Operating Instructions Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Operating Instructions. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human? I'm not sure. That's my answer: I'm not sure.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
one thing about having a baby is that each step of the way you simply cannot imagine loving him any more than you already do, because you are bursting with love, loving as much as you are humanly capable of- and then you do, you love him even more.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
Seamus Heaney (Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture)
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
You say: "There are persons who lack education" and you turn to the law. But the law is not, in itself, a torch of learning which shines its light abroad. The law extends over a society where some persons have knowledge and others do not; where some citizens need to learn, and others can teach. In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge. But in the second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property.
Frédéric Bastiat (The Law)
I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered in flannel. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
All these people keep waxing sentimental about how fabulously well I am doing as a mother, how competent I am, but I feel inside like when you're first learning to put nail polish on your right hand with your left. You can do it, but it doesn't look all that great around the cuticles.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
Saskia groaned again. She threw back her bed covers, the last vestiges of sleep leaving her. It would be evening in Lyon. Clarissa would be expecting to hear from her. A call-in at least once every 24 hours was part of several protocols Clarissa had established. The instruction at the end of the conversation, “Give the dogs a pat for me”, reassured Clarissa that all was well. Leave the words out, replace any one of the words in the sentence with another or not place a call in a 24-hour period, and Clarissa would alert authorities. In her younger years, Clarissa had served in the British army. Her experiences in those years had caused the trauma she now lived with, though she used her expertise by teaching her three partners basic self-defence, how to operate firearms and how to wield weapons. She also programmed their watches and phones to enable her to constantly track their whereabouts, explaining, “I want to know that my three charges are safe”. Another protocol was to always check accommodation venues for listening devices. Saskia did this before calling Clarissa. “Clarissa. Ça va?” “What have you to report?
Miriam Verbeek (The Forest: A new Saskia van Essen crime mystery thriller (Saskia van Essen mysteries))
...this is the work of the Holy Spirit and our operating instructions, to be cooling breezes to sad or worried people, including ourselves, in this sometimes hot stuffy joint [the world].
Anne Lamott (Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage)
I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are. All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.)
David Eddings (The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon)
I’m sure if Socrates were alive today, and had to sit through even a single meeting discussing how to use data to inform instruction, he’d kill himself all over again.
Brian Huskie (A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School)
I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the world and over his life, is another addiction and a total illusion. He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the back seat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
While in general I avoid the use of torture - torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance - the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as the Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the Switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.
William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch)
Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting.  It got me thinking.  It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving.  God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture.  We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the think lumpy patches, the tangles.  But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are.  The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life.  You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into [God's] camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a a sense of sin which they already had... The "Gospels" [came] later, and were written, not to make Christians, but to edify Christians already made.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us [...], because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning.
Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France)
She had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the way people perceive an émigré? Wasn't she interpreting her own life according to the operating instructions other people had handed her? And she thought that even though it had been imposed from the outside and against her will, her emigration was perhaps, without her knowing it, the best outcome for her life.
Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
Three Miracles of weight loss and health gain First, you were given a constantly-renewing body. Second, all the foods you need have been provided. And third, you have a brain that is operating to coordinate your body and life according to your instructions.
Celso Cukierkorn (The Miracle Diet: Lose Weight, Gain Health... 10 Diet Skills)
When Sam’s having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it’s like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there’s a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float. This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
In a chapter headed ‘Independent Command: Suffolk,’ he downplayed Lee’s instructions to Longstreet, and in so doing advanced the Lost Cause assertion that the operation was a failure.
Harold M. Knudsen (James Longstreet and the American Civil War: The Confederate General Who Fought the Next War)
I realized during that session that I wanted Sam to grow up with the sense that it’s safe to fall, that there’s enough of the important stuff in the world for him, including Band-Aids.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
It was an operation that Dr. Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so. Now they and all their mates saw him do it again: they saw Joe Plaice's scalp taken off, his skull bared, a disc of bone audibly sawn out, the handle turning solemnly; a three-shilling piece, hammered into a flattened dome by the armourer, screwed on over the hole; and the scalp replaced, neatly sewn up by the parson. It was extremely gratifying - the Captain had been seen to go pale, and Barret Bonden too, the patient's cousin - blood running down Joe's neck regardless - brains clearly to be seen - something not to be missed for a mint of money - instructive, too - and they made the most of it.
Patrick O'Brian
The theory behind open source is simple. In the case of an operating system, the source code-the programming instructions underlying the system-is free. Anyone can improve it, change it, exploit it. But those improvements, changes, and exploitations have to be made freely available. Think Zen. The project belongs to no one and to everyone. When a project is opened up, there is rapid and continual improvement. With teams of contributors working in parallel, the results can happen far more speedily and success­ fully than if the work were being conducted behind closed doors.
Linus Torvalds (Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary)
This trip to Atlantic City was multi-purpose, which was not unusual for government operations in which I was forced to participate. I had a major cocaine transaction involving Noriega to attend at the airport; a message to deliver to Philip Habib pertaining to the Contras, and another programmed in by Habib in answer to Reagan; country music "entertainment" 4 aspects; and prostitution to Habib according to Reagan's instruction.
Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
One annoyance is people’s seeming inability or unwillingness to differentiate between the number zero and the letter “o.” I’ve had conversations with telephone operators who have told me that I can reach my party by dialing, for example, 31o-3o55. Sometimes I’ve asked, “If I follow your instructions, by dialing the letter ‘o’ instead of the number zero, will I reach my party?” They always answer no and that I must dial the zero. Then I ask, “Why did you tell me ‘o’ when you meant zero?” Our chitchat usually degrades after that. It’s not only telephone operators. How many times have you heard a student or teacher say, “He has a 4 point o GPA”? I
Walter E. Williams (American Contempt for Liberty (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 661))
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen Free Download [22734] Follow the instructions: Step 1) Search Google.com For "special keygens and hacks" Step 2) Click the 1st or 2nd place result which is a Facebook Page or Pagebin Enjoy! :)
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen Free Download 22734 DVD9 ITA FRE Sub ITA
But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.
William James (The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1)
This is your birthday treat, and you're supposed to enjoy it, I reminded myself. It was part of my normal existence to give myself instructions like this. Maybe other people acted and lived in total naturalness. I often wondered if they did. But me? I needed an operating manual.
Lauren Myracle (Thirteen (The Winnie Years, #4))
Whenever you notice your mind wandering,” a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, “bring your mind back to its point of focus.” The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I'm temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father's ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it. Don't worry, I don't hear voices. But there is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I roam. And I roam.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
17.  Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. [Chang Yu says: If he can fight, he advances and takes the offensive; if he cannot fight, he retreats and remains on the defensive. He will invariably conquer who knows whether it is right to take the offensive or the defensive.] (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. [This is not merely the general’s ability to estimate numbers correctly, as Li Ch’uan and others make out. Chang Yu expounds the saying more satisfactorily: “By applying the art of war, it is possible with a lesser force to defeat a greater, and vice versa. The secret lies in an eye for locality, and in not letting the right moment slip. Thus Wu Tzu says: ‘With a superior force, make for easy ground; with an inferior one, make for difficult ground.’"] (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign. [Tu Yu quotes Wang Tzu as saying: “It is the sovereign’s function to give broad instructions, but to decide on battle it is the function of the general.” It is needless to dilate on the military disasters which have been caused by undue interference with operations in the field on the part of the home government. Napoleon undoubtedly owed much of his extraordinary success to the fact that he was not hampered by central authority.] 18.  Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
a table and diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step, including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any C++ coder today.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.
Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)
Beveridgefn20 is a good thing though – that’s all right, so long as people don’t start relaxing with a sigh of relief. (I’ve just been reading Bev. – a fine piece of work – thorough and equitable – and it will be a good fight, trying to get it put into operation – doomed to failure I surmise, but instructive.)
Iris Murdoch (Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995)
It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.
Ray Kurzweil (How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed)
Nineteenth-century operating “theaters” had more to do with medical instruction than with saving patients’ lives. If you could, you stayed out of them at all cost. For one thing, you were being operated on without anesthesia. (The first operations under ether didn’t take place until 1846.) Surgical patients in the late 1700s and early 1800s could feel every cut, stitch, and probing finger. They were often blindfolded—this may have been optional, not unlike the firing squad hood—and invariably bound to the operating table to keep them from writhing and flinching or, quite possibly, leaping from the table and fleeing into the street. (Perhaps owing to the presence of an audience, patients underwent surgery with most of their clothes on.)
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
Aboriginal Okinawan Karate was traditionally taught in modest home Dojos, in small informal groups (sole purpose of teachings revolved around life preservation), in A closely tied supportive environment; unlike main island modern Japanese version with rivalry and competition, instructed in large groups belonging to even larger organizations with pseudo-militaristic hierarchy
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful. This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping". I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In this body I look back up, see the choice-tree above me that I came down. Did I, this Essence, come all the way down to this solar system, this planet, this place, this body, or does it make any difference? May not this body be a vehicle for any Essence that came into it? Are not all Essences universal, equal, anonymous, and equally able? Instructions for this vehicle are in it for each Essence to read and absorb on entry. The new pilot-navigator reads his instructions in storage and takes over, competently operating this vehicle.
John C. Lilly (The Center of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space)
Here truth is employed as a means to personal triumph and at the same time as a means to kill. It produces a few years later that sort of minister who operates not to instruct but to destroy his church. And if the elders, the church, and the young people begin to groan, if they protest to the church authorities, and finally stay away from worship, this young man is still Pharisaical enough not to listen one bit.
Helmut Thielicke (A Little Exercise for Young Theologians)
The charge that Anarchism is destructive, rather than constructive, and that, therefore, Anarchism is opposed to organization, is one of the many falsehoods spread by our opponents. They confound our present social institutions with organization; hence they fail to understand how we can oppose the former, and yet favor the latter. The fact, however, is that the two are not identical. “The State is commonly regarded as the highest form of organization. But is it in reality a true organization? Is it not rather an arbitrary institution, cunningly imposed upon the masses? “Industry, too, is called an organization; yet nothing is farther from the truth. Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor. “We are asked to believe that the Army is an organization, but a close investigation will show that it is nothing else than a cruel instrument of blind force. “The Public School! The colleges and other institutions of learning, are they not models of organization, offering the people fine opportunities for instruction? Far from it. The school, more than any other institution, is a veritable barrack, where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. “Organization, as WE understand it, however, is a different thing. It is based, primarily, on freedom. It is a natural and voluntary grouping of energies to secure results beneficial to humanity. “It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form, the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, result in the perfection of social harmony, which we call Anarchism. In fact, Anarchism alone makes non-authoritarian organization of common interests possible, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes. “Under present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a co-operative commonwealth. “There is a mistaken notion that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and growth of personality. “Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in formation of the complete organism, so does the individual, by co-operative effort with other individuals, attain his highest form of development. “An organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented in the expression of individual energies. “It therefore logically follows that the greater the number of strong, self-conscious personalities in an organization, the less danger of stagnation, and the more intense its life element. “Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all. “The germ of such an organization can be found in that form of trades unionism which has done away with centralization, bureaucracy, and discipline, and which favors independent and direct action on the part of its members.
Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays)
A Communist revolution is a transfer of society from the medium of money to the medium of language. It implements a true linguistic turn on the level of social practice ... Communism is a project, the goal of which is to subordinate economics to politics, in order to provide the latter with sovereign freedom of action. The medium of economics is money. Economics operates with numbers. The medium of politics is language. Politics operates with words - arguments, programs, and resolutions, as well as orders, prohibitions, instructions, and regulations.
Boris Groys
You have probably noted a lack of “how to” instructions to this point. While some technical and tactical suggestions will be offered in the next chapter, the essence of maneuver warfare is its approach to tactics and operations. Rather than concentrating on formulas and checklists - with their inherent predictability - maneuver warfare emphasizes a thought process. It is a process of seeing your options, creating new options, and shifting rapidly among those options as the situation changes. Ultimately tactics in maneuver warfare require that you “out-Boyd Cycle” the enemy.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it includes both in its alterations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation.
Samuel Johnson (Preface to Shakespeare)
During the mission, we dressed in civilian clothes to emphasize the humanitarian nature of the evacuation. One disturbing aspect of the operation were our orders not to carry weapons. This went against my instincts as an operator, especially since we were working on an airfield pockmarked with bomb craters and surrounded by Yemini soldiers carrying AK-47 assault rifles. I chose to interpret our instructions to mean we could not openly carry weapons. I carried my 9mm pistol in a fanny pack around my waist and, just in case, we had some rifles broken down and stored in backpacks. I think it’s unwise to walk around unarmed in a combat zone.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not—Churchill’s state funeral—in motion. On the flight to London, Churchill, heavily sedated, awoke, and muttered to Montague Browne: “I don’t think I’ll go back to that place, it’s unlucky. First Toby, and then this.” Montague Browne had forgotten Toby, the budgerigar, but Churchill had not. The body was frail, but not the wit.
William Manchester (The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965)
In the modern computer, software has developed in such a way as to fill this role of go-between. On one end you have the so-called end user who wants to be able to order up a piece of long division, say, simply by supplying two numbers to the machine and ordering it to divide them. At the other end stands the actual computer, which for all its complexity is something of a brute. It can perform only several hundred basic operations, and long division may not be one of them. The machine may have to be instructed to perform a sequence of several of its basic operations in order to accomplish a piece of long division. Software—a series of what are known as programs—translates the end user’s wish into specific, functional commands for the machine.
Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine)
To sum up: at various stages of embryonic development, and at various structural levels, we find different biochemical mechanisms, but analogue principles at work. At every stage and level the game is played according to fixed rules but with flexible strategies (although their flexibility is normally hidden from the eye and revealed only by the transplantation and grafting techniques of experimental embryology). The overall rules of the game are laid down in the complete set of instructions operative at any level at any time is triggered off by messages from the inter- and extra-cellular environment, which vary in character according to structural level and developmental stage: fertilizing agents, cytoplasmic feedbacks, direct-contact evocators, hormones, and other catalysts.
Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation)
Joseph Andreas Epp. Epp told us that German scientists had secret UFOs’ facilities in Germany and Poland. He particularly mentioned the UFOs’ hangars located in Letow, Breslau and Dresden, which was reduced to ashes by Allied aerial carpet bombings. He stated that 15 UFOs prototypes were built and flew successfully. He added that the early German UFOs were based upon blueprints and instructions given by Maria Ostric’s Vril Society. Epp in his own words, describing the UFO mode of operation: The circular wing blades rotated independently and smoothly around the external body (Chassis) of the machine as the craft moved forward in a centrifugical manner (Auto-gyrocopter), and the craft took off vertically in a spiral mode. It reached a high altitude at an incredible speed…close to a supersonic speed.
Jean-Maximillien De La Croix de Lafayette (Volume I. UFOs: MARIA ORSIC, THE WOMAN WHO ORIGINATED AND CREATED EARTH’S FIRST UFOS (Extraterrestrial and Man-Made UFOs & Flying Saucers Book 1))
A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake.
Richard Preston (Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come)
We largely persist in modelling our sense of what other people are like – and of what might be going on in their heads – on our experience of ourselves. We find it remarkably difficult to imagine clearly and calmly that others might not be very much like us at all. Others have different skills, different weaknesses, different motives and fears. It is as if the human brain did not evolve with the need to address this particular problem. And it may have been that for most of the time that human beings have existed it has been sufficient – for individual and group survival – to operate with a very limited interest in how people might differ from us in terms of how their minds work. In the office, other people are out of our control – and yet we need their assistance in performing delicate, complicated tasks. When we are doing things ourselves, we don’t actually give ourselves clear instructions. If
The School of Life (Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury)
A crucial capability of System 2 is the adoption of “task sets”: it can program memory to obey an instruction that overrides habitual responses. Consider the following: Count all occurrences of the letter f in this page. This is not a task you have ever performed before and it will not come naturally to you, but your System 2 can take it on. It will be effortful to set yourself up for this exercise, and effortful to carry it out, though you will surely improve with practice. Psychologists speak of “executive control” to describe the adoption and termination of task sets, and neuroscientists have identified the main regions of the brain that serve the executive function. One of these regions is involved whenever a conflict must be resolved. Another is the prefrontal area of the brain, a region that is substantially more developed in humans than in other primates, and is involved in operations that we associate with intelligence.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
You needn't instruct me to think about my children's welfare," Phoebe said quietly. "I've always put them first, and always will. As for me being a child... I'm afraid I'm not nearly enough like one." A faint smile touched her lips. "Children are optimistic. They have a natural sense of adventure. To them, the world has no limitations, only possibilities. Henry was always a bit childlike in that way- he never became disenchanted with life. That was what I loved most about him." "If you loved Henry, you will honor his wishes. He wanted Edward to have charge of his family and estate." "Henry wanted to make sure our future would be in capable hands. But it already is." "Yes. Edward's." "No, mine. I'll learn everything I need to know about managing this estate. I'll hire people to help me if necessary. I'll have this place thriving. I don't need a husband to do it for me. If I marry again, it will be to a man of my choosing, in my own time. I can't promise it will be Edward. I've changed during the past two years, but so far, he doesn't see me for who I am, only who I was. For that matter, he doesn't see how the world has changed- he ignores the realities he doesn't like. How can I trust him with our future?" Georgiana regarded her bitterly. "Edward is not the one who is ignoring reality. How can you imagine yourself capable of running this estate?" "Why wouldn't I be?" "Women aren't capable of leadership. Our intelligence is no less than men's, but it is shaped for the purpose of motherhood. We're clever enough to operate the sewing machine, but not to have invented it. If you asked the opinions of a thousand people whether they would trust you or Edward to make decisions for the estate, whom do you think they would choose?" "I'm not going to ask a thousand people for their opinions," Phoebe said evenly. "Only one opinion is required, and it happens to be mine." She went to the doorway and paused, unable to resist adding, "That's leadership." And she left the dowager fuming in silence.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil's Daughter (The Ravenels, #5))
The Case of the Eyeless Fly The fruit fly has a mutant gene which is recessive, i.e., when paired with a normal gene, has no discernible effect (it will be remembered that genes operate in pairs, each gene in the pair being derived from one parent). But if two of these mutant genes are paired in the fertilised egg, the offspring will be an eyeless fly. If now a pure stock of eyeless flies is made to inbreed, then the whole stock will have only the 'eyeless' mutant gene, because no normal gene can enter the stock to bring light into their darkness. Nevertheless, within a few generations, flies appear in the inbred 'eyeless' stock with eyes that are perfectly normal. The traditional explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is that the other members of the gene-complex have been 'reshuffled and re-combined in such a way that they deputise for the missing normal eye-forming gene.' Now re-shuffling, as every poker player knows, is a randomising process. No biologist would be so perverse as to suggest that the new insect-eye evolved by pure chance, thus repeating within a few generations an evolutionary process which took hundreds of millions of years. Nor does the concept of natural selection provide the slightest help in this case. The re-combination of genes to deputise for the missing gene must have been co-ordinated according to some overall plan which includes the rules of genetic self-repair after certain types of damage by deleterious mutations. But such co-ordinative controls can only operate on levels higher than that of individual genes. Once more we are driven to the conclusion that the genetic code is not an architect's blueprint; that the gene-complex and its internal environment form a remarkably stable, closely knit, self-regulating micro-hierarchy; and that mutated genes in any of its holons are liable to cause corresponding reactions in others, co-ordinated by higher levels. This micro-hierarchy controls the pre-natal skills of the embryo, which enable it to reach its goal, regardless of the hazards it may encounter during development. But phylogeny is a sequence of ontogenies, and thus we are confronted with the profound question: is the mechanism of phylogeny also endowed with some kind of evolutionary instruction booklet? Is there a strategy of the evolutionary process comparable to the 'strategy of the genes'-to the 'directiveness' of ontogeny (as E.S. Russell has called it)?
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
Chernobyl’s third reactor was in a precarious situation of its own. Once Unit 3’s Shift Chief Yuri Bagdasarov realised there was no backup water supply to cool the still-operating third reactor, because all water lines from the emergency tanks were connected to its devastated twin, he asked Chief Engineer Nikolai Fomin - who had by now arrived at the plant - for permission to shut it down. Fomin, who struggled to cope during the crisis, forbade it. By 5am, justifiably fearing the worst, Bagdasarov distributed respirators and iodine tablets to his staff to prevent radioactive iodine from building up in the thyroid gland, and then disobeyed his superior’s instructions; he shut down Unit 3 himself.160 Along with the firemen, he prevented the possible destruction of a second reactor. The decision to shut down Units 1 and 2 was not made for a further 16 hours. Fomin, meanwhile, ordered a trusted senior physicist to investigate the state of Unit 4. Like the others before him, his report of the reactor’s destruction was ignored and he, too, later died. Time and time again Bryukhanov and Fomin were told that the reactor was completely destroyed, and time and time again they disregarded everyone who warned them.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
AS ALL-CONSUMING AS the economic crisis was, my fledgling administration didn’t have the luxury of putting everything else on hold, for the machinery of the federal government stretched across the globe, churning every minute of every day, indifferent to overstuffed in-boxes and human sleep cycles. Many of its functions (generating Social Security checks, keeping weather satellites aloft, processing agricultural loans, issuing passports) required no specific instructions from the White House, operating much like a human body breathes or sweats, outside the brain’s conscious control. But this still left countless agencies and buildings full of people in need of our daily attention: looking for policy guidance or help with staffing, seeking advice because some internal breakdown or external event had thrown the system for a loop. After our first weekly Oval Office meeting, I asked Bob Gates, who’d served under seven previous presidents, for any advice he might have in managing the executive branch. He gave me one of his wry, crinkly smiles. “There’s only one thing you can count on, Mr. President,” he said. “On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.” We went to work trying to minimize screw-ups.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Last night I decided that it is totally nuts to believe in Christ, that it is every bit as crazy as being a Scientologist or a Jehovah’s Witness. But a priest friend said solemnly, “Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are crazier than they have to be.” Then something truly amazing happened. A man from church showed up at our front door, smiling and waving to me and Sam, and I went to let him in. He is a white man named Gordon, fiftyish, married to our associate pastor, and after exchanging pleasantries he said, “Margaret and I wanted to do something for you and the baby. So what I want to ask is, What if a fairy appeared on your doorstep and said that he or she would do any favor for you at all, anything you wanted around the house that you felt too exhausted to do by yourself and too ashamed to ask anyone else to help you with?” “I can’t even say,” I said. “It’s too horrible.” But he finally convinced me to tell him, and I said it would be to clean the bathroom, and he ended up spending an hour scrubbing the bathtub and toilet and sink with Ajax and lots of hot water. I sat on the couch while he worked, watching TV, feeling vaguely guilty and nursing Sam to sleep. But it made me feel sure of Christ again, of that kind of love. This, a man scrubbing a new mother’s bathtub, is what Jesus means to me. As Bill Rankin, my priest friend, once said, spare me the earnest Christians.
Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)
FACT 3 – In 1969, the combined agencies of the CIA, Army and FBI were put into full operational use. The Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders were committed in August 1969. The Altamont violence occurred four months later. CIA The CIA prepared for defense against domestic unrest in 1965, coinciding with Camelot and Politica. The CIA joined forces with the FBI and the Army. By August 1967, a special operations group went after the youth. By July 1968, Operation Chaos, identical to the Chilean “Chaos,” clamped down on “restless youth.” This wasn’t a study. It was an attack. Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Manson Family massacres, Operation Chaos entered a phase of tight security. From 1956-63, the Agency had produced enough LSD to incite every violent act associated with the chaos in Los Angeles or at Altamont. It was identical to handing out poison candy at Halloween. LSD was the moving force, the cause for the Sharon Tate-La Bianca slaughters. It was a steady diet at the Spahn ranch. LSD was the catalyst of the Altamont killing. Thousands of tablets were distributed to the Hell’s Angels, who then went totally berserk and started cracking skulls. FBI May 1964, after the JFK assassination, the FBI instituted COINTELPRO. July 1968, explicit orders went out to proceed, accompanied with instructions, to neutralize segments of American society, including those “restless youth.” By 1969, the Special Services Staff (SSS) of the FBI teamed up with the Justice Department and the CIA’s Operation Chaos.
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
One particularly distressing example of the high cost to feminist progress exacted by the war is what happened in Pakistan after the capture of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. In the run-up to his capture, the CIA and the U.S. military allegedly worked with the charity Save the Children in hiring Dr. Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani physician, to run a fake Hepatitis B vaccination program as a front for their surveillance operations.15 Per CIA instructions, Dr. Afridi and a female healthcare worker visited the bin Laden compound under the guise of administering vaccinations and managed to gain access, although they did not see bin Laden. In 2012, all foreign Save the Children staff were expelled from Pakistan, and in 2015, the entire organization there was required to shut its doors, despite having denied (and continuing to deny) that it was involved in this effort. The CIA managed to get their guy, but when the Pakistanis, irate at not having been told about the raid, expelled U.S. military trainers from Islamabad, they were immediately threatened with a cut of the $800 million aid package that the U.S. had promised, thus exposing yet again the coercive power that aid wields. The loss of aid money was not, however, the worst impact of the tragedy. As the British medical journal The Lancet reported, the unintended victims of the tragedy were the millions of Pakistani children whose parents now refused to have them vaccinated amidst rising rates of polio, a disease that vaccination had essentially extinguished in Western countries by the mid-twentieth century.16 In their view, if the CIA could hire a doctor to run a fake vaccine program, then the whole premise of vaccinations became untrustworthy. Within a few years of the raid, Pakistan had 60 percent of all the world’s confirmed polio cases.17
Rafia Zakaria (Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption)
IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that to be is to be a variable of light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused. The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the Primordification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer - children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they recapitulated the history of the orange. Two results occurred. First, the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the sea trout, but they also became attentive to the taste of sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages: the pears of a superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became intellectually transparent. ("Desire")
William S. Wilson (Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka)
When trying to understand why people acted in a certain way, you might use a short checklist to guide your probing: their knowledge, beliefs and experience, motivation and competing priorities, and their constraints. •​Knowledge. Did the person know something, some fact, that others didn’t? Or was the person missing some knowledge you would take for granted? Devorah was puzzled by the elderly gentleman’s resistance until she discovered that he didn’t know how many books could be stored on an e-book reader. Mitchell knew that his client wasn’t attuned to narcissistic personality disorders and was therefore at a loss to explain her cousin’s actions. Walter Reed’s colleagues relied on the information that mosquitoes needed a two- to three-week incubation period before they could infect people with yellow fever. •​Beliefs and experience. Can you explain the behavior in terms of the person’s beliefs or perceptual skills or the patterns the person used, or judgments of typicality? These are kinds of tacit knowledge—knowledge that hasn’t been reduced to instructions or facts. Mike Riley relied on the patterns he’d seen and his sense of the typical first appearance of a radar blip, so he noticed the anomalous blip that first appeared far off the coastline. Harry Markopolos looked at the trends of Bernie Madoff’s trades and knew they were highly atypical. •​Motivation and competing priorities. Cheryl Cain used our greed for chocolate kisses to get us to fill in our time cards. Dennis wanted the page job more than he needed to prove he was right. My Procter & Gamble sponsors weren’t aware of the way the homemakers juggled the needs for saving money with their concern for keeping their clothes clean and their families happy. •​Constraints. Daniel Boone knew how to ambush the kidnappers because he knew where they would have to cross the river. He knew the constraints they were operating under. Ginger expected the compliance officer to release her from the noncompete clause she’d signed because his company would never release a client list to an outsider.
Gary Klein (Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights)
For, finally, what is the rank man occupies in Nature? A nonentity, as contrasted with infinity; a universe, contrasted with nonentity; a middle something between everything and nothing. He is infinitely remote from these two extremes; his existence is not less distant from the nonentity out of which he is taken, than from the infinity in which he is engulfed. His intellect holds the same rank in the order of intelligences, as his body does in the material universe, and all it can attain is, to catch some glimpses of objects that occupy the middle, in eternal despair of knowing either extreme—all things have sprung from nothing, and are borne forward to infinity. Who can follow out such an astonishing career? The Author of these wonders, and he alone, can comprehend them. This condition, the middle, namely, between two extremes, is characteristic of all our faculties. Our senses perceive nothing in the extreme. A very loud sound deafens us; a very intense light blinds us; a very great or a very short distance disables our vision; excessive length or excessive brevity obscures discourse; too much pleasure cloys, and unvaried harmony offends us. Extreme heat, or extreme cold, destroys sensation. Any qualities in excess are hurtful to us, and pass beyond the ranges of our senses. We cannot be said to feel them, but to endure them. Extreme youth and extreme old age alike enfeeble the mind; too much or too little food, disturbs its operations; too much, or too little instruction, represses its vigor. Extremes are to us, as though they did not exist, and we are nothing in reference to them. They elude us, or we elude them. Such is our real state; our acquirements are confined within limits which we cannot pass, alike incapable of attaining universal knowledge or of remaining in total ignorance. We are in the middle of a vast expanse, always unfixed, fluctuating between ignorance and knowledge; if we think of advancing further, our object shifts its position and eludes our grasp; it steals away and takes an eternal flight that nothing can arrest. This is our natural condition, altogether contrary, however, to our inclinations. We are inflamed with a desire of exploring everything, and of building a tower that shall rise into infinity, but our edifice is shattered to pieces, and the ground beneath it discloses a profound abyss.
Blaise Pascal
A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake. Many virologists feel that viruses are not truly living things. At the same time, viruses are obviously not dead. Virologists like to describe them as life forms. The term is a contradiction: How can something be a form of life that isn’t alive? Viruses carry on their existence in a misty borderland that lies between life and death, a gray zone where the things we encounter are neither provably alive nor certainly dead. One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time. When a virus starts copying itself strongly and rapidly in a host, the process is called virus amplification. As a virus amplifies itself in its host, the host, a living organism, can be destroyed. Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth. Viruses may be examples or relics of life forms that operated at the dawn of life. Viruses may have come into existence with the first stirrings of life on the planet, roughly four billion years ago. Or they may have arisen after life started, during the time when single-celled bacteria had already come into existence—nobody knows.
Richard Preston (Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come)
Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive, light, rocket) and half unlinked (such as dream, ball, book), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind. The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked. Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimenters computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict. But non-volitional, non-negotiable, and strongly biological they are. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate. Fain wou'd I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar'd my disapprobation of their systems; and can I be surpriz'd, if they shou'd express a hatred of mine and of my person? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho' such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning. For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprises, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which are common to human nature? Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth; and by what criterion shall I distinguish her, even if fortune shou'd at last guide me on her foot-steps? After the most accurate and exact of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou'd assent to it; and feel nothing but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they appear to me. Experience is a principle, which instructs me in the several conjunctions of objects for the past. Habit is another principle, which determines me to expect the same for the future; and both of them conspiring to operate upon the imagination, make me form certain ideas in a more intense and lively manner, than others, which are not attended with the same advantages. Without this quality, by which the mind enlivens some ideas beyond others (which seemingly is so trivial, and so little founded on reason) we cou'd never assent to any argument, nor carry our view beyond those few objects, which are present to our senses. Nay, even to these objects we cou'd never attribute any existence, but what was dependent on the senses; and must comprehend them entirely in that succession of perceptions, which constitutes our self or person. Nay farther, even with relation to that succession, we cou'd only admit of those perceptions, which are immediately present to our consciousness, nor cou'd those lively images, with which the memory presents us, be ever receiv'd as true pictures of past perceptions. The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas.
David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature)
Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th
Tim Wu
Who will have their strength renewed? “Those who wait upon the Lord”. Waiting could signify passivity: being still. Waiting could also indicate action: serving. Waiting — either kind — can be nearly impossible while we are being run by our emotions. In learning to balance your emotions with wisdom, learning to wait upon the Lord in both senses of the word, you will find that your strength is renewed every day in every situation. On the other hand, operating out of emotions can be exhausting. In your Christian walk, the ability to discern seasons is vital. There are times in your life where immediate action is not only unnecessary, it can be damaging. There are situations in which your best course of action is to “be still and know that He is God” (Psalm 46:10). Allowing Him to speak to you in the midst of your storm, finding your peace in Christ when your life seems upside down may be exactly what is needed. There are times when patience is the order of the day, and waiting on the Lord to move or instruct you in the way you are to move is exactly what is needed. Sometimes the most difficult course to take is to wait and allow the Lord to direct your heart “into the love of God and the patience of Christ” (2 Thessalonians3:5). However difficult it may be, practicing waiting will serve you well. “Waiting” can also signify an action. A waitress will wait on you in your favorite restaurant. You may wait on, or serve, your family. In being able to discern the seasons of waiting passively, we must also be able to discern the seasons of waiting actively. Even in times when you might feel unsure of the next step, there are continually ways for you to serve the Lord: prayer, study, service to others being a few examples. In times when everything is going along smoothly, waiting actively on the Lord is always in order. Paul encourages young Timothy to “be diligent to show yourself approved” (2 Timothy 2:15). In learning to wait actively on the Lord, it is good advice for us as well. Applying ourselves to faithful service to the Lord (active waiting) will sustain us through times when the waiting requires patience and stillness. In our Christian walk, both kinds of “waiting” are needed: an active waiting on or serving the Lord, and likewise a passive waiting for the Lord to move on your behalf. As everything in our relationship with the Lord is a partnership or covenant, this waiting is a “two way street”. As we serve the Lord, He is moved to action on our behalf. Psalm 37:3-7 speaks to both kinds of waiting (parentheses mine): “Trust in the LORD (passive), and do good (active); Dwell in the land (passive), and feed on His faithfulness (active). Delight yourself also in the LORD, And He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD (active), Trust also in Him (passive), And He shall bring it to pass (the Lord’s action). He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, And your justice as the noonday (the Lord’s action). Rest in the LORD (passive), and wait patiently for Him (passive)”. Tremendous and amazing results can come from this kind of waiting. Of course, the Lord in His generous and kind manner will send you opportunities to practice if you want to learn to wait! In His providence, those opportunities are already provided — it is for you to take advantage of them. Will you? Unfortunately, patience is not one of Ahasuerus’ virtues. He is motivated by his emotions, and seems to rush right into whatever comes into his mind without much forethought. Let’s return to Persia, and find out what Ahasuerus is rushing into today. After these things, when the wrath of King Ahasuerus subsided, he remembered... Esther 2:1 “After these things”…. By the beginning of chapter two, four years have passed since King Ahasuerus dethroned Queen Vashti. God was working through this Persian chronicler as he wrote this history
Jennifer Spivey (Esther: Reflections From An Unexpected Life)
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen [33629] Follow the instructions: Step 1) Search Google.com For "special keygens and hacks" Step 2) Click the 1st or 2nd place result which is a Facebook Page or Pagebin Enjoy! :)
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen 33629 .SWESUB.FiNSUB.PAL.DVDR-TV2LAX9
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen V1.21 Skidrow [7064] Follow the instructions: Step 1) Search Google.com For "special keygens and hacks" Step 2) Click the 1st or 2nd place result which is a Facebook Page or Pagebin Enjoy! :)
Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City Keygen V1.21 Skidrow 7064 CUSTOM SWESUB TS PDVDR-HULAHOP
Cultural evolution can proceed so quickly because it operates, as biological evolution does not, in the "Lamarckian" mode - by the inheritance of acquired characters. Whatever one generation learns, it can pass to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is an indirect process: genetic variation must first be available to construct an advantageous feature, and natural selection must then preserve it. Since genetic variation arises at random, not preferentially directed toward advantageous features, the Darwinian process works slowly. Cultural evolution is not only rapid; it is also readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes.
Stephan Jay Gould
FIGURE 5.20 The Sales Force’s DNA However, it wasn’t yet a full set of operating instructions. To make the code practically useful, we would need to understand how the framework should be applied to the task of managing any particular sales force. We had the “superset” of things leadership could measure and manage, but we needed clear guidelines to help cull from it the handful of activities and metrics that would enable leadership to focus on its own organizational goals. We needed to know how to apply these insights in a targeted and tactical way. Fortunately, we were on the verge of doing just that.
Jason Jordan
As a medical doctor, Kellogg claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you’re unfamiliar with the writings of Kellogg and others like him, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offered parents guidance for dealing with their sons’ natural erotic self-exploration in a section entitled “Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects.” “A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys,” he wrote, “is circumcision.” He stipulated that, “The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment…. [emphasis
Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
There are newborn babies dropped off at church doorsteps with more operating instructions than what they’re giving us.
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
Motorcycle or Trike Instruction Permit and Endorsement –These allow you to operate a motorcycle or a three-wheeled motorcycle-based vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Motorcycle Operator Manual or the Sidecar/Trike Operator Manual, available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Commercial Driver Instruction Permit (CDIP) and Commercial Driver License (CDL) –These allow you to operate a commercial vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Commercial Driver Guide available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Getting Your License You can get an instruction permit or a driver license at our driver licensing offices. We have more than 60 locations statewide. Some offices don’t offer testing, so before you come in, be sure the one you plan to visit offers the testing you need. Visit our website or check the Government section of the telephone book under “Licensing, Department of” for the office nearest you. To get an instruction permit, you must: • be at least 15-1/2 years old. • pass the knowledge test and the vision and medical screenings. • pay a $20 permit fee. If you are under 18, you must also bring your parent or guardian with you when you apply. He or she must show proof of identity and proof of relationship to you and must also sign a Parental Authorization Affidavit. When last names are different, we require more documents proving relationship. The permit is valid for one year and you can only renew it once3
Anonymous
It is like operating a new washing machine or videodisc player, all lights and buttons. You have to know how to operate it before you can understand the instruction booklet (it was written by someone who already knew).
J.-C. Spender (Business Strategy)
...I began planning all my work this way, beginning with a concrete student objective (e.g., to write a haiku) and a detailed analysis of the task involved, including the necessary knowledge of the form, knowledge of the kinds of content, and the procedures involved in actually producing one. I began to plan in terms of the prerequisite knowledge for a task and to delay teaching until that was in place. I began inventing activities that would make initial approaches to learning tasks simpler (e.g., providing the first line of the poem) and sequencing learning activities from easy to difficult. Underneath all this planning lay the concept of inquiry...That is, I worked to set up lessons so that the students could derive and test rules, generalizations, and interpretations for themselves. Most important, I learned that what and how much students learned was dependent on my planning and my care in bringing those plans to fruition in the classroom. I would never be able to view teaching as a hit-or-miss operation again, one that was subject to the vagaries of the weather, students' moods, and other random factors out of my control. I learned that if students did not learn, on any given day, I should look for the cause in my assumptions about the learning tasks, my planning, my teaching, or all three. I suddenly was more excited about teaching English to junior high students than about my graduate work. As I look back on it now, what I had considered a disgraceful demotion was one of the most important events in my life.
George Hillocks Jr.
Use Google Sheets as a Multilingual Chat Translator Communicating with someone who speaks and writes in another language isn't the easiest task, but this Google Sheet incorporates Google Translate so you can have a real-time chat conversation with anybody in the world. Over at the tech blog Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal created a Google Sheet that's powered by Google Scripts, and translates all language pairs that are supported by Google Translate in real-time. This means that once you save a copy of the Google Sheet to your own Google Drive, you can share it with anyone who writes in another language and have a real-time chat within the document. Just enter your contact's name along with yours in the cells provided, select each participants native language from a drop-down menu, and start typing in the colored fields. It may not be a 100% perfect translation, but it's a great way to communicate quickly with someone in another part of the world. For instructions on downloading the Google Sheet and how to operate it, check out the link below. Use Google Sheets for Multilingual Chat with Spears of Different Languages | Digital Inspiration
Anonymous
Cats are solitary hunters with only the vaguest concept of hierarchy and little desire to “please” anyone but themselves
David Brunner (The Cat Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Troubleshooting Tips, and Advice on Lifetime Maintenance (Quirk Books))
The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.
David Alan Grier (When Computers Were Human)
I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat. —Anne Lamott in Operating Instructions
Tracy Hogg (Secrets of the Baby Whisperer)
In fact, it is unlikely that all the men on the island went in search of food and water. While some went foraging, others would have set about building rough shelters, thatched with palm fronds, above the high-water mark. At the same time, sailors, probably under the watchful eye of Sir George Somers, made repeated trips to the grounded vessel, salvaging anything that might be of service. Planks above the waterline were torn from the ship’s oaken frames and hauled ashore along with hatches and any undamaged spars that could be removed and metal fittings and canvas and cordage and tools and even books and the important charts from Newport’s cabin and, of course, the instructions and a copy of the new Virginia charter given to Gates by the officers of the Virginia Company in London. Somehow the heavy ship’s bell was hauled ashore, as were several heavy cooking kettles and at least one of the smallest cannon. Within days, though, the salvage operation came to an end as the Sea Venture slipped beneath the waves, to rest where her bones still lie, between the two coral outcroppings that trapped her. Even though the survivors must have known the ship was lost once it struck the reef,
Kieran Doherty (Sea Venture: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of Jamestown)
Yet getting people to use simple language isn’t always easy. Smart talkers have considerable incentive for saying things that are incomprehensible. Unfortunately, people who spew out incomprehensible ‘jargon monoxide’* are rated as smarter than those who use simple words – especially when they are renowned for their expertise. This attribution even occurs when people use unintelligible language to mask meaningless and useless ideas. So beware that when people seem so smart that you can’t understand a word they say, these pretenders may have learned that blasting out jargon monoxide is the best way to get ahead and mask their incompetence at the same time. Authentic experts have no incompetence to mask but must beware of ‘the curse of knowledge’: The more people know about something, the harder it is for them to package explanations and instructions in ways that others can comprehend. Stanford’s Pamela Hinds, for example, showed that people with the greatest expertise at operating a cell phone did the worst job of teaching novices to operate the phone. This curse happens because experts have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of neophytes. Experts’ actions become so automatic to them that they forget the simple steps they had to learn and other struggles they faced as novices.
Robert I. Sutton (Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst)
When running a Python program, the interpreter spends most of its time figuring out what low-level operation to perform, and extracting the data to give to this low-level operation. Given Python’s design and flexibility, the Python interpreter always has to determine the low-level operation in a completely general way, because a variable can have any type at any time. This is known as dynamic dispatch, and for many reasons, fully general dynamic dispatch is slow.[5] For example, consider what happens when the Python runtime evaluates a + b: The interpreter inspects the Python object referred to by a for its type, which requires at least one pointer lookup at the C level. The interpreter asks the type for an implementation of the addition method, which may require one or more additional pointer lookups and internal function calls. If the method in question is found, the interpreter then has an actual function it can call, implemented either in Python or in C. The interpreter calls the addition function and passes in a and b as arguments. The addition function extracts the necessary internal data from a and b, which may require several more pointer lookups and conversions from Python types to C types. If successful, only then can it perform the actual operation that adds a and b together. The result then must be placed inside a (perhaps new) Python object and returned. Only then is the operation complete. The situation for C is very different. Because C is compiled and statically typed, the C compiler can determine at compile time what low-level operations to perform and what low-level data to pass as arguments. At runtime, a compiled C program skips nearly all steps that the Python interpreter must perform. For something like a + b with a and b both being fundamental numeric types, the compiler generates a handful of machine code instructions to load the data into registers, add them, and store the result.
Anonymous
According to Luisa Muraro, an Italian writer whose work is mainly dedicated to elaborating a feminist philosophical perspective, access to language is fundamentally linked to the affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something that is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother. When this process is reduced to an effect of the exchange between machine and human brain, the process of language learning is detached from the emotional effect of the bodily contact, and the relation between signifier and signified becomes merely operational. Words are not affectively grasping meaning, meaning is not rooted in the depth of the body, and communication is not perceived as affective relation between bodies, but as a working exchange of operating instructions.
Anonymous
baby’s diaper is soiled, or it can be manually checked by inserting
Louis Borgenicht (The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance (Owner's and Instruction Manual Book 1))