“
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
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Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.
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Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
“
Healthy nutrition is just as much an art as science. It is important to test and investigate methods and foods in your own laboratory (your body) and observe how various things affect you. Be
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Mantak Chia (The Practice of Greater Kan and Li: Techniques for Creating the Immortal Self)
“
When Miss Carter came back to the table she reported that laboratory tests had shown that the “sleepy” kitten had indeed been drugged.
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Carolyn Keene (The Clue of the Tapping Heels (Nancy Drew, #16))
“
In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...
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William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch: The Restored Text)
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So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the "victim" of another. You can only be a "victim" of yourself. It's all in how you discipline your mind. Who
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
“
History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
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Étienne Gilson
“
When you go to the doctor for a routine blood test or to have a mole removed, when you have an appendectomy, tonsillectomy, or any other kind of ectomy, the stuff you leave behind doesn’t always get thrown out. Doctors, hospitals, and laboratories keep it. Often indefinitely.
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Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
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All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.
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Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
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Work with what you have control of and you'll have your hands full.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays))
“
The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
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Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
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So make sure in your heart of hearts, in your inner self, that you treat your station in life with indifference, not with contempt, only with indifference.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
“
Epictetus: "The judgment seat and a prison is each a place, the one high, the other low; but the attitude of your will can be kept the same, if you want to keep it the same, in either place.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
“
Ino the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects, The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.
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Rachel Carson (Silent Spring)
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Epictetus: "Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
“
The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most diffcult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a diffcult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.
A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion(compassion) or not.
”
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Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
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The brunette was conducting tests on the collected blood when the older woman came into her laboratory to get the child’s photo. The old woman took the picture to a pale-skinned woman with red hair, who in turn fixed it with a morbidly curious look before handing it back.
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R.G. Richards (Cavers: A Vampire Tale)
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In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
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Carl Sagan
“
Do what you will, reputation is at least as fickle as your station in life. Others decide what your reputation is.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
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don't let "reputation" get mixed up with your moral purpose or your will power; they are important. Make sure "reputation" is in that box in the bottom drawer marked "matters of indifference
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
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If you want to protect yourself from "fear and guilt," and those are the crucial pincers, the real long-term destroyers of will, you have to get rid of all your instincts to compromise, to meet people halfway. You have to learn to stand aloof, never give openings for deals, never level with your adversaries. You have to become what Ivan Denisovich called a "slow movin' cagey prisoner.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays Book 6))
“
Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life.
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Nancy R. Pearcey (Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes)
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David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?
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Paul C.W. Davies (About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution)
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What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment - he has made out of himself. In concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
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In the cases of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, substantial evidence is now emerging that these syndromes may result from unusual infectious microorganisms that are not detected by the typical laboratory tests. Special, sophisticated lab tests such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests can, however, detect these invaders. A growing number of peer reviewed papers are now confirming the presence of these microorganisms in these particular illnesses.
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James L. Wilson (Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome (The 21st-Century Stress Syndrome))
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Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity
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Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
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After ejection I had about thirty seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead. And so help me, I whispered to myself: "Five years down there, at least. I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.
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James B. Stockdale (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior (Hoover Essays))
“
Your co-orbital anti-satellite weapon is designed to destroy satellites. Furthermore, the Soviet Union began research in defenses utilizing directed energy before the United States did and seems well along in research (and incidentally, some testing outside laboratories) of lasers and other forms of directed energy. I do not point this out in reproach or suggest these activities are in violation of agreements, but if we were to follow your logic to the effect that what you call space-strike weapons would only be developed by a country planning a first strike, what would we think?
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Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
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Albert Einstein hardly ever set foot in the laboratory; he didn’t test phenomena or use elaborate equipment. He was a theorist who perfected the “thought experiment,” in which you engage nature through your imagination, by inventing a situation or model and then working out the consequences of some physical principle. In Germany before World War II, laboratory-based physics far outranked theoretical physics in the minds of most Aryan scientists. Jewish physicists were all relegated to the lowly theorists’ sandbox and left to fend for themselves. And what a sandbox that would become.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
“
In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. Our
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
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to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force
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Mary Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void)
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Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women--foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried. Illogical and shameful as they seemed in retrospect, those experiences enriched modern Man. Few races had made so many mistakes in so short a time, or tried so many tentative solutions to hopeless problems.
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David Brin (Startide Rising (The Uplift Saga, #2))
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...[S]o many people look only to their bank balance for peace or to fellow human beings for models to follow. Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man? I had such a test decades ago when one of my medical faculty colleagues chastised me for failing to separate my professional knowledge from my religious convictions. He demanded that I not combine the two. How could I do that? Truth is truth! It is not divisible, and any part of it cannot be set aside. Whether truth emerges from a scientific laboratory or through revelation, all truth emanates from God.
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Russell M. Nelson (Accomplishing the Impossible: What God Does, What We Can Do)
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Wilson-Donovan wanted to move ahead as quickly as possible to clinical trials on patients, which was why it was so important to test Vicotec’s safety now before the FDA hearings in September, which would hopefully put it on the “Fast Track.” Peter was absolutely sure that the testing being concluded by Paul-Louis Suchard, the head of the laboratory in Paris, would only confirm the good news he had just been given in Geneva.
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Danielle Steel (Five Days in Paris)
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The world,’ he said, ‘grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief of apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history, in archaeology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of antiquity, by the rudest savage of today, by the Christian, the Pagan, the Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces is condemned as a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool.
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Amelia B. Edwards (The Phantom Coach: Collected Ghost Stories)
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Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia, has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. The tests find not only that three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white, anti-Black bias, but also that nearly as many Hispanics and Asians share that pro-white, anti-Black bias.5 Furthermore,
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Charles M. Blow (The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto)
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Fitness means different things to different people. To exercise scientists, it means cardiorespiratory fitness, a parameter that can be measured in the laboratory by way of a test called maximal oxygen uptake or “VO2max” (the “V” stands for “volume”). It is also called aerobic fitness, and it refers to the capacity of your body to transport and utilize oxygen. Scientists have found that it’s one of the best predictors of overall health.
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Martin Gibala (The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter)
“
Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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And so far, their most recent results had been perfect. Their meetings in Germany and Switzerland had gone brilliantly. The testing done in their laboratories there was even more rigorous than what had been done in the States. They were sure now. It was safe. They could move ahead to Phase One Human Trials, as soon as the FDA approved it, which meant giving low doses of the medication to a select number of willing, well-informed subjects, and seeing how they fared.
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Danielle Steel (Five Days in Paris)
“
SATANIC SEX
The prevalence of deviant and/or fetishistic behavior in our society would stagger the imagination of the sexually naïve. There are more sexual variants than the unenlightened individual can perceive: transvestism, sadism, masochism, urolagnia, exhibitionism - to name only a few of the more predominate. Everyone has some form of fetish, but because they are unaware of the preponderance of fetishistic activity in our society, they feel they are depraved if they submit to their "unnatural yearnings. *
*Fetishism is not only practiced by human beings, but by animals, as well. The fetish is an integral ingredient in the sex-lives of animals. The sexual odor, for example, is necessary for one animal to become sexually aroused by another. Laboratory tests have shown that when an animal is scientifically deodorized, it loses sexual attractiveness to the other animals. The stimulation provided by sexual odor is also enjoyed by man, although he will often deny it.
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Anton Szandor LaVey (The Satanic Bible)
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A human being is not one thing among others. Things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes, within the limits of endowment and environment, he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions, but not on conditions.
”
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Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
Yet skill in the most sophisticated applications of laboratory technology and in the use of the latest therapeutic modality alone does not make a good physician. When a patient poses challenging clinical problems, an effective physician must be able to identify the crucial elements in a complex history and physical examination; order the appropriate laboratory, imaging, and diagnostic tests; and extract the key results from densely populated computer screens to determine whether to treat or to “watch.” As the number of tests increases, so does the likelihood that some incidental finding, completely unrelated to the clinical problem at hand, will be uncovered. Deciding whether a clinical clue is worth pursuing or should be dismissed as a “red herring” and weighing whether a proposed test, preventive measure, or treatment entails a greater risk than the disease itself are essential judgments that a skilled clinician must make many times each day. This combination of medical knowledge, intuition, experience, and judgment defines the art of medicine, which is as necessary to the practice of medicine as is a sound scientific base.
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J. Larry Jameson (Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine)
“
In other words, the VMPFC, in healthy people, integrates many pieces of information gained from experience (e.g., many samples from the different decks) and translates that information into an emotional signal that gives the decision maker good advice about what to do. And once again, this advice, this gut feeling, may precede any conscious awareness of what’s good or bad and why. This explains why people with VMPFC damage make disastrous real-life decisions, despite their good performance on standard laboratory reasoning tests. They “know,” but they don’t “feel,” and feelings are very helpful.
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Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
“
The idea persists that faith is a remnant of an ancient way of life, a way of knowing that asks for unthinking acceptance of a belief system or adherence to specific dogma. This may be the case for some spiritual traditions, but the Buddha insisted that his disciples investigate his teachings with the powers of reason, test them in the inner laboratory of meditation, and build their faith on a firm foundation of knowledge. As a result, faith in the Dharma implies faith in one's ability to recognize truth when it presents itself and to take responsibility for verifying it through analysis and meditative experience.
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”
Dharma Publishing (Ways of Enlightenment (Buddhism for the West))
“
At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, “To physics and metaphysics.” By “metaphysics,” people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience. Wood answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.* The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
The earliest modern attempt to test prayer’s efficacy was Sir Francis Galton’s innovative but flawed survey in 1872.16 The field languished until the 1960s, when several researchers began clinical and laboratory studies designed to answer two fundamental questions: (1) Do the prayerful, compassionate, healing intentions of humans affect biological functions in remote individuals who may be unaware of these efforts? (2) Can these effects be demonstrated in nonhuman processes, such as microbial growth, specific biochemical reactions, or the function of inanimate objects? The answer to both questions appears to be yes.
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Ervin Laszlo (The Akashic Experience: Science and the Cosmic Memory Field)
“
It is well known that animals respond poorly to living conditions that do not stimulate them mentally or physically. Rats, mice, monkeys, and other mammals confined for long periods in laboratory cages where they have little or no opportunity to engage in such natural behaviors as foraging, hiding, nest-building, or choosing social partners develop neurotic behaviors. Termed “stereotypies,” these behaviors involve repetitive, functionless actions sometimes performed for hours on end. Rodents, for example, will dig for hours at the corners of their cages, gnaw at the bars, or perform repeated somersaults. These “behavioral stereotypies” are estimated to afflict about half of the 100 million mice currently used in laboratory tests and experiments in the United States.16 Monkeys chronically confined to the boredom, stress, and social isolation of laboratory cages perform a wide range of abnormal, disturbing behaviors such as eating or smearing their own excrement, pulling or plucking their hair, slapping themselves, and self-biting that can cause serious, even fatal injury. Severely psychotic human patients display similar behaviors. If you’ve seen the repetitive pacing of caged big cats (and many other smaller animals) at the zoo, you’ve witnessed behavioral stereotypies.
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Jonathan Balcombe (Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals)
“
A laboratory analogy to repression can be found in an experiment by A.F. Zeller.
Zeller arranged a situation so that one group of students underwent an unhappy “failure” experience right after they had successfully learned a list of nonsense syllables. When tested later, these subjects showed much poorer recall of the nonsense syllables compared to a control group, who had not experienced failure. When this same “failure” group was later allowed to succeed on the same task that they had earlier failed, their recall showed tremendous improvement. This experiment indicates that when the reason for the repression is removed, when material to be remembered is no longer associated with negative effects, a person no longer experiences retrieval failure.
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”
Elizabeth F. Loftus (Human Memory: The Processing of Information)
“
A human being is not one thing among others; things
determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining.
What he becomes - within the limits of endowment
and environment - he has made out of himself. In
the concentration camps, for example, in this living
laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and
witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine
while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities
within himself; which one is actualized depends
on decisions but not on conditions.
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to
know man as he really is. After all, man is that being
who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however,
he is also that being who entered those gas
chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the
Shema Yisrael on his lips.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs—BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY.
“This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer.
This turned out to be the brochure for a new company.
Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. “I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it . . .
Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.
”
”
Lisa Marie Rice (I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops, #2))
“
Physicists have gone to great lengths to eliminate these possibilities, and a cottage industry has arisen in doing “loophole-free Bell tests.” One recent result wanted to eliminate the possibility that an unknown process in the laboratory worked to influence the choice of how to measure the spin. So instead of letting a lab assistant choose the measurement, or even using a random-number generator sitting on a nearby table, the experiment made that choice based on the polarization of photons emitted from stars many light-years away. If there were some nefarious conspiracy to make the world look quantum-mechanical, it had to have been set up hundreds of years ago, when the light left those stars. It’s possible, but doesn’t seem likely. It seems that quantum mechanics is right again. So far, quantum mechanics has always been right.
”
”
Sean Carroll (Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime)
“
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
”
”
Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
“
Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.
”
”
Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
“
Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled.
”
”
Christian Humberg (50 Years of the Lego Brick)
“
An Erudite woman comes out of a stall, and I scramble to my feet, draw the stunner, and point it at her, all without thinking.
She freezes, her arms up, toilet paper stuck to her shoe.
“Don’t shoot!” Her eyes bulge from her head.
I remember, then, that I am dressed like the Erudite. I set the stunner on the edge of a sink.
“My apologies,” I say. I try to adopt the formal speech common to the Erudite. “I am slightly edgy, with everything that’s occurring. We are reentering in order to retrieve some of our test results from…Laboratory 4-A.”
“Oh,” the woman says. “That seems rather unwise.”
“The data is of the utmost importance,” I say, trying to sound as arrogant as some of the Erudite I’ve met. “I would rather not leave it to get riddled with bullets.”
“It’s hardly my place to prevent you from trying to recover it,” she says. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash my hands and take cover.”
“Sounds good,” I say. I decide not to tell her she has toilet paper on her shoe.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
“
Bartal placed one rat in an enclosure, where it encountered a small transparent container, a bit like a jelly jar. Squeezed inside it was another rat, locked up, wriggling in distress. Not only did the free rat learn how to open a little door to liberate the other, but she was remarkably eager to do so. Never trained on it, she did so spontaneously. Then Bartal challenged her motivation by giving her a choice between two containers, one with chocolate chips—a favorite food that they could easily smell—and another with a trapped companion. The free rat often rescued her companion first, suggesting that reducing her distress counted more than delicious food.47 The empathy of laboratory rats has been tested by presenting them with a companion trapped in a glass container. Responding to the distress of the trapped rat, the free rat makes a purposeful effort to liberate her. This behavior disappears if the free rat is put on a relaxing drug, which dulls her sensitivity to the other’s emotional state.
”
”
Frans de Waal (Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves)
“
Page 50:
It is a common misconception that psychological measurements of human abilities are generally more prone to error or inaccuracy than are physical measurements. In most psychological research, and especially in psychometrics, this kind of measurement error is practically negligible. If need be, and with proper care, the error variance can usually be made vanishingly small. In my laboratory, for example, we have been able to measure such variables as memory span, flicker-fusion frequency (a sensory threshold), and reaction time (RT) with reliability coefficients greater than .99 (that is, less than 1 percent of the variance in RT is due to errors of measurement). The reliability coefficients for multi-item tests of more complex mental processes, such as measured by typical IQ tests, are generally about .90 to .95. This is higher than the reliability of people's height and weight measured in a doctor's office! The reliability coefficients of blood pressure measurements, blood cholesterol level, and diagnosis based on chest X-rays are typically around .
”
”
Arthur R. Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence))
“
Graedon was sick of waiting for the FDA’s test results. He spoke with experts about what could produce the symptoms that patients were reporting. He even reached out for help to independent laboratories. Tod Cooperman, the president of ConsumerLab in White Plains, New York, was quick to join his cause. ConsumerLab tested the 300-milligram dose of Teva’s Budeprion XL against that of GSK’s Wellbutrin XL. The results revealed the likely source of patient distress: the generic dumped four times as much active ingredient during the first two hours as the brand name did. Graedon compared the effect to guzzling alcohol. “If you sip a glass of wine over the course of two or three hours, you’re not going to feel drunk,” he explained. “But if you drink the whole thing in fifteen minutes, you’re getting too much too fast.” The Graedons believed that this “dose dumping” explained why many patients were experiencing signs of overdose, such as headaches and anxiety, followed by symptoms of withdrawal, including renewed depression and suicidal thoughts. Teva flatly rejected the ConsumerLab report and claimed that the independent laboratory’s testing method was “inappropriate.” The FDA was silent.
”
”
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
“
OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS
At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability. * In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not identical
* Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively unnoticed.
to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.7 A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years. In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry.
”
”
Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
“
This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram looking name, Sig Lemanski, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua's last doctor. When Leymanski's obsession turned into love, and one's sympathy got focused on his enchanting, melancholy, betrayed wife (nee Antilia Glems), our author found himself confronted with the distressful task of now stamping out in Antilia, a born brunette, all traces of Ada, thus reducing yet another character to a dummy with bleached hair.
After beaming Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart, a graceful microorganism extending transparent appendages toward his huge humid eye. Alas, the testibulus (test tube - never to be confused with testiculus, orchid), with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid, is "accidentally" thrown away by Professor Leyman's (he had trimmed his name by that time) assistant, Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun.
”
”
Vladimimir Nabokov
“
Former member of CSICOP Marcello Truzzi summed up the history of laboratory parapsychology: As proponents of anomalies produce stronger evidence, critics have sometimes moved the goal posts further away. . . . To convince scientists of what had merely been supported by widespread but weak anecdotal evidence, parapsychologists moved psychical research into the laboratory. When experimental results were presented, designs were criticized. When protocols were improved, a “fraud proof” or “critical experiment” was demanded. When those were put forward, replications were demanded. When those were produced, critics argued that new forms of error might be the cause (such as the “file drawer” error that could result from unpublished negative studies). When meta-analyses were presented to counter that issue, these were discounted as controversial, and ESP was reduced to being some present but unspecified “error some place” in the form of what Ray Hyman called the “dirty test tube argument” (claiming dirt was in the tube making the seeming psi result a mere artifact). And in one instance, when the scoffer found no counter-explanations, he described the result as a “mere anomaly” not to be taken seriously so just belonging on a puzzle page. The goal posts have now been moved into a zone where some critics hold unfalsifiable positions.30
”
”
Chris Carter (Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics)
“
As many speakers noted, this tool wasn’t particularly well suited for assessing outcomes of a psychiatric drug. How could a study of a neuroleptic possibly be “double-blind”? The psychiatrist would quickly see who was on the drug and who was not, and any patient given Thorazine would know he was on a medication as well. Then there was the problem of diagnosis: How would a researcher know if the patients randomized into a trial really had “schizophrenia”? The diagnostic boundaries of mental disorders were forever changing. Equally problematic, what defined a “good outcome”? Psychiatrists and hospital staff might want to see drug-induced behavioral changes that made the patient “more socially acceptable” but weren’t to the “ultimate benefit of the patient,” said one conference speaker.11 And how could outcomes be measured? In a study of a drug for a known disease, mortality rates or laboratory results could serve as objective measures of whether a treatment worked. For instance, to test whether a drug for tuberculosis was effective, an X-ray of the lung could show whether the bacillus that caused the disease was gone. What would be the measurable endpoint in a trial of a drug for schizophrenia? The problem, said NIMH physician Edward Evarts at the conference, was that “the goals of therapy in schizophrenia, short of getting the patient ‘well,’ have not been clearly defined.
”
”
Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)
“
As soon as we study animals — not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains — we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Annotated))
“
NATO paper: Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions, detailed how the atmosphere could be modified to absorb electromagnetic radiation by spraying polymers behind high flying aircraft. Absorbing microwaves transmitted by HAARP and other atmospheric heaters linked from Puerto Rico, Germany and Russia, these artificial mirrors could heat the air, inducing changes in the weather. U.S. Patent # 4253190 describes how a mirror made of “polyester resin” could be held aloft by the pressure exerted by electromagnetic radiation from a transmitter like HAARP. A PhD polymer researcher who wishes to remain anonymous told researcher William Thomas that if HAARP’s frequency output is matched to Earth’s magnetic field, its tightly beamed energy could be imparted to molecules “artificially introduced into this region.” This highly reactive state could then “promote polymerization and the formation of new compounds,” he explained. Adding magnetic iron oxide powder to polymers exuded by many high flying aircraft can foster the heat generation needed to modify the weather. Radio frequency absorbing polymers such as Phillips Ryton F 5 PPS are sensitive in the 1 50 MHz regime, HAARP transmits between two and 10 MHz. HAARP's U.S. Air Force and Navy sponsors claim that their transmitter will eventually be able to produce 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power. But on page 185 of an October 1991 “Technical Memorandum 195” outlining projected HAARP tests, there is a call by the ionospheric effects division of the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory for HAARP to reach a peak power output of 100 billion watts. Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast at 50,000 watts. Some hysterical reports state that HAARP type technologies will be used to initiate
”
”
Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
“
Despite the popularity of this view, the DeValoises felt it was only a partial truth. To test their assumption they used Fourier's equations to convert plaid and checkerboard patterns into simple wave forms. Then they tested to see how the brain cells in the visual cortex responded to these new wave-form images. What they found was that the brain cells responded not to the original patterns, but to the Fourier translations of the patterns. Only one conclusion could be drawn. The brain was using Fourier mathematics—the same mathematics holography employed—to convert visual images into the Fourier language of wave forms. 12 The DeValoises' discovery was subsequently confirmed by numerous other laboratories around the world, and although it did not provide absolute proof the brain was a hologram, it supplied enough evidence to convince Pribram his theory was correct. Spurred on by the idea that the visual cortex was responding not to patterns but to the frequencies of various wave forms, he began to reassess the role frequency played in the other senses. It didn't take long for him to realize that the importance of this role had perhaps been overlooked by twentieth-century scientists. Over a century before the DeValoises' discovery, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had shown that the ear was a frequency analyzer. More recent research revealed that our sense of smell seems to be based on what are called osmic frequencies. Bekesy's work had clearly demonstrated that our skin is sensitive to frequencies of vibration, and he even produced some evidence that taste may involve frequency analysis. Interestingly, Bekesy also discovered that the mathematical equations that enabled him to predict how his subjects would respond to various frequencies of vibration were also of the Fourier genre.
”
”
Michael Talbot (The Holographic Universe)
“
Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure."
Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from the "noisy crowing up of things and whatsoever wars on the divine" was one of the vital offerings of the classic religions: hence their emphasis was not on technological productivity but on personal poise. The old slogan of New York subway guards in handling a crush of passengers applies with even greater force to the tempo of megatechnic society: "What's your hurry...Watch your step!
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
“
Thakur’s findings were not news to Ranbaxy’s top executives. Just ten months earlier, in October 2003, outside auditors started investigating Ranbaxy facilities worldwide. In this case, the audits had been ordered up by Ranbaxy itself. This was a common industry practice: drug companies often hired consultants to audit their facilities as a dry run to see how visible their problems were. If the consultants could find it, they reasoned, then most likely regulators could too. The fact-finding mission by Lachman Consultant Services left Ranbaxy officials under no illusion as to the extent of the company’s failings. At Ranbaxy’s Princeton, New Jersey, facility, auditors found that the company’s Patient Safety Department barely functioned and training was essentially “non-existent.” The staff had no written protocols for investigating patient complaints, which piled up in boxes, uncategorized and unreported. They had no clerical help for basic tasks like mailing out the patients’ samples for testing. “I don’t think there’s the same medicine in this medicine,” was a common refrain from patients. Even when there were investigations, they were so perfunctory and half-hearted that expiration dates were listed as “unknown,” even when they could easily have been found from a product’s lot number. An audit of Ranbaxy’s main U.S. manufacturing plant, Ohm Laboratories in New Jersey, found that the company, though required to report adverse events to the FDA, rarely did so. There was no system to capture patient complaints after hours, and no global medical officer to ensure that any potential negative consequences for patients were being monitored. The consultants from Lachman urged Ranbaxy to address these problems globally. Ranbaxy’s initial reaction to the findings was to question the number of hours, and the resulting invoice, that Lachman had sent for its work.
”
”
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
“
In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members."
A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death.
The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.
”
”
Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
“
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morshikachi
“
Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get.
My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago.
Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so.
Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.'
The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious.
Utopian faith is a helluva drug.
”
”
J. Bradford DeLong (Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century)
“
Today, such studies are illegal. Medical scientists cannot offer inducements like pardons to persuade prisoners to take part in their studies. Although they can award small cash payments to research subjects, they are forbidden from giving anyone so much money or such tempting favors that their compensations might constitute what ethicists term an inappropriate inducement, an irresistible temptation to join the study.
Now, more than eighty years after the 1918 flu, people enter studies for several reasons—to get free medical care, to get an experimental drug that, they hope, might cure them of a disease like cancer or AIDS, or to help further scientific knowledge. In theory at least, study participants are supposed to be true volunteers, taking part in research of their own free will.
But in 1918, such ethical arguments were rarely considered. Instead, the justification for a risky study with human beings was that it was better to subject a few to a great danger in order to save the many. Prisoners were thought to be the ideal study subjects. They could offer up their bodies for science and, if they survived, their pardons could be justified because they gave something back to society.
The Navy inmates were perfect for another reason. Thirty-nine of them had never had influenza, as far as anyone knew. So they might be uniquely susceptible to the disease. If the doctors wanted to deliberately transmit the 1918 flu, what better subjects? Was influenza really so easily transmitted? the doctors asked. Why did some people get it and others not? Why did it kill the young and healthy? Could the wartime disruptions and movements of troops explain the spread of the flu? If it was as contagious as it seemed, how was it being spread? What kind of microorganism was causing the illness?
The normal way to try to answer such questions would be to study the spread of the disease in animals. Give the disease to a few cages of laboratory rats, or perhaps to some white rabbits. Isolate whatever was causing the illness. Show how it spread and test ways to protect animals—and people—against the disease.
But influenza, it seemed, was a uniquely human disease. No animal was known to be susceptible to it. Medical researchers felt they had no choice but to study influenza in people. Either the Navy doctors were uncommonly persuasive or the enticement of a pardon was overwhelmingly compelling. For whatever reason, the sixty-two men agreed to be subjects in the medical experiment.
And so the study began. First the sailors were transferred to a quarantine station on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor. Then the Navy doctors did their best to give the men the flu. Influenza is a respiratory disease—it is spread from person to person, presumably carried on droplets of mucus sprayed in the air when sick people cough or sneeze, or carried on their hands and spread when the sick touch the healthy. Whatever was causing the flu should be present in mucus taken from the ill.
The experiments, then, were straightforward. The Navy doctors collected mucus from men who were desperately ill with the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men, and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed that mucus into the back of a volunteer’s nose.
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Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
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How many doctors and paediatricians actually get their free samples laboratory tested and give them thorough ‘scientific assessment’?
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Gabrielle Palmer (The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business)
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Materialistically bound, traditional science assumes that anything that cannot be measured, tested in a laboratory, or probed by the five senses or their technological extensions simply doesn't exist. it's "not real.
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Anonymous
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A statistically significant finding gives you a clue, suggesting a promising place to focus your research energy. The significance test is the detective, not the judge. <...> If a result is novel and important, other scientists in other laboratories ought to test and retest the phenomenon and its variants, trying to figure out whether the result was a one-time fluke or whether it truly meets the Fisherian standard of “rarely fails.” That’s what scientists call replication; if an effect can’t be replicated, despite repeated trials, science backs apologetically away. The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.
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Jordan Ellenberg (How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking)
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Pepper Spray and Cougars. People assume that since pepper spray usually "works" on bears, it will work on cougars. In contrast, pepper spray was tested on bears under laboratory conditions long before it was sold to the public. Inventor Bill Pounds and biologist Chuck Jonkel wanted to make sure that spraying a bear didn't just further irritate it. Thus far, zookeepers have used pepper spray effectively on tigers, African lions, and jaguars. Pepper spray could prove to be an outstanding defensive weapon for people being stalked or followed by a cougar.
Walking sticks. Many hikers carry a walking stick; it could be used to wallop a cougar.
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Dave Smith
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REFERENCE RANGES FOR PLATELET COUNTS Platelets (mm3)* Category Greater than 400,000 High 150,000 to 400,000 Normal Less than 150,000 Low *Depending on the testing laboratory, other units, such as microliters (μl, may be used to measure platelets.
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James B. LaValle (Your Blood Never Lies: How to Read a Blood Test for a Longer, Healthier Life)
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Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk’s experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,
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Paul A. Offit (Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases)
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What worries me is that common sense seems to be dwindling to the point of extinction. The minds of men whom our contemporaries consider educated are regressing to the level of the most ignorant peasant on a Mediaeval manor. There is something terrifying in the spectacle of men who hold degrees in the genuine sciences and assemble vast arrays of elaborate scientific equipment to “prove” the authenticity of a “Holy Shroud,” and thus make it necessary to assemble more equipment and conduct long and painstaking research to prove what any half-way educated and rational man would have known from the very first. And the same sotie is performed whenever some prestidigitator claims that he can bend spoons by thinking about them. Is there any limit to the gullibility of “highly qualified scientists”?
I sometimes have a vision of scores of great scientists and tons of elaborate and very expensive laboratory equipment assembled about a pond into which they drop horsehairs to determine whether the percentage that turn into tadpoles is significant by the binomial formula. If hairs from Standard-breeds don’t work, get some from Appaloosas. Then try Percherons and Arabians: their hairs may make tadpoles better. And no one can say that the hairs of horses do not turn into tadpoles until you have made exhaustive scientific tests of hairs from every known breed of horses – and then someone will turn up to prove that the negative results are all wrong, because tadpoles come from the hairs of horses who eat the variety of four-leaved clover that grows in a hidden valley in Afghanistan, so the assembled scientists and their equipment will start all over.
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Revilo P. Oliver (Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?)
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In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members."
A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death.
The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.
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Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
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In order to deeply bury reprehensible emotions, your brain can cause physical pain to distract you. The pain is real. Laboratory tests demonstrate that the pain is caused when your brain cuts off oxygen to the afflicted area. Epidemiologists call this transfer of symptoms amplification.10 Amplification prevents unacceptable ideas from surfacing.
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Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life)
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Turning a corner, she encountered the smell of fried chicken. One of the test kitchens had been working on a new product for a fast-food client, developing a proprietary sauce for a new kind of sandwich to compete with one KFC had recently brought to market. It had no bun, but rather two pressed chicken segments deep-fried in a shortening of processed lard and beef fat, wrapped around thick shingled bacon and a slice of provolone, and smothered in this hydrogenated oil-based sauce.
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Jeffrey Stepakoff (The Orchard)
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It is clear that some absolutes cannot be tested in a tube and yet must be affirmed. For example, it is clear racism is bad, rape is wrong, and the Holocaust should have been avoided. Surely no "thinking person" such as Dr. Stenger would deny such empirical facts, even if such truths cannot be derived from the laboratory or a Petri dish? It is also clear that it takes about as much "foolish faith and vanity" to believe nature's design has no designer as it does to suppose a painting has no painter, a building has no builder, a book has no writer, or a watch has no watchmaker.
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Everett Piper (Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth)
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Seven years after A Nation at Risk was published with such fanfare, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a second look at the data gathered for the report. These people were no amateurs when it came to statistics—they build and maintain nuclear weapons—and they quickly found the error. Yes, it was true that SAT scores had gone down on average. However, the number of students taking the test had ballooned over the course of those seventeen years. Universities were opening their doors to more poor students and minorities. Opportunities were expanding. This signaled social success. But naturally, this influx of newcomers dragged down the average scores. However, when statisticians broke down the population into income groups, scores for every single group were rising, from the poor to the rich.
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Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
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To read history, to debate history, is to test our assumptions in the laboratory of real events; to learn, in the process, some appropriate humility about our capacity to forestall crises; and to grasp that extraordinary moments generally demand that ordinary assumptions be hurled out the window. Model-based social sciences, with their search for certainties that appear constant in large sets of data, teach neither humility nor flexibility.
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Sebastian Mallaby
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Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe.
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Yanis Varoufakis (Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment)
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Anil Gupta
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Farm animals aren't the only ones that suffer at the hands of human beings. Scientists use animals for their research. It's not just rats and guinea pigs – cats, dogs, monkeys and even chimpanzees can be found in laboratories, many of them suffering pain and distress as they are drugged or given electric shocks. Singer's test to see if any research is morally acceptable is this: would we be prepared to perform the same experiment on a brain-damaged human being? If not, he believes, it is not right to perform the experiment on an animal with a similar level of mental awareness. This is a tough test, and not many experiments would pass it. In practice, then, Singer is very strongly against using animals in research. The
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Nigel Warburton (A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories))
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The other major domain of cultural learning is food. Animals learn from each other what to eat, and what not. Parent crows that fly daily with their offspring to the local garbage dump to look for tasty morsels instill in them a life-long preference for such sites, whereas the crow family that survives on natural foods will have offspring that carry on the same tradition when they get older. Food aversion is similarly transmitted. This was first noticed by a German rodent-control officer who set out poisoned bait, killing wild rats in large numbers. After a while, however, the remaining rats began to avoid the bait, and their offspring would do the same. Without any direct experience with the bait, young rats would eat only safe foods.
An experimental psychologist, Bennett Galef, tested this in his laboratory by feeding rats two diets of different texture, taste, and smell. He then laced one of the diets with lithium chloride, which makes rats sick. This procedure led the animals to avoid the contaminated diet. The question now was how the rats' offspring would react after removal of the contamination. Both diets were again perfectly okay to eat, but adults fed exclusively on only one diet due to their bad experience with the other. It turned out that the pups acted like their parents. Of 240 pups given a choice of both diets, only one ate any of the food that adults in its colony had learned to avoid.
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Frans de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist)
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People v. Marx, 54 Cal. App. 3d 101 (1975), became one of the most consequential opinions in forensic science, not just forensic odontology. It began with a remarkable concession: there was “no established science of identifying persons from bite marks.” The technique had not been subjected to even the most rudimentary tenets of the scientific method. No hypotheses were tested. No laboratory experiments were conducted. No clinical research. The dentists never demonstrated their claimed ability to match teeth to bite marks. It was just an opinion.
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M. Chris Fabricant (Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System)
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My opinion, while interesting to me, is just a hypothesis, to be tested in the laboratory of the market.
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Aaron Adamson
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Functional Range: 1.8-3.0 mU/L Typical Laboratory Range: 0.5-5.5 mU/L
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Datis Kharrazian (Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? When My Lab Tests Are Normal: A revolutionary breakthrough in understanding Hashimoto’s disease and hypothyroidism)
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Free T4 is high with hyperthyroidism and low with hypothyroidism. It’s important to note that even a high TSH with normal T4 is enough to identify hypothyroidism. A rare pattern and one indicative of a hereditary thyroid resistance condition is high FT4. High FT4 can also be caused by taking heparin or by an acute illness that causes binding protein levels to suddenly fall. If an illness other than thyroid disease becomes severe or chronic, it may decrease FT4. Functional Range: 1.0-1.5 ng/ dL Typical Laboratory Range: 0.7-1.53 ng/dL
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Datis Kharrazian (Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? When My Lab Tests Are Normal: A revolutionary breakthrough in understanding Hashimoto’s disease and hypothyroidism)
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The production of rT3 typically takes place in cases of extreme stress, such as major trauma, surgery, or severe chronic stress. It appears the increased production of T3 is due to an inability to clear rT3, as well as from elevated levels of cortisol. Functional Range: 90-350 pg/ml Typical Laboratory Range: 90-350 pg/ml
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Datis Kharrazian (Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? When My Lab Tests Are Normal: A revolutionary breakthrough in understanding Hashimoto’s disease and hypothyroidism)
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Bill Silver was anything but surprised to see the abilities typical for one of the so-called special children of the twenty-first century. That was the label they wore in the scientific world. A boom in the birthrate of such children had risen suspectingly fast, compared to the last century, puzzling them. Thus, the global Government recognized a serious threat in the thousands of such faces. Bill personally found himself in the laboratory designed to run tests on these gifted children, so he was completely aware of what people like Scarlett were practically capable of doing. The Government worried that one day these gifted children would become an army impossible to defeat because of the nature of their characters which made them impossible to manipulate, control or mislead. The gifted ones did not know the mere meaning of obedience in any shape or form.
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I.G. Lilith (Scarlett: Dawn Of Rebellion #1)
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The “feeling of being stared at” is the focus of a subset of distant-mental-interaction studies. This is a particularly interesting belief to investigate because it is related to one of the oldest known superstitions in the Western world, the “evil eye,” and to one of the oldest known blessings in the Eastern world, the darshan, or gaze of an enlightened master. Most ancient peoples feared the evil eye and took measures to deflect the attraction of the eye, often by wearing shiny or attractive amulets around the neck. Today, most fears about the evil eye have subsided, at least among educated peoples. And yet many people still report the “feeling of being stared at” from a distance. Is this visceral feeling what it appears to be—a distant mental influence of the nervous system—or can it be better understood in more prosaic ways? In the laboratory today, the question is studied by separating two people and monitoring the first person’s nervous system (usually electrodermal activity) while the second person stares at the first at random times over a one-way closed-circuit video system. The stared-at person has no idea when the starer is looking at him or her. Figure 9.2. Effect sizes for studies testing the “feeling of being stared at,” where 50 percent is chance expectation. Confidence intervals are 95 percent. Figure 9.2 shows the results for staring studies conducted over eight decades.34 Similar to William Braud’s electrodermal studies but conducted in a context that more closely matched common descriptions of “feeling stared at,” these studies resulted in an overall effect of 63 percent where chance expectation is 50 percent. This is remarkably robust for a phenomenon that—according to conventional scientific models—is not supposed to exist. The combined studies result in odds against chance of 3.8 million to 1. Summary Given the evidence for psi perception and mind-matter interaction effects discussed so far, we could have expected that experiments involving living systems would also be successful. The studies discussed here show that our expectations are confirmed. The implications for distant healing are clear. All the experiments discussed so far have been replicated in the laboratory dozens to hundreds of times. They demonstrate that some of the “psychic” experiences people report probably do involve genuine psi. Now we move outside the laboratory to examine a new type of experiment, one that explores mind-matter interaction effects apparently associated with the collective attention of groups.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)