Module Time Quotes

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Photons also are highly conscious beings. They know when they’re being observed, and they know how to get to where they’re going, regardless of obstacles. If there is a pathway or many, the photon will know them all instantaneously and use them all. It exists in the quantum state and can be in more than one place at the same time. Its awareness is unlimited. It can synchronize itself with the quantum state of the universe.
Kenneth Schmitt (Quantum Energetics and Spirituality Volume 1: Aligning with Universal Consciousness)
Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. " My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
He had also jinxed my telescope so that every time I looked at Mars, Marvin the Martian popped up and threatened to destroy the Earth with an explosive space-modulator.
Jim C. Hines (Codex Born (Magic Ex Libris, #2))
I had archives of everything that had happened since I hacked my governor module, but I hadn’t had as much relevant experience in that time. But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit.
Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
LIFE is a big word, isn't it? Let's break it down into small segments. Let's find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we'll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as training units.
Chris Cleave (Gold)
Sol, listen,” came the Voice, modulated now so it did not boom from far above but almost whispered in his ear, “the future of humankind depends upon your choice. Can you offer Rachel out of love, if not obedience?” Sol heard the answer in his mind even as he groped for the words. There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. Not this time. Not ever again.
Dan Simmons (The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2))
He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov's Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories‏ (Anchor Literary Library))
During his depression he lost that forward momentum. In fact, the loss of it was the very thing that was wrong with him. It was time without nuance or modulation, always the same, minute by minute, day by day. He knew nothing of the defeat or futility that people assumed he was feeling. He was simply not there, an absence, an empty space.
A.S.A. Harrison (The Silent Wife)
Emotions properly trained and modulated, Aristotle told his readers, are essential to being practically wise: We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.
Barry Schwartz (Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing)
Your most stable beliefs, the ones that actually modulate your behavior, aren’t about life purposes; they are about momentum management. You are more likely to switch religions than to switch from an impatient to a patient temperament.
Venkatesh G. Rao (Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision-Making)
She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel , upon the senseless wood.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
He skims through the speech he prepared (for the 50th Independence day): … Before the Apocalypse, the system gave us a goal, forcing us to exhaustion at the end of the day. We had no time to look inside. The system was a slave-reproduction module where we thought we were free. With time lost, we lost our only chance of final evolution at the end of our one life … … The system succeeded, enough to turn talents into machines, warriors into lazy citizens, knights into faithful slaves, writers and artists into pets and trophies. They succeeded, and they laughed. But not after the Apocalypse. Not after the War. We fought. We lost many, but we won through evolution. Now, things are different. Now things are better … Bullshit!—Yuan stops at this point. Too many lies! Nothing has changed. Nothing is better. How can a monk with a voice lie? Moreover, a war hero favoring the Apocalypse—too dark! What was he thinking last night? “Delete all of it,” he mutters sternly.
Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).
Orit Badouk Epstein (Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.
Henry David Thoreau
Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult. You need this capacity to free yourself from the automatic flow of experience, and to choose where to direct your attention. Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.
David Rock (Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long)
All the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space
Richard Powers (The Time of Our Singing)
Timpul este un "cum" . Cînd ne întrebăm ce este timpul, nu trebuie să ne agăţăm grăbiţi de un răspuns ( de genul "asta sau asta este timpul" ), care să conţină mereu un "ce" . Să nu privim către răspuns, ci să repetăm întrebarea. Ce s-a întîmplat cu întrebarea ? S-a modificat. întrebarea "Ce este timpul ?" a devenit întrebarea "Cine este timpul ?". Mai exact : sîntem noi înşine timpul ? Sau, şi mai exact : sînt eu timpul meu ? Cu aceasta m-am apropiat cel mai mult de el şi, dacă înţeleg corect întrebarea, atunci o dată cu ea totul devine serios. Prin urmare, asemenea interogare este modul cel mai adecvat de a accede şi de a mă raporta la timp, ca la unul ce este "de fiecare dată al meu: Dasein-ul este atunci cel problematic.
Martin Heidegger (The Concept of Time)
But about the gentleman thing.” She waved her glass. “I want to make it plain as the nose on your face. I can stand anything in the book but gentlemen. Because I've spent a lot of time, too much time with them, and I know why gentlemen are what they are. They decide to be that way after they've tried all the real things and flopped at them. They've flopped at women. They've flopped at standing up on their hind legs and acting like men. So they become gentlemen. They've flopped at being individuals. So they say to themselves one fine morning: 'What can I be that's no trouble at all and that doesn't amount to a damned thing, but yet will make everyone look up to me?' The answer's simple. Be a gentleman. Take life flat on your back, cry in private, and then in a well-modulated voice.
Elliot Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel)
Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.
John Derbyshire (Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics)
Pattern recognition is so basic that the brain's pattern detection modules and its reward circuitry became inextricably linked. Whenever we successfully detect a pattern-or think we detect a pattern-the neurotransmitters responsible for sensations of pleasure squirt through our brains. If a pattern has repeated often enough and successfully enough in the past, the neurotransmitter release occurs in response to the mere presence of suggestive cues, long before the expected outcome of that pattern actually occurs. Like the study participants who reported seeing regular sequences in random stimuli, we will use alomst any pretext to get our pattern recognition kicks. Pattern recognition is the most primitive form of analogical reasoning, part of the neural circuitry for metaphor. Monkeys, rodents, and birds recognize patterns, too. What distinguishes humans from other species, though, is that we have elevated pattern recognition to an art. "To understand," the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, "is to perceive patterns." Metaphor, however, is not the mere detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns, too. When Robert Frost wrote, "A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain" his brain created a pattern connecting umbrellas to banks, a pattern retraced every time someone else reads this sentence. Frost believed passionately that an understanding of metaphor was essential not just to survival in university literature courses but also to survival in daily life.
James Geary (I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World)
We let our fathers carry our stuff up into our new rooms and our mothers make up our beds with new linen, something we probably wouldn’t do in a few months’ time after a single gender studies module convinced us we knew more about the world than our parents had learned from decades of living in it.
Catherine Ryan Howard (The Liar's Girl)
Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls (Us)
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue.
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
First, intelligence is situational—there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. Second, it is contextual—far from existing in a vacuum, any individual intelligence will always be both defined and limited by its environment. (And currently, the environment, not the brain, is acting as the bottleneck to intelligence.) Third, human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in your brain but in your civilization. Think of individuals as tools, whose brains are modules in a cognitive system much larger than themselves—a system that is self-improving and has been for a long time.
Erik J. Larson (The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do)
Fortunately, suppressing an impulse doesn’t always have to decrease your dopamine—it can actually feel good. The key is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pursuing long-term goals and has the ability to modulate dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. So suppressing an impulse can be rewarding, as long as it’s in service of your larger values.
Alex Korb (The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time)
While a witchy wardrobe can certainly be sexy at times, it doesn’t tend to prioritize body consciousness. More often than not, witch fashion is about loose layers that veil the form or fabrics that cloak and cover. It conceals more than it reveals. It creates a shroud, albeit one emblazoned with spangles and talismanic symbols. And so the wearer is self-modulating and self-protected, a walking woven spell. If she’s shocking, it’s because she wants to be. This witch is a voluntary disturbance. Women have been told over many lifetimes that their bodies are wrong and unbecoming - that they belong to other people. The fashion witch is self-possessed, first and foremost. She controls how much of herself she shares. Whether others consider her anatomy a monstrosity, or a thing of majesty, is of little concern. She knows her body is her own. And that is true power.
Pam Grossman (Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power (Witchcraft Bestseller))
When I begin my work with patients, I remind them that everything starts with a shared commitment to reality. The goal of therapy is not to feel good—it is to live in reality, regardless of how it may feel. Over time, patients can modulate the way they feel, but they can never modify reality itself, as it exists independent of them. Attempting to redefine reality is delusional and serves only as a defense against emotional discomfort. For
Mark McDonald (United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis)
There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, who are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense data, feeling, memories relocating - are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero. “In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid.
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme. From the opening words a narrative voice begins to create its own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice, finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world. So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends, talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness, variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice.
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
Given the complexity of the chore, “escapees,” as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom. CERNAN:…You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what’s happening is— STAFFORD: Oh—who did it? YOUNG: Who did what? CERNAN: What? STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter] CERNAN: Where did that come from? STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air. YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine. CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine. STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away. YOUNG: God almighty. [And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.] YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime? CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that—Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a— YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]… STAFFORD: It was just floating around? CERNAN: Yes. STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that. YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag— CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter] YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?
Mary Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void)
Over time, she accepted the fact that the price for this great love was this great fear. Love's unfortunate alter ego. Fear, she came to realize, was utterly enamored with love. Obsessed with it. Vying for its attention, modulating its own particularities to suit love. And love was equally accommodating to fear: creating space, ushering it in, giving it a home, the two of them operating in comparative measure and perfect synchrony; clinging to each other like warm bodies in the night.
Rebecca Kauffman (The House on Fripp Island)
Then it came about that a simple atmospheric variation was sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often in one we find a day that has strayed from another, that makes us live in that other, evokes at once and makes us long for its particular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece)
Lemons had us write on index cards the different activities (or modules) that we usually did in class, one per card. That was the first time I had written out a list of my teaching modules—an activity that was eye-opening enough on its own. Then she asked us to consider an upcoming class, and to think about what we wanted students to accomplish during it. Finally, she had us take the cards and use them to build that class period. It was a fascinating visual activity to put the cards in different orders, seeing how each of them would lead to
James M. Lang (Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It)
Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner serenity, and that too is part of his legacy. He was often tightly coiled and impatient, traits he made no effort to hide. Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. "My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it," he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Shit shit shit,” Frank said. “This ship was in no shape to jump again when I got stuffed into that damned pod.” He scooped up the module and 9 with it, and headed straight for the door back into Engineering. The door didn’t open and after hitting the panel several times, Frank backed up, raised one of his legs, and kicked it. The human must have miscalculated the effectiveness of the action, or their limbs were underreporting their damage status, because the door didn’t budge, and he nearly fell over again. “It’s stuck,” 9 informed him, helpfully.
Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 177, June 2021)
Sometimes being a twin had felt like living with another version of yourself. That person existed for everyone, probably, an alternative self that lived only in the mind. But hers was real. Stella rolled over in bed each morning and looked into her eyes. Other times it felt like living with a foreigner. Why are you not more like me? she’d think, glancing over at Desiree. How did I become me and you become you? Maybe she was only quiet because Desiree was not. Maybe they’d spent their lives together modulating each other, making up for what the other lacked.
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
Katherine Johnson’s passion for her work was as strong during the remainder of her thirty-three-year career at Langley as it was the first day she was drafted into the Flight Research Division. “I loved every single day of it,” she says. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.” She considers her work on the lunar rendezvous, prescribing the precise time at which the lunar lander needed to leave the Moon’s surface in order to coincide and dock with the orbiting command service module, to be her greatest contribution to the space program.
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
BRIDE SONG Too late for love, too late for joy, Too late, too late! You loitered on the road too long, You trifled at the gate: The enchanted dove upon her branch Died without a mate; The enchanted princess in her tower Slept, died, behind the grate; Her heart was starving all this while You made it wait. Ten years ago, five years ago, One year ago, Even then you had arrived in time, Though somewhat slow; Then you had known her living face Which now you cannot know: The frozen fountain would have leaped, The buds gone on to blow, The warm south wind would have awaked To melt the snow. Is she fair now as she lies? Once she was fair; Meet queen for any kingly king, With gold-dust on her hair, Now these are poppies in her locks, White poppies she must wear; Must wear a veil to shroud her face And the want graven there: Or is the hunger fed at length, Cast off the care? We never saw her with a smile Or with a frown; Her bed seemed never soft to her, Though tossed of down; She little heeded what she wore, Kirtle, or wreath, or gown; We think her white brows often ached Beneath her crown, Till silvery hairs showed in her locks That used to be so brown. We never heard her speak in haste; Her tones were sweet, And modulated just so much As it was meet: Her heart sat silent through the noise And concourse of the street. There was no hurry in her hands, No hurry in her feet; There was no bliss drew nigh to her, That she might run to greet. You should have wept her yesterday, Wasting upon her bed: But wherefore should you weep today That she is dead? Lo we who love weep not today, But crown her royal head. Let be these poppies that we strew, Your roses are too red: Let be these poppies, not for you Cut down and spread.
Christina Rossetti (Poems of Christina Rossetti)
In (largely) gloomy Germany the area needed by PV panels to supply all electricity generation (nearly 560 TWh in 2012) would be considerably larger. With an average PV output of 100 kWh/m2 (the recent annual mean for both roof - and ground-based installations), it would require about 5,600 km2 covered with modules. That would be the equivalent of nearly 1.6% of Germany's total area, 25% of the country's built-up area, or almost 15% of land claimed by settlements and transportation infrastructure; and roughly 2.7 times the total area of all German roofs, based on an estimate of roughly 25 m2 of roof area per person (Waffenschmidt 2008).
Vaclav Smil (Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses)
It is possible, just as it is with the auditory training of musicians, to begin using the feeling sense actively. This will increase neuronal development in the hippocampal and the cardiovascular (heart) system and with practice, over time, increase sensitivity to tiny modulations in that sensory flow. Sensitivity to the tiniest shifts in feeling will develop, just as they do in musicians with sound complexes. And, with experience, the ability to determine the meanings inside those feelings will become a reliable skill. In other words, it becomes possible to immediately know the intent of the dog as soon as it is seen/nonkinesthetically felt.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they’ve heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was – a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting (chances in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child’s play: no walls, not even the glass ones which, though we could see through them, killed the birds while they were flying.
John Cage (A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings)
And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along comes the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been name, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experience in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.
José Saramago (The Cave)
I have sometimes gone so far as to wish to banish all the melodies and sweet chants commonly used for David's psalter from my ears and from the Church as well. But I think a safer course one which I remember being often told of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. He used to make the reader of the psalm chant with so flexible a speech-rhythm that he was nearer to reciting than to singing. Nevertheless, when I remember the tears which I poured out at the time when I was first recovering my faith, and that now I am moved not by the chant but by the words being sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and entirely appropriate modulation, then again I recognize the great utility of music in worship.
Augustine of Hippo (Confessions)
It didn’t work this way when he had sex with younger women. He would have to think from beginning to end, making choices and judgments. This made Tengo uncomfortable. All the responsibilities fell on his shoulders. He felt like the captain of a small boat on a stormy sea, having to take the rudder, inspect the setting of the sails, keep in mind the barometric pressure and the wind direction, and modulate his own behavior so as to boost the crew’s trust in him. The slightest mistake or accident could lead to tragedy. This felt less like sex than the discharging of a duty. As a result he would tense up and miss the timing of an ejaculation or fail to become erect when necessary. This would only increase his doubts about himself.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
There obviously is a different feel to a wave of intense emotion versus an abstract thought, but each conscious form is an experience that gives us a unique perception of reality. The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story. The vast variety of conscious forms and the ubiquity of consciousness in the brain are best explained by a modular architecture of the brain. The conceptual challenge now is to understand how hundreds, if not thousands, of modules, embedded in a layered architecture—each layer of which can produce a form of consciousness—give us a single, unified life experience at any given moment that seems to flow flawlessly into the next across time.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
But about the gentleman thing.” She waved her glass. “I want to make it plain as the nose on your face. I can stand anything in the book but gentlemen. Because I've spent a lot of time, too much time with them, and I know why gentlemen are what they are. They decide to be that way after they've tried all the real things and flopped at them. They've flopped at women. They've flopped at standing up on their hind legs and acting like men. So they become gentlemen. They've flopped at being individuals. So they say to themselves one fine morning: 'What can I be that's no trouble at all and that doesn't amount to a damned thing, but yet will make everyone look up to me?' The answer's simple. Be a gentleman. Take life flat on your back, cry in private, and then in a well-modulated voice.
Elliott Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel)
The poetry of music composes each generation of Americans’ autobiographical memories. Language and music represent two rotaries of the revolving and evolving wheels that we employ to internalize the axis of identification. Music plays a profound role in the definitive stages of most people’s lives. Reminiscent of the sounds and smells that flavored our youth, musical intonations organize our personal memories into temporal time sequence. Modulation of musical memories comprises an important quotient in people’s autographical memory system. If we listen to enough music, its pitch, tone, timbre, and cadence eventually seeps into our unconsciousness. The lilt of music becomes a portal through which we perceive, feel, and experience worldly inflections and how we synthesize swirling emotions.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
It is fiercely inventive. It squeezes complexity out of simplicity. It orchestrates the activation or repression of certain genes in only certain cells and at certain times, creating unique contexts and partners for each gene in time and space, and thus produces near-infinite functional variation out of its limited repertoire. And it mixes and matches gene modules-called exons-within single genes to extract even further combinatorial diversity out of its gene repertoire. These two strategies-gene regulation and gene splicing-appear to be used more extensively in the human genome than in the genomes of most organisms. More than the enormity of gene numbers, the diversity of gene types, or the originality of gene function, it is the ingenuity of our genome that is the secret to our complexity.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Consciousness is not the product of a special network that enables all of our mental events to be conscious. Instead, each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing. The results bubble up from various modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water. Bubble after bubble, each the end result of a module’s or a group of modules’ processing, pops up and bursts forth for a moment, only to be replaced by others in a constant dynamic motion. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time. (This metaphor is limited to bubbles roiling up at a rate of twelve frames a second or faster; or consider a cartoon flip book, where the faster we snap the pages, the more continuous the movements of the characters appear.)
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
We must learn to modulate our exposure, allowing things to ripen and mature in the container of the heart before revealing our secret inside flesh to others. In so doing, we will be better able to hear the subtle character and nuanced complexities of our inner life. This is delicate work, requiring a watchful attention to the rhythms of the soul. It is important to distinguish it from isolation and withholding—those are strategies devised early in our lives to keep hidden what had been shamed or wounded. Many of us had our expressions of suffering silenced. We heard the voices of those we looked to for comfort saying, “We’ve heard you say this all before. Stop repeating yourself.” “Get over it! Stop whining.” Or we heard nothing at all. Rarely did we find a refuge for our grief. Similarly, many of us found ourselves isolated in times of loss, shamed by the absence of someone who cared.
Francis Weller (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)
There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
Dasein-ul este fiinţarea caracterizată ca fapt-de-a-fi-în-lume. Viaţa umană nu este ceva precum un subiect care trebuie să facă cine ştie ce artificiu pentru a veni în lume. Dasein-ul, ca fapt-de-a-fi-în-Iume, înseamnă: a fi în lume în asa fel încît acest fapt de a fi să însemne: a avea mereu de-a face cu lumea; a zăbovi în preajma ei într-un anume mod, fie al executării, al îndeplinirii sau rezolvării a ceva, fie în modul contemplării, al interogării, al determinării contemplative şi comparative. Faptul de-a-fi-în-lume este caracterizat ca preocupare. Dasein-ul, ca fapt-de-a-fi-în-lume, este totodată fapt-de-a-fi-unul-laolaltă-cu-altul, de a fi cu ceilalţi; a deţine împreună cu alţii aceeaşi lume, a-l întalni pe celălalt, a fi laolaltă în sensul de a-fi-unul-pentru-altul. Însă acest Dasein este totodată pentru ceilalţi o simplă prezenţă, aşa cum este prezentă o piatră care nu deţine o lume şi care nu se preocupă de vreo lume. A fi unul laolaltă cu altul în lume, în sensul de a o avea laolaltă - acest fapt are o determinare ontologică privilegiată. Modul fundamental în care există lumea pe care Dasein-urile o deţin laolaltă este vorbirea. Vorbirea văzută în totalitatea ei: ca vorbire care se exprimă pe sine atunci cînd vorbeşte cu altul despre ceva. În spaţiul vorbirii are loc, cu precădere, faptul-de-a-fi-în-lume al omului. Acest lucru era cunoscut deja de Aristotel. În felul în care Dasein-ul, în lumea sa, vorbeşte despre modul în care se îndeletniceşte cu această lume a sa este implicată dintru început o explicitare de sine a acestui Dasein. Felul în care el vorbeşte ne arată cum anume se înţelege Dasein-ul de fiecare dată pe sine, ca ce anume se consideră el pe sine. În vorbirea unuia cu celălalt, în acel ceva despre care se stă de vorbă este cuprinsă de fiecare dată o explicitare de sine a prezentului în care are loc această convorbire. Dasein-ul este o fiinţare care se determină pe sine ca "eu sunt". Dasein-ului îi este constitutiv faptul-de-a-fi-de-fiecare-dată al acestui "eu sunt". Prin urmare, Dasein-ul, asa cum este el în faptul-de-a-fi-în-lume, este primordial şi Dasein-ul meu. El este de fiecare dată propriu şi, ca propriu, el este de fiecare dată. Dacă această fiinţare trebuie determinată în caracterul său de fiinţă,nu trebuie făcut abstracţie de faptul-de-a-fi-de-fiecare-dată care este "al meu". Mea res agitur. Toate caracterele fundamentale trebuie să se regăsească astfel în faptul-de-a-fi-de-fiecare-dată, înteles ca "de fiecare dată al meu".În măsura în care Dasein-ul este o fiinţare care sunt eu însumi şi totodată este determinat ca fapt-de-a-fi-unul-laolaltă-cu-altul, eu nu sunt, în primă instanţă şi la nivel mediu, eu însumi, ci ceilalţi; eu sunt cu ceilalţi, şi aceştia, la rîndul lor, cu alţii. Nimeni nu este, în cotidianitate, el insuşi Nimeni nu este ceea ce el este şi aşa cum este: nici unul şi totuşi toţi laolaltă. Aceştia toţi nu sunt ei înşişi. Acest Nimeni, de care suntem noi inşine trăiţi în cotidianitate, este impersonalul "se". Se spune, se aude, se optează pentru ceva, se dă curs unei preocupări. În înverşunarea dominaţiei acestui impersonal "se" rezidă posibilităţile Dasein-ului meu şi "eu sunt" este posibil pornind de la această nivelare. O fiinţare care este posibilitatea lui "eu sînt" este ca atare, cel mai adesea, o fiinţare dominată de impersonalul "se".
Martin Heidegger (The Concept of Time)
And this deflation of rivals is no closer to the truth than the self-inflation that is also high on the agenda for that particular conversation. But the deflation is heartfelt; we tend to believe the bad publicity we give rivals, the better to spread it. The Buddha seems to have seen this dynamic clearly. A scripture attributed to him reads: The senses’ evidence, And works, inspire such scorn For others, and such smug Conviction he is right, That all his rivals rank As “sorry, brainless fools.” So what do we do about all this? If our mind keeps getting seized by different modules, and each module carries with it different illusions, how do we change the situation? The answer isn’t simple, but what should already be clear is that getting more control over the situation may have something to do with feelings. A link between feelings and illusion was somewhat apparent back in chapter 3, when I noted that some feelings are in one sense or another “false,” so getting some critical distance from them can clarify things. But the case against being enthralled by our feelings only grows when you realize that their connection to illusion can be described in a second way. Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse.
Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment)
The chair faced the room instead of the window. Reading while waiting for marijuana was out of the question. He considered masturbating but did not. He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and drying out and floating dryly away, and felt on some level that this had something to do with him and his circumstances and what, if this grueling final debauch he’d committed himself to didn’t somehow resolve the problem, would surely have to be called his problem, but he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect, which had retreated back into its hole in the angled girder, because at this precise time his telephone and his intercom to the front door’s buzzer both sounded at the same time, both loud and tortured and so abrupt they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in, waiting, and he moved first toward the telephone console, then over toward his intercom module, then convulsively back toward the sounding phone, and then tried somehow to move toward both at once, finally, so that he stood splay-legged, arms wildly out as if something’s been flung, splayed, entombed between the two sounds, without a thought in his head.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.
Buzz Aldrin (Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration)
A respectable old man gives the following sensible account of the method he pursued when educating his daughter. "I endeavoured to give both to her mind and body a degree of vigour, which is seldom found in the female sex. As soon as she was sufficiently advanced in strength to be capable of the lighter labours of husbandry and gardening, I employed her as my constant companion. Selene, for that was her name, soon acquired a dexterity in all these rustic employments which I considered with equal pleasure and admiration. If women are in general feeble both in body and mind, it arises less from nature than from education. We encourage a vicious indolence and inactivity, which we falsely call delicacy; instead of hardening their minds by the severer principles of reason and philosophy, we breed them to useless arts, which terminate in vanity and sensuality. In most of the countries which I had visited, they are taught nothing of an higher nature than a few modulations of the voice, or useless postures of the body; their time is consumed in sloth or trifles, and trifles become the only pursuits capable of interesting them. We seem to forget, that it is upon the qualities of the female sex, that our own domestic comforts and the education of our children must depend. And what are the comforts or the education which a race of beings corrupted from their infancy, and unacquainted with all the duties of life, are fitted to bestow? To touch a musical instrument with useless skill, to exhibit their natural or affected graces, to the eyes of indolent and debauched young men, who dissipate their husbands' patrimony in riotous and unnecessary expenses: these are the only arts cultivated by women in most of the polished nations I had seen. And the consequences are uniformly such as may be expected to proceed from such polluted sources, private misery, and public servitude.
Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
Now, here is the kicker: while hemi-neglect can occur when there is actual loss of sensation or motor systems, a version of it can also occur when all sensory systems and motor systems are in good working order—a syndrome known as extinction. In this case each half brain seems to work just fine alone, but it begins to fail when required to work at the same time as the other half. Yet information in the neglected field can be used at a nonconscious level!5 That means the information is there, but the patient isn’t conscious it is there. Here is how it works. If patients with left hemi-neglect are shown visual stimuli in both their right and left visual fields at the same time, they report seeing only the stimulus on the right. If, however, they are shown only the left visual stimulus, hitting the same exact place on the retina as previously, the left stimulus is perceived normally. In other words, if there is no competition from the normal side, then the neglected side will be noticed and pop into conscious awareness! What is strangest of all is that these patients will deny that there is anything wrong; they are not conscious of the loss of these circuits and their resulting problems. It appears, then, that their autobiographical self must be derived only from what they are conscious of. And what they are conscious of is dependent on two things. First, they are not conscious of circuits that are not working. It is as if the circuits never existed and consciousness for what the circuits did disappears with the circuit. The second thing is that some sort of competitive processing is happening. Some circuits’ processing makes it into consciousness while others’ does not. In short, conscious experience seems tied to processing that is exceedingly local, which produces a specific capacity, and that processing can also be outcompeted by the processing of other modules and never make it to consciousness. This has astounding implications.
Michael S. Gazzaniga (The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind)
Flagyl was clearly effective in the treatment of Lyme disease. But how did it work? As early as 1967 The British Journal of Venereal Diseases had published a study showing Flagyl to be effective in certain cases of syphilis, and that it had an effect on bacterial DNA and RNA irrespective of bacterial replication. Could this be the mechanism of Flagyl’s action against Burrelia burgdorferi? The key to Flagyl’s effectiveness on Lyme, however, was not reported until several months after my study was presented. Dr. O. Brorson, a Norwegian researcher, published a paper on Flagyl and its effect on the cystic forms of Lyme disease six months after I presented my research. The cystic form of Lyme disease, it turns out, is one mechanism that Borrelia burgdorferi utilizes to persist in the body. Dr. Brorson reported that Flagyl would cause Borrelia cysts to rupture, and he went on to publish that he could see under the microscope the cell wall forms of Borrelia burgdorferi (helical/spiral–shaped organisms) transform into cystic forms, and under proper conditions convert back into mobile spirochetes. A review of the medical literature revealed that these cystic forms had, in fact, been reported in syphilis. No one had clearly made the link between Borrelia and a cystic form of the organism that could persist for long periods of time in a dormant state. It was a highly evolved survival mechanism that would allow the organism to reemerge when conditions were optimal. My patient, Mary, had been treated initially with Plaquenil, which according to Dr. Brorson’s research also affects the cystic forms, yet it appeared that it was not powerful enough to destroy the dormant forms and prevent a relapse, or to prevent her from passing it on to her fetus. She had also been treated with drugs that addressed the cell wall and intracellular forms of Lyme. Although Plaquenil has some effect on cystic forms, it is often primarily used in antibiotic regimens with Lyme disease to alkalize the intracellular compartment, modulate autoimmune reactions, and affect essential enzymes necessary for bacterial replication. Clearly, however, it is not powerful enough to destroy enough of the
Richard I. Horowitz (Why Can't I Get Better?: Solving the Mystery of Lyme & Chronic Disease)
Cannabinoids relax the rules of cortical crowd control, but 300 micrograms of d-lysergic acid diethylamide break them completely. This is a clean sweep. This is the Renaissance after the Dark Ages. Dopamine—the fuel of desire—is only one of four major neuro modulators. Each of the neuromodulators fuels brain operations in its own particular way. But all four of them share two properties. First, they get released and used up all over the brain, not at specific locales. Second, each is produced by one specialized organ, a brain part designed to manufacture that one potent chemical (see Figure 3). Instead of watering the flowers one by one, neuromodulator release is like a sprinkler system. That’s why neuromodulators initiate changes that are global, not local. Dopamine fuels attraction, focus, approach, and especially wanting and doing. Norepinephrine fuels perceptual alertness, arousal, excitement, and attention to sensory detail. Acetylcholine energizes all mental operations, consciousness, and thought itself. But the final neuromodulator, serotonin, is more complicated in its action. Serotonin does a lot of different things in a lot of different places, because there are many kinds of serotonin receptors, and they inhabit a great variety of neural nooks, staking out an intricate network. One of serotonin’s most important jobs is to regulate information flow throughout the brain by inhibiting the firing of neurons in many places. And it’s the serotonin system that gets dynamited by LSD. Serotonin dampens, it paces, it soothes. It raises the threshold of neurons to the voltage changes induced by glutamate. Remember glutamate? That’s the main excitatory neurotransmitter that carries information from synapse to synapse throughout the brain. Serotonin cools this excitation, putting off the next axonal burst, making the receptive neuron less sensitive to the messages it receives from other neurons. Slow down! Take it easy! Don’t get carried away by every little molecule of glutamate. Serotonin soothes neurons that might otherwise fire too often, too quickly. If you want to know how it feels to get a serotonin boost, ask a depressive several days into antidepressant therapy. Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, and all their cousins leave more serotonin in the synapses, hanging around, waiting to help out when the brain becomes too active. Which is most of the time if you feel the world is dark and threatening. Extra serotonin makes the thinking process more relaxed—a nice change for depressives, who get a chance to wallow in relative normality.
Marc Lewis (Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs)
The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
Gabor Maté
Candidates who mindlessly jump into coding problems will do the same with testing problems. If we pose a problem to add test variations to modules, we don’t want them to start listing tests until we tell them to stop; we want the best tests first. An SET’s time is limited. We want candidates to take a step back and find the most efficient way to solve the problem, and the previous function definition can use some improvement. A good SET looks at a poorly defined API and turns it into something beautiful while testing it.
James A. Whittaker (How Google Tests Software)
This really does attack essence. Because the build-on-package phenomenon does not today affect the average MIS programmer, it is not yet very visible to the software engineering discipline. Nevertheless, it will grow rapidly, because it does attack the essence of fashioning conceptual constructs. The shrink-wrapped package provides a big module of function, with an elaborate but proper interface, and its internal conceptual structure does not have to be designed at all. High-function software products such as Excel or 4th Dimension are big modules indeed, but they serve as known, documented, tested modules with which to build customized systems. Next-level application builders get richness of function, a shorter development time, a tested component, better documentation, and radically lower cost. The difficulty, of course, is that the shrink-wrapped software package is designed as a stand-alone entity whose functions and interfaces metaprogrammers cannot change. Moreover, and more seriously, shrink-wrapped package builders seemingly have little incentive to make their products suitable as modules in a larger system. I
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
All of this highlights a puzzle: Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the “deliberation”? If it’s just a show trial—if it all comes down to a contest of power between modules that have summoned whatever fortifying logic might support their cause—couldn’t the whole thing happen subconsciously, freeing up the conscious mind to do something constructive, like ponder the mind-body problem? Well, recall that the conscious mind—being the part of your mind that communicates with the world—seems to be a kind of public relations agent. “My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.
Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment)
When not subject to this localization and modulation mechanism, mind is unbound: it entails consciousness of all there is across space, time, and perhaps beyond. Therefore, by localizing mind, the brain also ‘filters out’ of consciousness anything that is not correlated with the body’s perspective.
Bernardo Kastrup (Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything)
This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. High intelligence requires both lots of hardware (made of atoms) and lots of software (made of bits). The fact that most of our human hardware is added after birth (through growth) is useful, since our ultimate size isn’t limited by the width of our mom’s birth canal. In the same way, the fact that most of our human software is added after birth (through learning) is useful, since our ultimate intelligence isn’t limited by how much information can be transmitted to us at conception via our DNA, 1.0-style. I weigh about twenty-five times more than when I was born, and the synaptic connections that link the neurons in my brain can store about a hundred thousand times more information than the DNA that I was born with. Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download. So it’s physically impossible for an infant to be born speaking perfect English and ready to ace her college entrance exams: there’s no way the information could have been preloaded into her brain, since the main information module she got from her parents (her DNA) lacks sufficient information-storage capacity.
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
A Variation of Dr. Ayres’s “Four Levels of Sensory Integration” By the time a child is ready for preschool, the blocks for complex skill development should be in place. What are these blocks? • Ability to modulate touch sensations through the skin, especially unexpected, light touch, and to discriminate among the physical properties of objects by touching them (tactile sense), • Ability to adjust one’s body to changes in gravity, and to feel comfortable moving through space (vestibular sense), • Ability to be aware of one’s body parts (proprioceptive sense), • Ability to use the two sides of the body in a cooperative manner (bilateral coordination), and • Ability to interact successfully with the physical environment; to plan, organize, and carry out a sequence of unfamiliar actions; to do what one needs and wants to do (praxis).
Carol Stock Kranowitz (The Out-of-Sync Child: Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder)
The point of loose coupling is that an effective module provides an additional level of abstraction—once you write it, you can take it for granted. It reduces overall program complexity and allows you to focus on one thing at a time. If using a module requires you to focus on more than one thing at once—knowledge of its internal workings, modification to global data, uncertain functionality—the abstractive power is lost and the module's ability to help manage complexity is reduced or eliminated. Classes and routines are first and foremost intellectual tools for reducing complexity. If they're not making your job simpler, they're not doing their jobs.
Steve McConnell (Code Complete)
Lehman and Belady have studied the history of successive releases in a large operating system.[6] They find that the total number of modules increases linearly with release number, but that the number of modules affected increases exponentially with release number. All repairs tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing original design flaws; more and more is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes. As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing ceases to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. Furthermore, machines change, configurations change, and user requirements change, so the system is not in fact usable forever. A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
...poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.
Czesław Miłosz
but in the meanwhile here were these slow undulations of lips and cheek, the articulate movements of tongue and jaw, the glow of alabaster skin. Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of “deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the what-ness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery. Here in this woman's body the mystery could be seen. This apparently inert being, her self erased or buried beneath this never-ending story, this labyrinth of story-rooms in which more tales had been hidden than he was interested to hear. This toothsome sleepwalker. This blank. The rote-learned words poured out of her as he looked on, and while he unbuttoned and caressed. He exposed her nudity without compunction, touched it without guilt, manipulated her without any feelings of remorse. He was the scientist of her soul. In the smallest motion of an eyebrow, in the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, in a sudden minuscule curling of the left corner of her upper lip, he deduced the presence of life. Her self, that sovereign treasure, had not been destroyed. It slept and could be awakened. He whispered in her ear, "This is the last time you will ever tell this story. As you tell it, let it go." Slowly, phrase by phrase, episode by episode, he would unbuild the “only a man looking for the deeper truth would have seen it, her back arched in return. There was nothing wrong in what he did. He was her rescuer. She would thank him in time” Excerpt From: Toppy. “The Enchantress of Florence - Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)
In the course of life, all such systems (i.e., the different evolutionary ridges) are somewhat functionally interdependent, as are components within each system (i.e., the different programs, schema, modules). Nevertheless, each system and system component has a somewhat distinct evolutionary history and time line. There is no single origin of religion, nor any necessary and sufficient set of functions that religion serves. Rather, there is a family of evolutionary-compatible functions that all societies more or less realize but that no one society need realize in full. Religions
Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition))
In what’s fondly called the spinning disk experiment, Jenkins trained them to reach through the bars of their cage and keep a couple of digits in contact with wedge-shaped grooves in a four-inch disk that was spinning like an old LP. The monkeys had to modulate carefully the force they applied to the disk: too little, and their fingers would lose contact with the disk; too much and their fingers would ride along as if on a carousel. But if the animals did it just right, maintaining contact without getting taken for a ride, they were rewarded with a banana-flavored pellet. “I’d sit there for hours, hand-training a hungry monkey until he got it,” says Jenkins. Then, some 500 times a day, the monkeys practiced the move; if successful, they got a pellet. “We made sure the monkeys were hungry, and put the disk near them,” recalls Allard. “Once they had mastered the task and were performing it hundreds of times a day for several weeks, we went in to their brains. We found a fourfold increase in the area of the somatosensory cortex responding to signals from these fingers.” This wasn’t a response to something as traumatic as an amputation, a lesion, or a nerve transection, as the earlier work had been. The researchers didn’t have to cut the animal to get a change in its brain: the rezoning was purely a response to purposeful behavior.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
I never saw the Desoto Solar Farm produce 25 megawatts into the electrical grid during my time there. At the time, I thought the contractor was tampering with the electrical meter and I reported it to the company management team. I was later to discover many blown fuses at the power plant and lots of solar modules out of service.
Steven Magee
The problem is that if we want to pass a large number of streams, such as from files on the filesystem, we would likely get an EMFILE, too many open files error. This is because functions like createReadStream() from the fs module will actually open a file descriptor every time a new stream is created, even before you start to read from those streams.
Mario Casciaro (Node.js Design Patterns: Design and Implement Production-Grade Node.js Applications Using Proven Patterns and Techniques)
The voice was suave, pleasant, well modulated and expressive. The restless eyes were so black that it was hard to detect expression in them, but his voice more than made up for it. Here was no man who talked in a conversational monotone, but one whose every word seemed alive with expression. His motions as he moved about straightening up the room were graceful, well-timed and effective.
Erle Stanley Gardner (The Case of the Crooked Candle (Perry Mason #24))
Your Dopamine System with Quality Sleep. The dopamine system helps modulate both slow-wave sleep and REM sleep.28 Furthermore, not only does dopamine have a large effect on sleep (as well as on pain and depression) but sleep, pain, and depression all also affect the dopamine system. In addition, many aspects of the dopamine system are influenced by circadian rhythms, including the production of dopamine receptors, dopamine transporters, and dopamine itself.
Alex Korb (The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time)
In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request. “Tell my wife,” he answered in a well-modulated voice, “to give the girl the name of Úrsula.” He paused and said it again: “Úrsula, like her grandmother. And tell her also that if the child that is to be born is a boy, they should name him José Arcadio, not for his uncle, but for his grandfather.” Before they took him to the execution wall Father Nicanor tried to attend him. “I have nothing to repent,” Arcadio said, and he put himself under the orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee.
Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Allow uyr self to change your frequency to help you navigate the different frames of parallel realities. This frequency modulation creates a continuous timeline that you experience in physical reality. It enables uy to navigate to the version of earth that already exists that’s more representative of the changes uy made within yourself that uy say uy prefer.
Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
How is it possible for a book of 628 pages to inspire so many different visions?2 Because it consists of so many distinct but interrelated objects — that is to say words, of course, but they denote and evoke things—more things than there are words. Many of the words or formations appear nowhere else, and it is difficult to describe something so much of which you’re seeing for the first time. Its neologisms make it unencompassable, endlessly redefinable. The textual matter of Finnegans Wake developed over seventeen years, just as the meaning for its readers has developed over the seventy- eight years since its first publication. The continual critical redefining of Finnegans Wake partly maps onto its many redefinitions of itself. Both have histories and the list above comprises jumbled fragments of them, concealing a deranged story of ever-shifting perceptions. During the seventeen years of its composition, composed in a manner unlike that used for any other novel, it was always growing. That is it was shifting, splitting, recombining, reconfiguring, restructuring, destructuring, decomposing, and recomposing. One of the things that Finnegans Wake is, is a strange object made in strange ways. By focusing on some of the ways it was made, we will in this book arrive at a further understanding of what it is. Through its continuously self-generating transformation, it is a text of modulation and becoming, flux and flow, an alternative classic of change to the I Ching. Written in a world which was heading towards a confident belief that it could locate, name, and describe anything (all organisms, subatomic particles, links of DNA, black holes), it produced something full of indescribable, unnamable parts. As an unencompassable unfathomable text it remains the best correlative for our unencompassable unfathomable times, changing in its meanings as swiftly as our world, through its feverish reproduction of reproductions.
Finn Fordham (Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals)
Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
Designing it twice does not need to take a lot of extra time. For a smaller module such as a class, you may not need more than an hour or two to consider alternatives. This is a small amount of time compared to the days or weeks you will spend implementing the class. The initial design experiments will probably result in a significantly better design, which will more than pay for the time spent designing it twice.
John Ousterhout (A Philosophy of Software Design)
The sustained release of cortisol in states of chronic stress results in the disruption of two things vital for learning: neuroplasticity and hippocampal health (Podgorny & Gulyaeva, 2021; Raffington et al., 2018). It inhibits neuroplasticity by inhibiting protein synthesis, an essential aspect of brain building. At the same time, it results in the death of hippocampal neurons through the disruption of cellular processes of homeostasis. At its core, psychotherapy is a learning process which relies on our clients’ ability to learn new information and practice new ways of being. From specific stress reduction techniques to the soothing effects of a supportive relationship, stress modulation and success in psychotherapy go hand in hand. Thus, stress reduction skills should not be limited only to those complaining of stress disorders, but should be a central part of our work with all clients. While evolution once favored an anxious gene, fitness in our contemporary world may require a state of mind and brain that is open to new learning, mindfulness, and relaxation.
Louis Cozolino (The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Fourth Edition) (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.
David Nicholls (Us)
Just like how Python comes with several modules like random, math, or time that provide additional functions for your programs, the Pygame framework includes several modules with functions for drawing graphics, playing sounds, handling mouse input, and other things.
Al Sweigart (Making Games with Python & Pygame)
Were you trying to go fast? Were you in a rush? Probably so. Perhaps you felt that you didn’t have time to do a good job; that your boss would be angry with you if you took the time to clean up your code. Perhaps you were just tired of working on this program and wanted it to be over. Or maybe you looked at the backlog of other stuff that you had promised to get done and realized that you needed to slam this module together so you could move on to the next. We’ve all done it. We’ve all looked at the mess we’ve just made and then have chosen to leave it for another day. We’ve all felt the relief of seeing our messy program work and deciding that a working mess is better than nothing. We’ve all said we’d go back and clean it up later. Of course, in those days we didn’t know LeBlanc’s law: Later equals never.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Robert C. Martin Series))
There are dozens, if not hundreds of individuals around the planet who have built similar devices that operate on the same basic principles.  The pioneers in this field are Lester Hendershot, inventor of the "Power Capture Unit" (1920s); and the late Floyd "Sparky" Sweet, inventor of the Vacuum Triode Amplifier (VTA) or Space Quantum Modulator (1986). West referred to an inventor in Bullhead City, Earl Davenport, who has a set-up very similar to his, and speculated that his "over unity," (more power coming out than put in) was purportedly confirmed by Walter Rosenthal and is a function of high-power lines nearby.  Across the river, not ten miles away, in Laughlin Nevada, is a large power plant, with high power lines extending from it in all directions. Joseph Newman's motor is another possible variation of this wireless transformer phenomenon, according to West.  It has a super long wire, with decent capacitance.  "Some people build it and claim it works well, others build it and it doesn't work so well.  It just may be the story of ‘location, location, location.’” Continued Research into Wireless Power
Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
First there was Genesis I, then Genesis II, and, if all goes well, there will be a Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) attached to the International Space Station (ISS) by 2015.
Erik Seedhouse (Bigelow Aerospace: Colonizing Space One Module at a Time (Springer Praxis Books))
In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view. Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.
J.P. Delaney (The Girl Before)
Local Assemblies In 2013, the ACRC developed a specialized module for local assemblies, and for the first time conducted the Integrity Assessment on 47 local assemblies. The
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One downfall of numpy’s optimization of vector operations is that it only occurs on one operation at a time. That is to say, when we are doing the operation A * B + C with numpy vectors, first the entire A * B operation completes, and the data is stored in a temporary vector; then this new vector is added with C. The in-place version of the diffusion code in Example 6-14 shows this quite explicitly. However, there are many modules that can help with this. numexpr is a module that can take an entire vector expression and compile it into very efficient code that is optimized to minimize cache misses and temporary space used. In addition, the expressions can utilize multiple CPU cores (see Chapter 9 for more information) and specialized instructions for Intel chips to maximize the speedup. It is very easy to change code to use numexpr: all that’s required is to rewrite the expressions as strings with references to local variables. The expressions are compiled behind the scenes (and cached so that calls to the same expression don’t incur the same cost of compilation) and run using optimized code. Example 6-19 shows the simplicity of changing the evolve function to use numexpr. In this case, we chose to use the out parameter of the evaluate function so that numexpr doesn’t allocate a new vector to which to return the result of the calculation.
Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
test3 defines the sin function as a keyword argument, with its default value being a reference to the sin function within the math module. While we still do need to find a reference to this function within the module, this is only necessary when the test3 function is first defined. After this, the reference to the sin function is stored within the function definition as a local variable in the form of a default keyword argument. As mentioned previously, local variables do not need a dictionary lookup to be found; they are stored in a very slim array that has very fast lookup times. Because of this, finding the function is quite fast! While these effects are an interesting result of the way namespaces in Python are managed, test3 is definitely not “Pythonic.” Luckily, these extra dictionary lookups only start to degrade performance when they are called a lot (i.e., in the innermost block of a very fast loop, such as in the Julia set example). With this in mind, a more readable solution would be to set a local variable with the global reference before the loop is started. We’ll still have to do the global lookup once whenever the function is called, but all the calls to that function in the loop will be made faster. This speaks to the fact that even minute slowdowns in code can be amplified if that code is being run millions of times. Even though a dictionary lookup may only take several hundred nanoseconds, if we are looping millions of times over this lookup it can quickly add up. In fact, looking at Example 4-10 we see a 9.4% speedup simply by making the sin function local to the tight loop that calls it.
Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
So to anyone out there still wondering, here’s your permission slip: you do not have to be like Steve. When Isaacson, his biographer, was asked by a 60 Minutes interviewer about Jobs’s failings, he replied, “He could have been kinder.” Grant adds, “How do we know he succeeded because of his asshole behaviors … and not in spite of them?” Indeed, a more recent biography of Jobs, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, argues that Jobs matured during his time away from Apple, and was much more modulated in his behavior—giving credit when appropriate, dispensing praise when warranted, ripping someone a new one when necessary—during the second (and more successful) half of his career. Without that kind of modulation—without getting a little outside our comfort zone, at least some of the time—we’re all probably less likely to reach our goals, whether we’re prickly or pleasant by disposition. As Grant himself puts it, “What I’ve become convinced of is that nice guys and gals really do finish last.” He believes that the most effective people
Anonymous
The only way to prove that your software is easy to change is to make easy changes to it. And when you find that the changes aren’t as easy as you thought, you refine the design so that the next change is easier. When do you make these easy changes? All the time! Every time you look at a module you make small, lightweight changes to it to improve its structure.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
I get asked this question a lot. My first piece of advice would be that the less well you understand a domain, the harder it will be for you to find proper bounded contexts for your services. As we discussed previously, getting service boundaries wrong can result in having to make lots of changes in service-to-service collaboration — an expensive operation. So if you’re coming to a monolithic system for which you don’t understand the domain, spend some time learning what the system does first, and then look to identify clean module boundaries prior to splitting out services.
Sam Newman (Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems)
To a television network, he offers the Moon as a reliable and uncensorable broadcasting location.
Erik Seedhouse (Bigelow Aerospace: Colonizing Space One Module at a Time (Springer Praxis Books))
The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking business." He has had a full program all day---conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time, he decides to lay aside his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the garcon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we've got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes, he's dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room---and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
Being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions (an ability I’ll call mindfulness throughout this book) and then take our time to respond allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain. This capacity is crucial for preserving our relationships with our fellow human beings. As long as our frontal lobes are working properly, we’re unlikely to lose our temper every time a waiter is late with our order or an insurance company agent puts us on hold. (Our watchtower also tells us that other people’s anger and threats are a function of their emotional state.) When that system breaks down, we become like conditioned animals: The moment we detect danger we automatically go into fight-or-flight mode.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
They desire to build intimacy rapidly, to mitigate fears of rejection, diving into relationships where trust isn’t yet built. You’ll meet them at a party and ask how they’re doing, and they’ll tell you about their childhood trauma, their surgery, their suicidal urges, hoping the vulnerability will entreat you. Secure people, in contrast, let relationships unfold over time, and critically, while they are trusting, they adjust their initial optimism based on feedback they receive from others in real time. Research finds, for example, that secure people modulate their disclosures depending on whether the other person reciprocates, whereas anxious people disclose, no matter the response of the other party.
Marisa G. Franco (Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends)