“
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
”
”
Keith Caserta (Soul Searching (Nodes of God, #1))
“
You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
”
”
N.K. Jemisin (The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2))
“
There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
”
”
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“
I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
”
”
Kaliane Bradley (The Ministry of Time)
“
Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show.
”
”
Sam Lipsyte (The Ask)
“
The Western States nervous under the beginning change.
Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico,
Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land.
Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants
the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land
--wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is
the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor
were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor
turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good.
Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as
we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor
does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land.
There is little difference between this tractor and a tank.
The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think
about this.
One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car
creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a
single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered.
And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another
family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat
on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the
node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these
two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each
other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the
zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split
and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our
land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and
perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still
more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have
none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little
food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction.
Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are
ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-
meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women;
behind, the children listening with their souls to words their
minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby
has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's
blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb.
This is the beginning--from "I" to "we."
If you who own the things people must have could understand
this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate
causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx,
Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive.
But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes
you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."
The Western States are nervous under the begining
change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action.
A half-million people moving over the country; a million
more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the
first nervousness.
And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.
”
”
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
“
When we look at supply chains and distribution in nature, we see that natural systems include an abundance of nodes in a network. Distribution is widely spread - enough to include the maximum nodes feasible yet not enough to add unnecessary time or cost to the path a thing takes from source to destination.
This maximizes efficiency, and minimizes the risk of congestion and bottle-necks.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
My heart beats with you,
Love runs red throughout my veins,
Making me alive
SA Node - Haiku
”
”
Eric Overby (Legacy)
“
Back when I’d been sick, I’d always dreaded hearing other words. Spread. Lymph nodes. Amputation. Those words, those possibilities, make you grow up quick. They made me remember to prioritize correctly, to value and appreciate. But mainly the branches of those words scared me so much, I wanted to live even if it wasn’t always going to be fun and games.
”
”
Mariana Zapata (Under Locke)
“
Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--'We lost *our* land.
”
”
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
“
The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).
”
”
George Steiner (Real Presences)
“
Cinder inhaled sharply. “Is the video … is it worth it?” “Oh!” Iko clapped her hands to her face. “It’s horrifying!” Thorne grinned. “It’s a jackpot.” “I’ll load it on the projector,” said Cress, turning toward the holograph node. “Please, no,” said Iko, “we don’t need to see it that big again.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appreared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. ...The flesh under the horny nails was candlvwax-coloured, and bloodless.
”
”
A.S. Byatt (Angels and Insects)
“
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full-stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.
”
”
Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language)
“
NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!
”
”
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
“
Don't make me come down there.
- God
”
”
Keith Caserta (Soul Searching (Nodes of God, #1))
“
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
- Love and Tensor Algebra
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
Did you just say 'nerd'?"
"Not a 'nerd' - node."
"Oh.
”
”
Raymond Benson (Sons of Liberty (Metal Gear Solid #2))
“
the problem that I’ve found with
most poets that I have known is that
they’ve never had an 8 hour job
and there is nothing
that will put a person
more in touch
with the realities
than
an 8 hour job.
they have been protected
against the actualities
from the
beginning
and they
understand nothing
but the ends of their
fingernails
and
their delicate
hairlines
and
their lymph
nodes.
their words are
unlived, unfurnished, un-
true, and worse—so
fashionably
dull.
poet (?): that word
needs re-defining.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
“
The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.
”
”
Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine)
“
At its most basic level semantic search applies meaning to the connections between the different data nodes of the Web in ways that allow a clearer understanding of them than we have ever had to date.
”
”
David Amerland (Google Semantic Search: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques That Get Your Company More Traffic)
“
It's time to think anew about the nature of the universe. This is a thinking universe, a self-solving cosmic organism, and we are all nodes, or cells, in this organism, providing our part of the collective answer.
”
”
Thomas Stark (The Thinking Universe: Energy Is Thought (The Truth Series Book 3))
“
Hierarchies are 'dissectible' into their constituent branches, on which the holons form the 'nodes'. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is called its 'depth', and the number of holons on any given level its 'span'.
”
”
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
“
And were you able to find Him?" I inquired.
A shadow crossed his face as the dervish noded and said.
"Indeed, He was with me all along.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Bastard of Istanbul)
“
I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.
”
”
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
“
The South Node is karmic and relates to the unfinished business brought forward from the past.
”
”
Manly P. Hall (Astrology and Reincarnation)
“
was Hale. He glanced toward Node 3, wondering if the cryptographer were watching. “Fuck it,” he grumbled. Below his feet the outline of a recessed trapdoor
”
”
Dan Brown (Digital Fortress)
“
In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don't obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup.
Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can't I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on the portal vein? The inside of your body is innocent, nothing has taught it fear. Your artery canals trust their cargo, they don't check the shipments in the blood. You are full to overflowing but the keeper is asleep and there's murder going on inside. Who comes here? Let me hold up my lantern. It's only the blood; red cells carrying oxygen to the heart, thrombocytes making sure of proper clotting. The white cells, B and T types, just a few of them as always whistling as they go.
The faithful body has made a mistake. This is no time to stamp the passports and look at the sky. Coming up behind are hundreds of them. Hundreds too many, armed to the teeth for a job that doesn't need doing. Not needed? With all that weaponry?
Here they come, hurtling through the bloodstream trying to pick a fight. There's no-one to fight but you Louise. You're the foreign body now.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
“
Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
”
”
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“
In our age of connection, every one of us is a node. We sit on that tense, stretched surface between center and periphery. When we say Connection changes the nature of an object, this is the exact balance we have to contemplate.
”
”
Joshua Cooper Ramo (The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks)
“
Imprisonment of orogenes was never the only option for ensuring the safety of society ... Lynching was never the only option. The nodes were never the only option. All of these were choices. Different choices have always been possible.
”
”
N.K. Jemisin (The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3))
“
the Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days – extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.11 The Mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses and were aware that these could occur only within plus or minus eighteen days of the node (when the moon’s path crosses the apparent path of the sun).
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
The thought is that Hitler is an unfortunate node in the way the world is unfolding. He did not choose to be the evil person he is. He deserves compassion, not anger. And he must die for reasons of compassion: compassion for him and all those who might suffer his awfulness.
”
”
Massimo Pigliucci (How to Live a Good Life: Choosing the Right Philosophy of Life for You)
“
Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.
”
”
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
“
Bekase why: would a wise man ant to live in de mid's er such a blimblammin' all de time? No--'deed he wouldn't. A wise man 'ud take en buil' a biler-factry; en den he could shet down de biler-factory when he want to res'.
”
”
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
“
The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph. Think of the number of connections that can connect two different nodes on that graph. It’s exponential compared to the number of items in a list that connect directly to you. The way you create the network effect is by encouraging people in your network to connect to each other and to help each other.
”
”
James Altucher (Choose Yourself)
“
Two nodes connected by a link are two nodes in proximity. They are two grains of space in contact with each other: this "touching" constructs the structure of space.
”
”
Carlo Rovelli (La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose)
“
The human habitat continues to be dominated by individuals with characteristics decidedly different from the human contingent observed inside Rama II and at the Node.
”
”
Arthur C. Clarke (The Garden of Rama (Rama, #3))
“
to bring the object aboard via the airlock in Node 3.
”
”
Dean Koontz (The House at the End of the World)
“
going to extend the view controllers in Homepwner to properly give their node information when the app is terminating
”
”
Joe Conway (iOS Programming (Big Nerd Ranch Guides))
“
The linages between the nodes that form the web of life- how delightful.
”
”
Gladys Chua
“
I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.
”
”
Phil Champagne (The Book Of Satoshi: The Collected Writings of Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto)
“
Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'.
”
”
Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
“
Almsgiving is a major tenet of Islam. It's also a kick in the pants of the highest order. Nothing is as cool as skimming off a couple of hundred thousand from some multinational corporation and handing it out to random strangers. Or writing a harmless little virus that makes credit counters "forget" to send a surcharge back to the bank after each purchase. Oh, sure, technically I'm supposed to give away my own money, but whatever. I'm sure Allah gets the spirit of what I'm doing here.
”
”
Lyda Morehouse (Messiah Node (LINK Angel, #3))
“
When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar size, ‘the giant connected component resists even after removing more than 80 per cent of the nodes, and the average distance within it [between nodes] is practically the same as at the beginning
”
”
Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
“
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.
”
”
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
“
Understanding your own culture and the ways it interacts with others, particularly the power dynamics of it, is far more appreciated. My reading of Germane Greer when I was a young lad was a lot more conducive to forming relationships with European females than my reading of Dante was--and that was more about my understanding of my male privilege and controlling its excess than being an export on women's literature or issues. This kind of cultural humility is a useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system. It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a node in a single network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won't be swallowed up by a hive mind or individuality--you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected.
”
”
Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World)
“
Gravity doesn’t just fight expansion,” she pleaded. “Gravity defeats chaos, from time to time. It assembles worlds and life and thought. Gravity is the watchmaker, and it feels like it has will, purpose. It’s the shape-memory of the universe, trying to pull itself back into a perfect singularity. It’s futile, ultimately, but every now and then it creates a perfect node. An intellect. A true wonder.
”
”
Frank O'Connor (Halo: Saint's Testimony)
“
These types of magical essences tend to be drawn toward each other and then form into rivers of power, called ley lines. Sometimes these lines of power intersect, creating nodes called places of power.
”
”
Kip Terrington (You're Not Allowed to Die (The Twenty-Sided Eye Series, #1))
“
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:
"The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory."
Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks.
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
[Evolution’s Erratic Pace - "Natural History," May, 1977]
”
”
Stephen Jay Gould
“
Defi means Decentralized lending and borrowing among other things. Each node in this Defi network is the new meaning of a bank. That means that instead of there being just a few big banks, there will be a multitude of banks embedded in every aspect of society. Every type of business and every type of organization will have a bank and every type of business and every type of organization will offer financial services.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
It is the gulf between the idea of the autonomous individual, and the algorithmic tendency to view the individual as one categorisable node in an aggregate mass that can result in The Formula’s equivalent of a crisis of self.
”
”
Luke Dormehl (The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems … and Create More)
“
You don’t need validation or approval from anyone but yourself. Even if the entire world goes against, disagrees with or attempts to crush you, stand up for what you believe in, and stand up alone if you have to! It’s better to die while living your own truth than to live in the truth of another. Lord Krishna in the holy Bhagavad Gita pointed this out when he said;
“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”
Integrity is the key to freedom. It’s only your own truth that can ‘set you free.’ It’s perfectly fine if your truth doesn’t match that of others because the experience of physical reality is a completely subjective one. It doesn’t make either of you wrong, as long as you’re both being true to yourselves, that’s all that matters.
”
”
Craig Krishna (The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind)
“
This is how you change history. As far as you know—or as far as the you that is me knows—the time-door is broken. You may never receive this document, which tells you what you will become if you follow this version of yourself. But if this falls into your hands, then I want you to know how it happens, step by step, so that you can change it. I exist at the beginning and end of this account, which is a kind of time-travel, but I hope you’ll find a way to contain me. I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper “Don’t worry, it gets better.” The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
”
”
Kaliane Bradley (The Ministry of Time)
“
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power.
”
”
Satoshi Nakamoto
“
If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age)
“
A calculation, in fact, demonstrates that without nodes, physical space has no volume. In other words, it is in the nodes of the graph, not in the lines, that the volume of space "resides." The lines "link together" individual volumes sitting at the nodes.
”
”
Carlo Rovelli (La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose)
“
When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry,
”
”
Charles Stross (Halting State (Halting State, #1))
“
We have retinas that face backward, the stump of a tail, and way too many bones in our wrists. We must find vitamins and nutrients in our diets that other animals simply make for themselves. We are poorly equipped to survive in the climates in which we now live. We have nerves that take bizarre paths, muscles that attach to nothing, and lymph nodes that do more harm than good. Our genomes are filled with genes that don’t work, chromosomes that break, and viral carcasses from past infections. We have brains that play tricks on us, cognitive biases and prejudices, and a tendency to kill one another in large numbers. Millions of us can’t even reproduce successfully without a whole lot of help from modern science. Our flaws illuminate not only our evolutionary past but also our present and future. Everyone knows that it is impossible to understand current events in a specific country without understanding the history of that country and how the modern state came to be. The same is true for our bodies, our genes, and our minds.
”
”
Nathan H. Lents (Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes)
“
The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life—the deep structures—so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner’s analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.
”
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.
”
”
Richard Powers (The Echo Maker)
“
generic definition of a blockchain: a distributed, append-only ledger of provably signed, sequentially linked, and cryptographically secured transactions that’s replicated across a network of computer nodes, with ongoing updates determined by a software-driven consensus.
”
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Michael J. Casey (The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything)
“
The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be ‘centralized’, with one central hub and multiple spokes, ‘decentralized’, with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or ‘distributed’, like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was the most resilient, in that it could withstand the destruction of numerous nodes, and that was indeed
”
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Niall Ferguson (The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook)
“
A horoscope is a specific map, or picture, of the heavens that is cast for the date, time, and location of your birth. The positions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as the sign that hovers at the horizon, are all placed around the wheel of the zodiac to reveal the intricate mathematical relationships that portray your personal blueprint and potential for development. This map can reveal your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual gifts and challenges, and you are always free to grow and change, according to your own volition. Also noteworthy are the nodal points, or the locations where the path of Earth and the path of the moon intersect, forming what is known as the “head and tail of the sky dragon,” or the north and south nodes. The location of the celestial dragon in a chart is of utmost importance, for it indicates the direction in which you are moving to achieve the fulfillment of your personal destiny, as well as the place in the past that you are emerging from. Once you are born into physical reality, you unfold your life within an imprint of cosmic energy that embodies a plan of intent and purpose, a plan designed and approved by you. Throughout
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Barbara Marciniak (Path of Empowerment: New Pleiadian Wisdom for a World in Chaos)
“
Of course, the cool kids have no idea that what they’re engaging in is really just another biological trick. They actually think they’re being cool, and being rewarded for it, when in fact they’re just mindless fleshy masses attached to a throbbing node, which is making all their dumb decisions for them.
”
”
Greg Gutfeld (Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You)
“
Although it has become the most visible of American suburban landscapes, the edge node has few architectural defenders. Even developers despair: 'Shopping centers built only in the 1960s are already being abandoned. Their abandonment brings down the values of nearby neighbourhoods. Wal-Marts built five years ago are already being abandoned for superstores. We have built a world of junk, a degraded environment. It may be profitable for a short-term, but its long-term economic prognosis is bleak.' -Dolores Hayden quoting Robert Davis, 'Postscript,' in Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, 2002.
”
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Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
“
His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case: this child's was steeper than most, his descent swifter. We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law, the same mathematical certainty.
”
”
Guy Vanderhaeghe (Man Descending: Selected Stories)
“
The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won $40,000 at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home. The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.
”
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
“
DENNIS, in order to die, one must first be alive.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum. Oh, yes, and also: I think, therefore I am.
”
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Keith Caserta (Soul Searching (Nodes of God, #1))
“
How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn’t a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he
”
”
Paul Monette (Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir)
“
But Project 56 revealed that a nuclear detonation wasn’t the only danger that a weapon accident might pose. The core of the Genie contained plutonium—and when it blew apart, plutonium dust spread through the air. The risks of plutonium exposure were becoming more apparent in the mid-1950s. Although the alpha particles emitted by plutonium are too weak to penetrate human skin, they can destroy lung tissue when plutonium dust is inhaled. Anyone within a few hundred feet of a weapon accident spreading plutonium can inhale a swiftly lethal dose. Cancers of the lung, liver, lymph nodes, and bone can be caused by the inhalation of minute amounts. And the fallout from such an accident may contaminate a large area for a long time. Plutonium has a half-life of about twenty-four thousand years. It remains hazardous throughout that period, and plutonium dust is hard to clean up. “The problem of decontaminating the site of [an] accident may be insurmountable,” a classified Los Alamos report noted a month after the Genie’s one-point safety test, “and it may have to be ‘written off’ permanently.
”
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Eric Schlosser (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
“
Economists have another way of measuring the “centrality” of a node in a network: rather than simply counting the number of connections, they take into account how many connections each of those connections has, and so on. If I have one hundred friends and you have only ten, I might appear better connected than you. But if your ten friends include people who are themselves very well connected—Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Justin Bieber—you may be more influential than me after all. (Google’s page-ranking system works in a similar way: it measures not only how many sites link to a page, but how many sites link to those sites, and so on. Being linked to once by the New York Times counts for more than being linked to by a dozen unknown blogs.)
”
”
Tom Wainwright (Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel)
“
She sat back again, a gentle loosening that made her straight spine seem effortless and restful. Again she did nothing. She simply sat across from me and unfurled herself. I felt her life brush up against me and flow around me. It was but the faintest touching, and had I not experienced both the Skill and the Wit, I do not think I would have sensed it. Cautiously, as softly as if I assayed a bridge made of cobweb, I overlay my senses on hers.
She quested. Not as I did, toward a specific beast, or to read what might be close by. I discarded the word I had always given to my sensing. Kettricken did not seek after anything with her Wit. It was as she said, simply a being, but it was being a part of the whole. She composed herself and considered all the ways the great web touched her, and was content. It was a delicate and tenuous thing and I marveled at it. For an instant I, too, relaxed. I breathed out. I opened myself, Wit wide to all. I discarded all caution, all worry that Burrich would sense me. I had never done anything to compare it with before. Kettricken's reaching was as delicate as droplets of dew sliding down a strand of spiderweb. I was like a dammed flood, suddenly released, to rush out to fill old channels to overflowing and to send fingers of water investigating the lowlands.
Let us hunt! The Wolf, joyfully.
In the stables, Burrich straightened from cleaning a hoof, to frown at no one. Sooty stamped in her stall. Molly shrugged away and shook out her hair. Across from me, Kettricken started and looked at me as if I had spoken aloud. A moment more I was held, seized from a thousand sides, stretched and expanded, illuminated pitilessly. I felt it all, not just the human folk with their comings and goings, but every pigeon that fluttered in the eaves, every mouse that crept unnoticed behind the wine kegs, every speck of life, that was not and never had been a speck, but had always been a node on the web of life. Nothing alone, nothing forsaken, nothing without meaning, nothing of no significance, and nothing of importance.
”
”
Robin Hobb (Royal Assassin (Farseer Trilogy, #2))
“
Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;
“All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.
”
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Craig Krishna (The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind)
“
We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.” I wasn’t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.
”
”
Rachel Kushner
“
Chapter Five: Elvi
A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante.
As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders’ long-dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions—or even billions—of years. The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two.
All in all, a really shitty experience.
So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains (..)
Tiamat's Wrath
”
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James S.A. Corey (Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8))
“
Ray, we don’t have much time,” I said. “We need to access the EDA intranet node hidden here in the store. It’s an emergency.” Ray only hesitated for a split second. “Behind the UFO poster on the back wall.” I turned and located the one he was talking about—a framed reprint of Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files. I took it down, revealing what appeared to be a small titanium safe embedded in the brick wall behind it, with a keypad at its center.
”
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Ernest Cline (Armada)
“
How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here - there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses… singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn't take… mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden… the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery… rose thorns that prick us by surprise… even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded… In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky - just before the last firing-switch closes - watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is… Do all these points imply, like the Rocket's, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?
”
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Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
“
Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It’ll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years. first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins etc... When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if needed. It’s based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free.
”
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Satoshi Nakamoto
“
Just as European nobles used to consolidate their unaccountable powers in castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in these fortified nodes of unaccountable political and economic power, capturing local politics and turning these jurisdictions into fast and flexible private law-making machines, defended against outside interference and protected by establishment consensus and the suppression of dissent.
”
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Nicholas Shaxson (Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens)
“
The Kleinrock controversy is interesting because it shows that most of the Internet’s creators preferred—to use the metaphor of the Internet itself—a system of fully distributed credit. They instinctively isolated and routed around any node that tried to claim more significance than the others. The Internet was born of an ethos of creative collaboration and distributed decision making, and its founders liked to protect that heritage. It became ingrained in their personalities—and in the DNA of the Internet itself.
”
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
What is essential to the unconscious is that out life, precisely because it is not a consciousness of others, in indifferent balance, but a node of significations which are traces of events, consisting of excrescences and gaps, forms a baroque system. Exactly as an adult or elderly body has its dynamic, its privileged positions, its style of gestures, and its syntax, an implex has its wrinkles and its own balancing processes, and the unconscious is our practical schema, where everything is inscribed in shillings and pence.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955)
“
The Light
I get a thud kick in pitch dark thick on belly and tumble
Hands tied at the back on damp floor shack to humble
Lights flash on face eyes blind in case I spin
Then lights go off a boot or two rough on chin
I feel blood drip snail down the lips in trickle
The glare blinks on and off and on and off in ripple
A hot metal rod scalds hard breast broad to snip flesh warm
The lights hem in piercing-thin a ruthless swarm
Red eyes get shut in blinding rut my vision erode
Final blackout in grisly rout in ecliptic node
I prepare my grit to encounter the hit as a fightback code.
--Malay Roychoudhury
”
”
মলয় রায়চৌধুরী ( Malay Roychoudhury )
“
The first duty of the command and control system is to survive,” Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks,” sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran’s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.
”
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Eric Schlosser (Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
“
For all the allure of speciously stress-free suburbs, for all the grinding of city life, cities endure. And when all those diverse energies are harnessed, and those choices, private and public, cohere, and all the bargains made in a million ways every day hold up, then a city flourishes and is the most stimulating center for life, and the most precious artifact, a culture can create. Think of great cities large and small (size, as with any work of art, does not necessarily determine value) and, in addition to nodes of government, commerce, law, hospitals, libraries, and newspapers will come to mind, as will restaurants and theaters and houses of worship and museums and opera houses and galleries and universities. And so will stadia and arenas and parks. In short, once finds not simply commerce but culture, not simply work but leisure, not only negotium but otium, not simply that which ennobles but also that which perfects us. Such has forever been the ultimate purpose of a city, to mirror our higher state, not simply to shelter us from wind and rain. As with leisure, so with the city: It is the setting to make us not the best that Nature can make us, but to manifest the best we, humankind, adding Art to Nature, can make us.
”
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A. Bartlett Giamatti (Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games)
“
Jobs and commerce have moved to edge nodes, but few people want to live in them. The presence of housing in edge nodes is often the result of spot builders filling in leftover sites with 'affordable' housing units. Nearby freeways make many of these units undesirable. Occasionally expensive apartments for households without children are added near upscale mall areas...but most affluent families prefer to live elsewhere. Ugly environments, cheap gas, and subsidized freeways mean that workers commute to residences far outside the edge nodes, scattering into less dense areas, creating one more suburban pattern, the rural fringes.
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Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
“
Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.
”
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Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age)
“
The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of
the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of
visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.
”
”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
“
We mustn’t repeat the Commune’s mistakes, its two main mistakes: it did not seize the banks and it was too magnanimous. Instead of cellar executions for the enemy classes, it safeguarded everyone’s life and thought it could reeducate them. There it was, the most ruinous thing threatening the proletariat—this magnanimity in revolution. The proletariat had to be taught pitiless mass methods!
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book 3 (The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series))
“
Eyuran,” I addressed his Node. “What was in this one?”
He came closer and studied the huge case, which was easily twice the height of an adult Danna and had body slots for some kind of gear.
“I don’t know for sure. I haven't seen this before. It resembles a gearbot sarx, but those are usually larger. Must be a new, compact model.” Observing the empty sarx, a wave of bad feelings came over me.
“I also saw some of the weapon crates with broken locks.”
“If someone is operating a gearbot, a bunch of guns will be the least of our worries. A hull repairer can’t even begin to compete with the power of an assault exomachine.” He looked around and frowned. “By the way, the whole hull repairer rack is empty. Counting the one you took out, we should have seven more roaming somewhere on the ship.
”
”
Jeno Marz (Falaha's Journey: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements)
“
A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?
”
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Afsaneh Najmabadi (Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity)
“
Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.
”
”
Suzanne Koven (Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life)
“
In the end, what is most satisfying about the picture of space given by loop quantum gravity is that it is completely relational. The spin networks do not live in space; their structure generates space. And they are nothing but a structure of relations, governed by how the edges are tied together at the nodes. Also coded in are rules about how the edges may knot and link with one another. It is also very satisfying that there is a complete correspondence between the classical and quantum pictures of geometry. In classical geometry the volumes of regions and the areas of the surfaces depend on the values of gravitational fields. They are coded in certain complicated collections of mathematical functions, known collectively as the metric tensor. On the other hand, in the quantum picture the geometry is coded in the choice of a spin network. These spin networks correspond to the classical description in that, given any classical geometry, one can find a spin network which describes, to some level of approximation, the same geometry (Figure 27).
”
”
Lee Smolin (Three Roads To Quantum Gravity)
“
My Dearest Brother I hope you get this message, for I do not think we shall ever meet again. You will know by now that my ship has arrived here, but we were captured by the Germans during our incapacity after the Emergence… Jones frowned at the word, but having materialized in the Atlantic and been taken prisoner, Philippe would have used the Axis terminology without thinking. He read on. I have little time. I am watched so closely by the Nazis I could not send this message before now, and even now I cannot send it directly. I have encrypted a pulse to go out with the launch of the missiles on Hawaii. I can only pray it finds a Fleetnet node somewhere and eventually finds you. I have done what I can to impair the fascists’ plans but I fear it is not enough. There is no more time. When they discover what I have done my life will be forfeit, but I shall do what I can before the end. I do not know if you will ever see Monique again but if you do, please make her understand that I did not dishonor my family or the Republic. Vive la France. And good-bye, brother. Philippe
”
”
John Birmingham (Final Impact (Axis of Time, #3))
“
These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)
”
”
Sam Kean (The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery)
“
A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event
-- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend
to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to
tie all languages together."
"Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis."
"Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner
summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of
thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our
perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over
that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of
the evolution of the human mind itself."
"Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?"
"In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have
anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can
analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in
common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits."
"Have they found any?"
"No. There seems to be an exception to every rule."
"Which blows universalism out of the water."
"Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits
are too deeply buried to be analyzable."
"Which is a cop out."
"Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human
brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same --"
"The hardware's the same. Not the software."
"You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand."
"Well, a French-speaker's brain starts out the same as an English-speaker's
brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software -- they
learn different languages."
"Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English -- or any
other languages -- must share certain traits that have their roots in the 'deep
structures' of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep
structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out
certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner
paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual
patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time,
'programmed' network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels."
"But these deep structures are so deep we can't even see them?"
"The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life -- the deep
structures -- so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use
Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and
it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
You integrate something by first of all accepting it. To resist any aspect of your past is to keep yourself fragmented, and to keep yourself fragmented is exactly what the built-in mechanisms of the negative beliefs in your unconscious mind are designed to do. To become whole within yourself, you must treat each and every experience that you have and ever will have as simply a stepping stone because there’s always a bigger picture. Something challenging may be happening to you right now, and you may have no conscious recognition or idea of why it’s happening, but let me assure you that you will know why one day. How many times have you said to yourself, “Wow, so that’s why it happened?” The issue isn’t really what’s going on in the present moment or what has happened back in the past, the issue is the way you’re defining or looking it…
”
”
Craig Krishna (The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind)
“
Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two
squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the
thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split
and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—"We lost our land." The danger is
here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we"
there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If
from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the
movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are
ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single
pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to
words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold.
Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket—take it for the baby.
This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we."
If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might
preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that
Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that
you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you
off forever from the "we."
The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to
concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million
more, restive to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.
And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.
”
”
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
“
Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency.2 And the founder’s legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union. Unlike a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for their mutual benefit. And unlike a traditional union, a network union is not set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety of different collective actions.3 Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds. Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism. Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.
”
”
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)