades. “I’ll see you in a moment, Father.” “Well Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling. “Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.” “Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.” “So you’ve noticed?

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The present still holds on to the immediate past without positing it as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is wholly collected up and grasped in the present. The same is true of the imminent future which will also have its horizon of imminence. But with my immediate past I have also the horizon of futurity which surrounded it, and thus I have my actual present seen as the future of that past. With the imminent future, I have the horizon of the past which will surround it, and therefore my actual present as the past of that future. Thus, through the double horizon of retention and protention, my present may cease to be a factual present quickly carried away and abolished by the flow of duration, and become a fixed and identifiable point in objective time. But, once more, my human gaze never posits more than one facet of the object, even though by means of horizons it is directed towards all the others. It can never come up against previous appearances or those presented to other people otherwise than through the intermediary of time and language. If I conceive in the image of my own gaze those others which, converging from all directions, explore every corner of the house and define it, I have still only a harmonious and indefinite set of views of the object, but not the object in its plenitude. In the same way, although my present draws into itself time past and time to come, it possesses them only in intention, and even if, for example, the consciousness of my past which I now have seems to me to cover exactly the past as it was, the past which I claim to recapture is not the real past, but my past as I now see it, perhaps after altering it. Similarly in the future I may have a mistaken idea about the present which I now experience. Thus the synthesis of horizons is no more than a presumptive synthesis, operating with certainty and precision only in the immediate vicinity of the object. The remoter surrounding is no longer within my grasp; it is no longer composed of still discernible objects or memories; it is an anonymous horizon now incapable of bringing any precise testimony, and leaving the object as incomplete and open as it is indeed, in perceptual experience. Through this opening, indeed, the substantiality of the object slips away.

What moral to draw, then, of the nonexistence of an innermost planet and the universal triumph of general relativity? At least this: Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every claim is provisional, which is to say each is incomplete in some small or, occasionally, truly consequential way. But in the midst of the fray, it is impossible to be sure what any gap between knowledge and nature might mean. We know now that Vulcan could never have existed; Einstein has shown us so. But no route to such certainty existed for Le Verrier, nor for any of his successors over the next half century. They lacked not facts, but a framework, some alternate way of seeing through which Vulcan's absence could be understood.

Try it on this page. You just opened the front door and a dinosaur in a tuxedo lunges for your face! What do you do? Fill up the page with what comes to mind! Incomplete sentences or drawings are fine. Just GO GO GO. You have five minutes! Put a timer on and start!

Seeking to bury the oppressed conscience of my mind, I have languished in the durance of my heart. For I knew not that I could not bury the past, and I comprehended not that the memory of our errs are made to vex us whithersoever we go. But all our chapters must close insofar as God allows us to close them, and this is one which cannot remain incomplete as long as I draw breath.

(e). Hence the expressions are equivalent, as is y = ŷ + e. Certain assumptions about e are important, such as that it is normally distributed. When error term assumptions are violated, incorrect conclusions may be made about the statistical significance of relationships. This important issue is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 15 and, for time series data, in Chapter 17. Hence, the above is a pertinent but incomplete list of assumptions. Getting Started Conduct a simple regression, and practice writing up your results. PEARSON’S CORRELATION COEFFICIENT Pearson’s correlation coefficient, r, measures the association (significance, direction, and strength) between two continuous variables; it is a measure of association for two continuous variables. Also called the Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient, it does not assume a causal relationship, as does simple regression. The correlation coefficient indicates the extent to which the observations lie closely or loosely clustered around the regression line. The coefficient r ranges from –1 to +1. The sign indicates the direction of the relationship, which, in simple regression, is always the same as the slope coefficient. A “–1” indicates a perfect negative relationship, that is, that all observations lie exactly on a downward-sloping regression line; a “+1” indicates a perfect positive relationship, whereby all observations lie exactly on an upward-sloping regression line. Of course, such values are rarely obtained in practice because observations seldom lie exactly on a line. An r value of zero indicates that observations are so widely scattered that it is impossible to draw any well-fitting line. Figure 14.2 illustrates some values of r. Key Point Pearson’s correlation coefficient, r, ranges from –1 to +1. It is important to avoid confusion between Pearson’s correlation coefficient and the coefficient of determination. For the two-variable, simple regression model, r2 = R2, but whereas 0 ≤ R ≤ 1, r ranges from –1 to +1. Hence, the sign of r tells us whether a relationship is positive or negative, but the sign of R, in regression output tables such as Table 14.1, is always positive and cannot inform us about the direction of the relationship. In simple regression, the regression coefficient, b, informs us about the direction of the relationship. Statistical software programs usually show r rather than r2. Note also that the Pearson’s correlation coefficient can be used only to assess the association between two continuous variables, whereas regression can be extended to deal with more than two variables, as discussed in Chapter 15. Pearson’s correlation coefficient assumes that both variables are normally distributed. When Pearson’s correlation coefficients are calculated, a standard error of r can be determined, which then allows us to test the statistical significance of the bivariate correlation. For bivariate relationships, this is the same level of significance as shown for the slope of the regression coefficient. For the variables given earlier in this chapter, the value of r is .272 and the statistical significance of r is p ≤ .01. Use of the Pearson’s correlation coefficient assumes that the variables are normally distributed and that there are no significant departures from linearity.7 It is important not to confuse the correlation coefficient, r, with the regression coefficient, b. Comparing the measures r and b (the slope) sometimes causes confusion. The key point is that r does not indicate the regression slope but rather the extent to which observations lie close to it. A steep regression line (large b) can have observations scattered loosely or closely around it, as can a shallow (more horizontal) regression line. The purposes of these two statistics are very different.8 SPEARMAN’S RANK CORRELATION

Critical thinking is unnatural. Following our feelings and emotions is more likely to motivate our behavior than well-reasoned arguments. We are as likely to be persuaded by irrelevant appeals as by relevant ones, and are more likely to produce slanted, selective, biased, one-sided, incomplete arguments than well-reasoned, fair-minded, reflective, accurate, complete arguments. We often prefer attacks on a person’s motives to attacks on a person’s reasons. We make assumptions that aren’t warranted, create straw man arguments out of fragments of opposing viewpoints, offer up false dilemmas, and draw conclusions hastily. It’s amazing we’ve made so much progress!

February 27 The Impoverished Ministry of Jesus From whence then hast Thou that living water? John 4:11 “The well is deep”—and a great deal deeper than the Samaritan woman knew! Think of the depths of human nature, of human life, think of the depths of the “wells” in you. Have you been impoverishing the ministry of Jesus so that He cannot do anything? Suppose there is a well of fathomless trouble inside your heart, and Jesus comes and says—“Let not your heart be troubled”; and you shrug your shoulders and say—“But, Lord, the well is deep; You cannot draw up quietness and comfort out of it.” No, He will bring them down from above. Jesus does not bring anything up from the wells of human nature. We limit the Holy One of Israel by remembering what we have allowed Him to do for us in the past, and by saying—“Of course I cannot expect God to do this thing.” The thing that taxes almightiness is the very thing which as disciples of Jesus we ought to believe He will do. We impoverish His ministry the moment we forget He is Almighty; the impoverishment is in us, not in Him. We will come to Jesus as Comforter or as Sympathiser, but we will not come to Him as Almighty. The reason some of us are such poor specimens of Christianity is because we have no Almighty Christ. We have Christian attributes and experiences, but there is no abandonment to Jesus Christ. When we get into difficult circumstances, we impoverish His ministry by saying—“Of course He cannot do any thing,” and we struggle down to the deeps and try to get the water for ourselves. Beware of the satisfaction of sinking back and saying—“It can’t be done”; you know it can be done if you look to Jesus. The well of your incompleteness is deep, but make the effort and look away to Him.

So my colleagues know more than I do about what’s going on in any given department at any given moment. On the other hand, I know more about issues that people working in production do not: schedule requirements, resource conflicts, market problems, or personnel issues that may be difficult or inappropriate to share with everyone. Each of us, then, draws conclusions based on incomplete pictures. It would be wrong for me to assume that my limited view is necessarily better.

Below in the hold, packed in jars, were thousands of little dead animals, but we did not think of them as trophies, as things cut off from the tide pools of the Gulf, but rather as drawings, incomplete and imperfect, of how it had been there. The real picture of how it had been there and how we had been there was in our minds, bright with sun and wet with sea water and blue or burned, and the whole crusted over with exploring thought.

If God intended for us to draw near to him by consistently denying ourselves the goodness with which he has endowed this world, the we certainly wouldn't have verses like "Taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). Jesus would never gave transformed water into the tastiest wine at the wedding. Set would be a clinical act of reproduction instead of a pleasurable and unifying act of intimacy inside marriage. A God who intended us to ignore our most basic needs and desires would never have dreamt up over 2,000 species of jellyfish to dazzle us or painted the sunset with the most delicate hues of peach against backdrops of vivid tangerine. We serve a God who created giraffes with their spindly necks, puzzle-piece-patterned bodies, and ludicrously long tongues and called it good. We serve a God who granted newborn babies the most delicious-smelling heads and dreamed up the idea of juicy, sun-warmed strawberries. We serve a God who rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17) and thought that the world was incomplete without the contribution of musical geniuses like Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. We do not serve a curmudgeonly or stingy God but a lavish and loving God, one who delights to give us good gifts, starting with his very presence.

If we cannot love ourselves, where will we draw our love  for  anyone  else?   People  who  do  not   love themselves  can adore others, because adoration is making   someone  else  big  and  ourselves   small.  They can desire others because desire comes out  of a sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled.  But they cannot love others, because love is  an affirmation of the living, growing being in  all of us.  If you don't have it, you can't give it.[4]

Unleashing Reliable Insights from Generative AI by Disentangling Language Fluency and Knowledge Acquisition Generative AI carries immense potential but also comes with significant risks. One of these risks of Generative AI lies in its limited ability to identify misinformation and inaccuracies within the contextual framework. This deficiency can lead to mistakenly associating correlation with causation, reliance on incomplete or inaccurate data, and a lack of awareness regarding sensitive dependencies between information sets. With society’s increasing fascination with and dependence on Generative AI, there is a concern that the unintended consequence that it will have an unhealthy influence on shaping societal views on politics, culture, and science. Humans acquire language and communication skills from a diverse range of sources, including raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content. However, when it comes to knowledge acquisition, humans typically rely on transparent, trusted, and structured sources. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT draw from an array of opaque, unattested sources of raw, unfiltered, and unstructured content for language and communication training. LLMs treat this information as the absolute source of truth used in their responses. While this approach has demonstrated effectiveness in generating natural language, it also introduces inconsistencies and deficiencies in response integrity. While Generative AI can provide information it does not inherently yield knowledge. To unlock the true value of generative AI, it is crucial to disaggregate the process of language fluency training from the acquisition of knowledge used in responses. This disaggregation enables LLMs to not only generate coherent and fluent language but also deliver accurate and reliable information. However, in a culture that obsesses over information from self-proclaimed influencers and prioritizes virality over transparency and accuracy, distinguishing reliable information from misinformation and knowledge from ignorance has become increasingly challenging. This presents a significant obstacle for AI algorithms striving to provide accurate and trustworthy responses. Generative AI shows great promise, but addressing the issue of ensuring information integrity is crucial for ensuring accurate and reliable responses. By disaggregating language fluency training from knowledge acquisition, large language models can offer valuable insights. However, overcoming the prevailing challenges of identifying reliable information and distinguishing knowledge from ignorance remains a critical endeavour for advancing AI algorithms. It is essential to acknowledge that resolving this is an immediate challenge that needs open dialogue that includes a broad set of disciplines, not just technologists Technology alone cannot provide a complete solution.

The nature of reaching, the nature of whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both the reaching of hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good. [Walt Kaplan/23 Kaplan's Furniture]

He is your sanctification. Any system that tries to draw your attention away from the person of Christ and onto your own efforts is antichrist in nature. Your union with God is not an incomplete relationship that comes progressively. Time is not the magic formula that makes you holy. Jesus’ sacrifice made you holy. Christ’s work was enough to purify you, spirit, soul and body.

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corrollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

Do you remember when you told me that you’d bought something ridiculously luxurious, and it was a mango?” he asks. “I was so fucking jealous of you. I wished that I could feel what that was like. I wanted to want something like that. I wanted to have that so badly.” I don’t have answers to any of his problems. I don’t even have solutions to mine. But this one thing? This, I can handle. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get some mangoes.” We pull off the freeway a few miles later and follow the computer’s directions to a little grocery store. Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in a rest stop, cutting our mangoes to bits. “Here,” I tell him. “Trade me. Pretend you’re me. Let me tell you what it was like when I had that mango.” He shuts his eyes obligingly. “I didn’t have a lot of money,” I tell him. “And that meant one thing and one thing only—fried rice.” He smiles despite himself. “Kind of a stereotype, don’t you think?” “Whose stereotype? Rice is peasant food for more than half the world. It’s easy. It’s cheap. You can dress it up with a lot of other things. A little bit of onion, a bag of frozen carrots and peas. A carton of eggs. With enough rice, that can last you basically forever. It does for some people.” “It actually sounds good.” “If you have a decent underlying spice cabinet, you can break up the monotony a little. Fried rice with soy sauce one day. Spicy rice the next. And then curry rice. You can fool your tongue indefinitely. You can’t fool your body. You start craving.” He’s sitting on the picnic table, his eyes shut. “For me, the thing I start craving first is greens. Lettuce. Pea shoots. Anything that isn’t coming out of a bag of frozen veggies. And fruit. If you have an extra dollar or two, you buy apples and eat them in quarters, dividing them throughout the day.” I slide next to him on the table. The sun is warm around us. “But you get sick of apples, too, pretty soon. And so that’s where I want you to imagine yourself: sick to death of fried rice. No respite. No letting up. And then suddenly, one day, someone hands you a debit card and says, ‘Hey. Here’s fifteen thousand dollars.’ No, I’m not going to buy a stupid purse. I’m going to buy this.” I hold up a piece of mango to his lips. He opens his mouth and the fruit slides in. His lips close on my fingers like a kiss, and I can’t bring myself to draw away. He’s warmer than the sun, and I feel myself getting pulled in, closer and closer. “Oh, God.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “That’s so good.” I feed him another slice, golden and dripping juice. “That’s what it felt like,” I tell him. “Like there’s a deep-seated need, something in my bones, something missing. And then you take a bite and there’s an explosion of flavor, something bigger than just the taste buds screaming, yes, yes, this is what I need.” I hand him another piece of mango. He bites it in half, chews, and then takes the other half. “That’s what it felt like,” I say. “It felt like I’d been starving myself. Like I…” He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Like there was something I needed,” I say softly. “Something I’ve needed deep down. Something I’ve been denying myself because I can’t let myself want it.” My voice trails off. I’m not describing the taste of mango anymore. My whole body yearns for his. For this thing I’ve been denying myself. For physical affection. For our bodies joined. For his arms around me all night. It’s going to hurt when he walks away. But you know what? It’ll hurt more if he walks away and we leave things like this, desperate and wanting, incomplete. My voice drops. “It’s like there’s someone I’ve been denying myself. All this time.

Recognition of the danger of drawing false inferences from incomplete, though correct information has led scientists to a preference for designed experimentation above mere observation of natural phenomena.