Inverted Pyramid Quotes

Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrongheaded pseudointellectualism is far worse.

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid. Skin damage is like aging. Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.

Many before have hailed the end of history; none have ever been right.

Football is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment.

That tension – between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d’arte and futebol de resultados – is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport, but also to life: to win, or to play the game well?

Golden ages, almost by definition, are past: gleeful naivety never lasts for ever.

In the beginning there was chaos, and football was without form.

In football,’ he said, ‘the tactics adopted must always be in relation to the ability of the men on the side to carry them out successfully. Because of this, it is hard to lay down hard and fast rules.

This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change my world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine. I liked many things about journalism. I liked that it was one thing people thought I was good at. I liked that it gave me a reason to go out into the world, like an explorer heading into the jungle to collect specimens. And I liked that journalism was a puzzle. You lay out your evidence and order it from most important to least; the inverted pyramid a force against woeful attention spans and chaos. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.

When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental one? Does her hand shape the lipstick into a cupid’s bow in a gesture of free will? She doesn’t have to do it. That is the response the beauty myth would like a woman to have, because then the Other Woman is the enemy. Does she in fact have to do it? The aspiring woman does not have to do it if she has a choice. She will have a choice when a plethora of faculties in her field, headed by women and endowed by generations of female magnates and robber baronesses, open their gates to her; when multinational corporations led by women clamor for the skills of young female graduates; when there are other universities, with bronze busts of the heroines of half a millennium’s classical learning; when there are other research-funding boards maintained by the deep coffers provided by the revenues of female inventors, where half the chairs are held by women scientists. She’ll have a choice when her application is evaluated blind. Women will have the choice never to stoop, and will deserve the full censure for stooping, to consider what the demands on their “beauty” of a board of power might be, the minute they know they can count on their fair share: that 52 percent of the seats of the highest achievement are open to them. They will deserve the blame that they now get anyway only when they know that the best dream of their one life will not be forcibly compressed into an inverted pyramid, slammed up against a glass ceiling, shunted off into a stifling pink-collar ghetto, shoved back dead down a dead-end street.

Recognition is powerful, as long as it’s authentic and specific. Whatever their level on the inverted pyramid, employees wants to feel needed and valued.

I worked on one monolithic system, for example, where we had 4,000 unit tests, 1,000 service tests, and 60 end-to-end tests. We decided that from a feedback point of view we had way too many service and end-to-end tests (the latter of which were the worst offenders in impacting feedback loops), so we worked hard to replace the test coverage with smaller-scoped tests. A common anti-pattern is what is often referred to as a test snow cone, or inverted pyramid. Here, there are little to no small-scoped tests, with all the coverage in large-scoped tests. These projects often have glacially slow test runs, and very long feedback cycles. If these tests are run as part of continuous integration, you won’t get many builds, and the nature of the build times means that the build can stay broken for a long period when something does break.

Weirdly, the former Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis also claimed to have invented the bicycle-kick, even though he never played football to any level and was not born until ten years after the first record of Unzaga performing the trick.

The debate was long and furious but, after a fifth meeting at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, at 7:00 p.m. on December 8, 1863, carrying the ball by hand was outlawed, and soccer and rugby went their separate ways. The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand but over hacking; that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F. W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favor. “If you do away with [hacking],” he said, “you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.” Sports, he appears to have believed, were about pain, brutality, and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win. A joke it may have been, but that his words were part of a serious debate is indicative of the general ethos, even if Blackheath did end up resigning from the association when hacking was eventually outlawed.

كان مينوتي شخصية رومانسية بشكل يفوق الوصف. كان نحيلا كقلم رصاص، ومدخنا شرها يتدل شعره على ياقته، أشيب السوالف، وله نظرة محدقة كصقر، بدا كما لو كان تجسيدا للبوهيمية الأرجنتينية، كان جناحأ أيسر ومفكرا، وفيلسوفا، وفنانا. يقول: «أدافع عن فكرة أن الفريق فوق الجميع» «وأكثر من كونها فكرة فهي .بمثابة التزام، وأكثر من كونها التزاما فهي اعتقاد جلي ينبغي على المدرب أن ينقله للاعبيه للدفاع عن تلك الفكرة» «لذلك فاهتمامي أننا معشر المدربين لا ندعي لأنفسنا الحق لنزيل من المشهد المرادف لكلمة الابتهاج، لصالح القراءة الفلسفية التي لا يمكن أن يطول بقاؤها، وهي تجنب المخاطرة، وفي كرة القدم هناك مخاطر لأن الطريقة الوحيدة التي يمكنك بها التغلب على المخاطر في أي لعبة يكون عن طريق عدم اللعب» " الهرم المقلوب - تاريخ تكتيكات كرة القدم 313/314ص

كان مينوتي شخصية رومانسية بشكل يفوق الوصف. كان نحيلا كقلم رصاص، ومدخنا شرها يتدل شعره على ياقته، أشيب السوالف، وله نظرة محدقة كصقر، بدا كما لو كان تجسيدا للبوهيمية الأرجنتينية، كان جناحأ أيسر ومفكرا، وفيلسوفا، وفنانا. يقول: «أدافع عن فكرة أن الفريق فوق الجميع» «وأكثر من كونها فكرة فهي .بمثابة التزام، وأكثر من كونها التزاما فهي اعتقاد جلي ينبغي على المدرب أن ينقله للاعبيه للدفاع عن تلك الفكرة» «لذلك فاهتمامي أننا معشر المدربين لا ندعي لأنفسنا الحق لنزيل من المشهد المرادف لكلمة الابتهاج، لصالح القراءة الفلسفية التي لا يمكن أن يطول بقاؤها، وهي تجنب المخاطرة، وفي كرة القدم هناك مخاطر لأن الطريقة الوحيدة التي يمكنك بها التغلب على المخاطر في أي لعبة يكون عن طريق عدم اللعب» " الهرم المقلوب - تاريخ تكتيكات كرة القدم 313/314ص

Van Gaal was red faced, dogmatic, and given to crudeness and sudden outbursts of temper. At one point when he was Bayern Munich manager, for instance, he made the point that he was unafraid of his big-name players by dropping his trousers in the dressing room. “The coach wanted to make clear to us that he can leave out any player, it was all the same to him because, as he said, he had the balls,” said the forward Luca Toni. “He demonstrated this literally. I have never experienced anything like it, it was totally crazy. Luckily I didn’t see a lot, because I wasn’t in the front row.

Head-down charging, certainly, was to be preferred to thinking, a manifestation, some would say, of the English attitude to life in general. In the public schools, thinking tended to be frowned upon as a matter of course. (As late as 1946, the Hungarian comic writer George Mikes could write of how, when he had first arrived in Britain, he had been proud when a woman called him “clever,” only to realize later the loadedness of the term and the connotations of untrustworthiness it carried.)

The dispute, strangely, was not over the use of the hand but over hacking; that is, whether kicking opponents in the shins should be allowed. F. W. Campbell of Blackheath was very much in favor. “If you do away with [hacking],” he said, “you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.

A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

The growth pyramid Only by moving from the upper-left corner of the inverted pyramid to the bottom tip can you reach the ultimate goal of being vulnerable and open to possibilities.

If they are to be turned into bread, grains have to be ground. When I was a little girl, my father decided to make some flour from the wheat we had grown on the farm. He tried pounding it with a pestle and mortar but all he got was broken grains, not flour. He put it through the hand mincer screwed to the edge of the table with the same result. Finally, he attacked it with a hammer on the flagstone floor. After he gave up, defeated, my mother cleared up the mess. It was sobering to realize that if the commercial millers had vanished, we could have starved even with barns full of sacks of wheat. To turn wheat into flour, you have to shear, not pound, the hard grains, which requires a grindstone, as the people of Lake Kinneret had discovered. A friend in Mexico, where hand grinding still goes on, showed me how it works. She knelt at the upper end of a grindstone, called a metate—a saddle-shaped platform on three inverted pyramidal legs, hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock (fig. 1.7). She mounded a handful of barley, took the mano, a stone shaped like a squared-off rolling pin, in both hands with her thumbs facing back to nudge the grain into place, and, using the whole weight of her upper body, sheared the mano over the grain. After half a dozen motions, she had broken the grains, which now clustered at the bottom end of the metate. Carefully scraping them up with her fingertips, she moved them back to the top, and started shearing again, this time producing white streaks of flour. By the time she had sheared the grain from top to bottom five or six times, she had produced a handful of flour.

Effective leaders see themselves at the bottom of an inverted pyramid.

There’s something where the student was. Something massive. Something growing. It’s human in shape, I’ll give it that. Squat powerful legs, broad as my chest, thickening at the thigh, ropes of muscle bursting through the jeans he was wearing. Above the waist—an inverted pyramid of flesh, each abdominal muscle a chopping board of flesh, the pectorals as wide as the hood of the car Kayla just cut away, but thicker, vault door thick. And the arms... They grow longer, knuckles strike the ground. Forearms thicker than the thighs. Biceps thicker still. Shoulder muscles like a cow’s carcass dragged over the joint. He’s colossal, ten feet tall and still going. Twelve foot now.

If Matthias Sindelar represented the cerebral central European ideal, it was Arsenal’s Ted Drake – strong, powerful, brave and almost entirely unthinking – who typified the English model.

the Scots achieve the same result as the English with less exertion,” wrote Looker-On in 1910 (although he was, of course, a Scot). That first-class football in Scotland is more calculated, more methodical, and consequently slower than English football is something which practically every Scotsman will admit, and I may say . . . that as a rule the Caledonians are very proud of the fact. Country clubs in Scotland play a game very like the average English League game, and in first-class circles in Scotland this is usually referred to with contempt as “the country kick and rush game.” Scotsmen apart from football are as quite fast as Englishmen, but when playing Soccer they seem to play a “thinking game” to a greater extent than the Saxons.

British crowds soon grow tired of patient build-up, but in, for instance, Capello’s first spell at Real Madrid, crowds booed when Fernando Hierro hit long accurate passes for Roberto Carlos to run on to.

a child who loses his parents is an orphan, a man who loses his wife is a widower, a woman who loses her husband is a widow. But there is no name for a parent who loses a child, for there are no words to describe this pain.

He who thus understands the nature of the body, and all human relationships based upon it, will derive strength to bear the loss of our dear ones. In the Divine plan, one day each union must end with separation.

Various cultures can point to games that involved kicking a ball, but, for all the claims of Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Caribbean, Mexico, China or Japan to be the home of football, the modern sport has its roots in the mob game of medieval Britain. Rules – in as much as they existed at all – varied from place to place, but the game essentially involved two teams each trying to force a roughly spherical object to a target at opposite ends of a notional pitch. It was violent, unruly and anarchic, and it was repeatedly outlawed.

If you do away with [hacking],’ he said, ‘you will do away with all the courage and pluck of the game, and I will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice.’ Sport, he appears to have felt, was about pain, brutality and manliness; without that, if it actually came down to skill, any old foreigner might be able to win.

First International: Scotland 0 England 0, Partick, 30 November 1872

And there, in a moment, was laid bare the prime deficiency of the English game. Football is not about players, or at least not just about players; it is about shape and about space, about the intelligent deployment of players, and their movement within that deployment. (I should, perhaps, make clear that by ‘tactics’ I mean a combination of formation and style: one 4-4-2 can be as different from another as Steve Stone from Ronaldinho.) The Argentinian was, I hope, exaggerating for effect, for heart, soul, effort, desire, strength, power, speed, passion and skill all play their parts, but, for all that, there is also a theoretical dimension, and, as in other disciplines, the English have, on the whole, proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract.