“
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
”
”
Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)
“
But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.
”
”
Peter Watts (Blindsight (Firefall, #1))
“
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
”
”
Doris Lessing (The Grass Is Singing)
“
That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8))
“
Diana gave her a measured look and ducked down behind the counter. She came up a moment later with a sword about the length of Clary's forearm. "What do you think of this?"
Clary stared at the weapon. It was undoubtedly beautiful. The cross-guard, grip and pommel were gold chased with obsidian, the blade a silver so dark it was nearly black.
"It's a shortsword. You might want to look at the other side," said Diana, and she flipped the sword over. On the opposite side of the blade, down the center ridge, ran a pattern of black stars.
"Oh." Clary's heart thumped painfully; she took a step away and nearly bumped into Jace, who had come up behind her, frowning. "That's a Morgenstern sword."
"Yes, it is." The sword-seller's eyes were shrewd. "Long ago the Morgensterns commissioned two blades from Wayland the Smith-a matched set. You have doubtless seen the the larger sword already, for Valentine Morgenstern carried it, and now his son carries it after him."
"You know who we are," Jace said. It wasn't a question. "Who Clary is."
"The Shadowhunter world is small," said Diana, and she looked from one of them to the other. "I'm on the Council. I've seen you give testimony, Valentine's daughter."
Clary looked doubtfully at the blade. "I've seen two men bear the larger version of that sword, and I hated them both. There are no Morgensterns in this world now who are dedicated to anything but evil."
Jace said, "There's you."
"I'll give it to you," said Diana. "You're right that people hate the Morgensterns; it's not the sort of item I could sell elsewhere. Or would necessarily want to. It should go to good hands."
"I don't want it," Clary said.
"If you flinch from it, you give it power over you," said Diana. "Take it, and cut your brother's throat with it, and reclaim the honor of your blood.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
“
A key ingredient to achieving your goals is to make sure your goals are totally congruent with who you are as a person. Your head and hearts desire must match. It's such an important step in goal achievement and if we miss it, we can end up travelling a long way down the wrong path!
”
”
Rachael Bermingham
“
The scientific creation story has majesty, power and beauty. and is infused with a powerful message capable of lifting our spirits in a way that its multitudinous supernatural counterparts are incapable of matching. It teaches us that we are the products of 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution and the mechanism by which meaning entered the universe, if only for a fleeting moment in time. Because the universe means something to me, and the fact that we are all agglomerations of quarks and electrons in a complex and fragile pattern that can perceive the beauty of the universe with visceral wonder, is, I think, a thought worth raising a glass to this Christmas.
”
”
Brian Cox (The Atheists' Guide to Christmas)
“
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. But we keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.
”
”
Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)
“
He coordinated his socks and underwear," she commented when Peabody came back in. "Colors and patterns. Who does that, and why?"
"I read this article about how what you wear under your clothes is all about what makes you feel empowered and in control. It's the Under You."
"If wearing matching boxers and socks make you feel empowered, you're a weenie.
”
”
J.D. Robb (Festive in Death (In Death, #39))
“
she started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head.
”
”
Alice Munro (Dance of the Happy Shades)
“
The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language
”
”
Don DeLillo (End Zone)
“
Even in utero and after birth, for every moment of every day, our brain is processing the nonstop set of incoming signals from our senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—all of the raw sensory data that will result in these sensations enter the lower parts of the brain and begin a multistage process of being categorized, compared to previously stored patterns, and ultimately, if necessary, acted upon. In many cases the pattern of incoming signals is so repetitive, so familiar, so safe and the memory template that this pattern matches is so deeply engrained, that your brain essentially ignores them. This is a form of tolerance called habituation.
”
”
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
“
Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one's daily life three lipstick cases with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven pence three farthings in loose change and the mandatory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phyrne's bag the last time Dot had turned it out.
”
”
Kerry Greenwood (Murder in Montparnasse (Phryne Fisher, #12))
“
In these cases, the police figure prominently in the incidents that triggered the rioting. Sometimes they are not directly involved, but rumors of police brutality flood through the ghetto. Although it may be of some interest to search for a pattern, no very profound purpose is served by concentrating on who struck the match. There are always matches lying around. We must ask why there was also a fuse and why the fuse was connected to a powder keg.
”
”
Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
“
This is another way to make sense of that haunting sensation: to walk into a home and recognize, even if you can’t name the feeling, that someone else not only lived here but adopted patterns of life completely alien to your own, whose daily ritual and marks of wear will never match your own. Haunted houses are the repository of the dreams dreamt inside them—both our dreams and those of previous occupants. This can make even the most simple of houses feel, at times, alive.
”
”
Colin Dickey (Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places)
“
The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa's idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.
”
”
Michael Chabon
“
Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear Dynamics.’ And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to a pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n² responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors.
And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Perfect Match)
“
That process culminated in the 1950s in the short-lived pattern that people have since come to think of as traditional marriage. So in the 1970s, when the inherent instability of the love-based marriage reasserted itself, millions of people were taken completely by surprise. Having lost any collective memory of the convulsions that occurred when the love match was first introduced and the crisis that followed its modernization in the 1920s, they could not understand why this kind of marriage, which they thought had prevailed for thousands of years, was being abandoned by the younger generation.
”
”
Stephanie Coontz (Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy)
“
Slender and lissome, Zilia had skin of the purest white and features the very emblem of candor and modesty; her large dark blue eyes, more tender than lively, seemed to express love at the height of delicacy, sentiment at its most voluptuous. Her mouth was deliciously formed, her teeth white and beautiful; she seemed a little pale until one's gaze fell upon her and then she burst to life, fresh as a rose. Her brow was noble, her hair, so nicely patterned, ashen blonde in great quantity, elegantly matched by the gracious contours of her veil, streaming across alabaster breasts, always exposed in accord with the fashion of the country—all finally lent this pretty woman the air of a goddess of youth. She had just reached her 16th year, still growing despite all, her arms lithe and fingers to our eyes so very supple and slender.
”
”
Marquis de Sade (Aline and Valcour, or, the Philosophical Novel, Vol. II)
“
Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt correlation was general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one: At 10,450 BC – and at that date only – we find that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I mean it’s a perfect match – faultless – and it cannot be an accident because the entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial events that occurred only at that time. First, and purely by chance, the Milky Way, as visible from Giza in 10,450 BC, exactly duplicated the meridional course of the Nile Valley; secondly, to the west of the Milky Way, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were at the lowest altitude in their precessional cycle, with Al Nitak, the star represented by the Great Pyramid, crossing the meridien at 11° 08ʹ.8
”
”
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
... [O]ne of the most influential approaches to thinking about memory in recent years, known as connectionism, has abandoned the idea that a memory is an activated picture of a past event. Connectionist or neural network models are based on the principle that the brain stores engrams by increasing the strength of connections between different neurons that participate in encoding an experience. When we encode an experience, connections between active neurons become stronger, and this specific pattern of brain activity constitutes the engram. Later, as we try to remember the experience, a retrieval cue will induce another pattern of activity in the brain. If this pattern is similar enough to a previously encoded pattern, remembering will occur. The "memory" in a neural network model is not simply an activated engram, however. It is a unique pattern that emerges from the pooled contributions of the cue and the engram. A neural network combines information in the present environment with patterns that have been stored in the past, and the resulting mixture of the two is what the network remembers... When we remember, we complete a pattern with the best match available in memory; we do not shine a spotlight on a stored picture.
”
”
Daniel L. Schacter (Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past)
“
Key Rabbit, allow me to bore you with a comparison of your wife and a beautiful woman," I said. "In the morning a beauty must lie in bed for three or four hours gathering strength for another mighty battle with Nature. Then, after being bathed and toweled by her maids, she loosens her hair in the Cascade of Teasing Willows Style, paints her eyebrows in the Distant Mountain Range Style, anoints herself with the Nine Bends of the River Diving-water Perfume, applies rouge, mascara, and eye shadow, and covers the whole works with a good two inches of the Powder of the Nonchalant Approach. Then she dresses in a plum-blossom patterned tunic with matching skirt and stockings, adds four or five pounds of jewelry, looks in the mirror for any visible sign of humanity and is relieved to find none, checks her makeup to be sure that it has hardened into an immovable mask, sprinkles herself with the Hundred Ingredients Perfume of the Heavenly Spirits who Descended in the Rain Shower, and minces with tiny steps toward the new day. Which, like any other day, will consist of gossip and giggles.
”
”
Barry Hughart (Bridge of Birds (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, #1))
“
Well, sounding wise wasn't difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn't have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain's pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you'd stored previously.
”
”
Eliezer Yudkowsky
“
The Congregating of Stars
They often meet in mountain lakes,
No matter how remote, no matter how deep
Down and far they must stream to arrive,
Navigating between the steep, vertical piles
Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered
Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter,
Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches
Of boulders and ripping ice.
Silently, the stars have assembled
On the surface of this lost lake tonight,
Arranged themselves to match the patterns
They maintain in the highest spheres
Of the surrounding sky.
And they continue on, passing through
The smooth, black countenance of the lake,
Through that mirror of themselves, down through
The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom
Stillness of the invisible life and death existing
In the nether of those depths.
Sky-bound- yet touching every needle
In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone,
Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars
Appear the same as in ancient human ages
On the currents of the old seas and the darkened
Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same
As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above
The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing
Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even
Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized.
The stars are congregating, perhaps
in celebration, passing through their own
names and legends, through fogs, airs,
and thunders, the vapors of winter frost
and summer pollens. They are ancestors
of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes
of the night. What can they know?
”
”
Pattiann Rogers (Quickening Fields (Penguin Poets))
“
The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa’s idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective. “That’s unusual,” Sammy
”
”
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
“
Science has no connection with Truth. It’s simply a pattern-matching exercise, i.e. it tries to match theoretical mathematical patterns to experimentally observed patterns, and, when it makes a match, it believes it has made some kind of discovery about reality. It has done no such thing. Correlation is not causation! Everyone know that, but apparently not scientists!
”
”
Mike Hockney (Black Holes Are Souls (The God Series Book 23))
“
I wore a blue silk Brunswick jacket, close-fitting and edged with dark fur, and a matching petticoat, both quilted with a pattern of diamonds and swirling flowers. My gloves were bright green kidskin, and on my head I wore the one extravagant hat I'd brought, the sweeping brim covered in black velvet and crowned with a profusion of scarlet ribbons.
I, Eliza Hamilton.
”
”
Susan Holloway Scott
“
The reason you have not already gotten what you desire is because you are holding yourself in a vibrational holding pattern that does not match the vibration of your desire. That is the only reason-ever! And an important thing for you to now understand is that if you will stop and think about it, or, more important, stop and feel about it, you can identify your very discord.
”
”
Esther Hicks (Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires)
“
...although the people walking along the streets were strangers to each other, they formed a tight chain, like some organic composition, and I could not squeeze in. Could sharing ordinary, normal faces forge such a strong bond among them? Moreover, even the things they wore matched. The mass-produced patterns of today called fashion. Is that a negation of the uniform, for heaven’s sake, or simply a new kind of uniform?
”
”
Kōbō Abe (The Face of Another)
“
He peeled the towel that imprisoned us away and let it fall. I felt it slide softly off my backside, and I felt, too, his rising excite¬ment, hard, erect, pressing against me.
My nipples were erect, straining, aching, pressed against his strong warm damp chest, the tangle and pattern of his hair. He was a beast, an animal. My excitement was rising again, to match his. It was as if my heart were about to burst or to flip flop, breathless, into a dark abyss.
“Of course, you are crazy, my darling, but, then, so am I.” He kissed me and his oh-so-clever hands seized my waist, tighten¬ing, and then sneaking up my backside, pulling me, pressing me closer, into him. He kissed me again, and his lips moved down my neck to my shoulder and then to my breasts.
“Oh,” I said, “Oh.”
He bent over me, kissing my collarbone and then my breasts, carefully, slowly, his hands traveling down my back, and over my backside; suddenly, he was on his knees, kissing the whorl of 101
my belly button; then he was forcing me open, gently, gently, his tongue exploring caressing, devouring …
“Oh …” I exhaled a deep, shuddering breath. I tipped on the very edge. He bit me, gently. Oooooh!
He pulled in the reins, the bit and bridle, of the frisky frothing filly that I had become; this sudden halt made me wilder, crazier; then, once again, he brought me, trembling, up to the very, very edge of the cliff – of orgasm, of loss of self.
Then he pulled me back. I blinked and trembled. Around the two of us, there was a whole world, a whole universe. It seemed too vivid to be real, like the backdrop in an opera. Venus was brighter and lower now. The sky had turned deep indigo. One by one, stars appeared.
”
”
Gwendoline Clermont (The Shaming of Gwendoline C)
“
There is only so much one person may give before it exhausts your shallow well of courage and leaves you damned and dry. Before outrage becomes commonplace, and you grow used to the horrors of this life. They count on it, the Nazis—and other villains, too. Mussolini in Italy and Baky in Hungary, Ion Antonescu, purging the streets of Old Romania—and those who, in some future time when civilized people think themselves beyond the reach of moral failings, may rise to stand on foreign soil. They want you tired and distracted. They plan to burn this world down—our old ways of being. From the ashes they will build the world anew, after a fearful pattern, after their own bleak design. But the flames can only devour what we leave unguarded. So they will force you inward, if they can, to huddle over whatever small treasures the Lord has given you. When your back is turned, that’s when they’ll strike the match.
”
”
Olivia Hawker (The Ragged Edge of Night)
“
Today’s dating sites mean easy access to countless singles tailored to your exact desires, with your perfect match only a click of a button away. Or at least that’s how we think it should be—but sometimes too much choice can just make it harder to weed out the bad options. For some of us, online dating is a succession of frogs with no prince at the end of it. For others, more choice seems to equal more rejection. The good news, as ever, is that math can help.
”
”
Hannah Fry (The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation)
“
We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in fifty-eight countries around the world, 63 percent of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was “gaze aversion.” We think liars in real life behave like liars would on Friends—telegraphing their internal states with squirming and darting eyes. This is—to put it mildly—nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match—whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look.
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
“
Dead Seas and Babbling Brooks Not all of us are out of touch with our emotions, but when it comes to talking, all of us are affected by our personality. I have observed two basic personality types. The first I call the “Dead Sea.” In the little nation of Israel, the Sea of Galilee flows south by way of the Jordan River into the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea goes nowhere. It receives but it does not give. This personality type receives many experiences, emotions, and thoughts throughout the day. They have a large reservoir where they store that information, and they are perfectly happy not to talk. If you say to a Dead Sea personality, “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you talking tonight?” he will probably answer, “Nothing’s wrong. What makes you think something’s wrong?” And that response is perfectly honest. He is content not to talk. He could drive from Chicago to Detroit and never say a word and be perfectly happy. On the other extreme is the “Babbling Brook.” For this personality, whatever enters into the eye gate or the ear gate comes out the mouth gate and there are seldom sixty seconds between the two. Whatever they see, whatever they hear, they tell. In fact, if no one is at home to talk to, they will call someone else. “Do you know what I saw? Do you know what I heard?” If they can’t get someone on the telephone, they may talk to themselves because they have no reservoir. Many times a Dead Sea marries a Babbling Brook. That happens because when they are dating, it is a very attractive match. If you are a Dead Sea and you date a Babbling Brook, you will have a wonderful evening. You don’t have to think, “How will I get the conversation started tonight? How will I keep the conversation flowing?” In fact, you don’t have to think at all. All you have to do is nod your head and say, “Uh-huh,” and she will fill up the whole evening and you will go home saying, “What a wonderful person.” On the other hand, if you are a Babbling Brook and you date a Dead Sea, you will have an equally wonderful evening because Dead Seas are the world’s best listeners. You will babble for three hours. He will listen intently to you, and you will go home saying, “What a wonderful person.” You attract each other. But five years after marriage, the Babbling Brook wakes up one morning and says, “We’ve been married five years, and I don’t know him.” The Dead Sea is saying, “I know her too well. I wish she would stop the flow and give me a break.” The good news is that Dead Seas can learn to talk and Babbling Brooks can learn to listen. We are influenced by our personality but not controlled by it. One way to learn new patterns is to establish a daily sharing time in which each of you will talk about three things that happened to you that day and how you feel about them. I call that the “Minimum Daily Requirement” for a healthy marriage. If you will start with the daily minimum, in a few weeks or months you may find quality conversation flowing more freely between you.
”
”
Gary Chapman (The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts)
“
locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self. ‘You
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
Ollie hadn’t been kidding. He really did like jigsaw puzzles. A countryside harvest festival was spread across the coffee table, and its repeating autumnal patterns held him and Grandma Young in a matching trance. Perched on their seat edges, they bonded over etiquette and strategy: start with the border. Then any sections that contain printed words. If someone is searching for one specific piece, but the other person finds it, it must be handed over, because it means more to the first person. And always save the sky—the hardest part of any puzzle—for last.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (There's Someone Inside Your House)
“
The door had six knobs on its inner side: the uppermost, which matched the outer one, a square of frost-furred crystal, and five beneath it, placed in an uneven row. The first two were of some sort of dark stone, one icy and the other matte and slippery-smooth. The fourth had the look of a tiny aquarium, a cylinder of turquoise sea shafted with sunlight. The bottom two were made of wood. The first was pale, carved with an intricate floral pattern. I could not tell if the second was similarly decorated, for it was largely covered in a wet moss woven with constellations of tiny white flowers.
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2))
“
Everyone has quirks of behavior and personality that at times irritate us. Yet in most cases the problem isn't that they are bad; its simply that their responses and thought patterns are different from ours.
Every person is different. Yet often, those differences are not understood or valued by others. Trying to change one's personality to match yours is as pointless and as futile as trying to change one's physical features to make him or her look like you. The key to reducing frustration over one's quirks of behavior and to communicate with him or her is to understand and accommodate their unique personality style.
”
”
H. Norman Wright
“
Hermes had said, the giant was about ten feet tall, which made him small compared to some other giants I’d seen. But Cacus made up for it by being bright and gaudy. He had curly orange hair, pale skin, and orange freckles. His face was smeared upward with a permanent pout, upturned nose, wide eyes, and arched eyebrows, so he appeared both startled and unhappy. He wore a red velour housecoat with matching slippers. The housecoat was open, revealing silky Valentine-patterned boxer shorts and luxurious chest hair of a red/pink/orange color not found in nature. Annabeth made a small gagging sound. “It’s the ginger giant.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Heroes of Olympus: The Demigod Diaries)
“
God clues us in to the fact that, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In short, God is not logical. This is not to say that he is illogical, only that he is not limited by logic. Simplified, "logic" is connecting the dots. We identify the dots we consider relevant, then connect them into lines and patterns. God, on the other hand, may see that, beneath one of the dots is a stack of a trillion more dots, each of which may be combined with the others. Little wonder that our ways and meanings frequently fail to match God's ways and meanings. Great wonder that, when they don't, we tend to fault him.
”
”
Ron Brackin
“
As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.
”
”
Ian Mortimer (The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England)
“
CHARACTERISTICS OF SYSTEM 1 generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search) executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance distinguishes the surprising from the normal infers and invents causes and intentions neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt is biased to believe and confirm exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect) focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI) generates a limited set of basic assessments represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness) computes more than intended (mental shotgun) sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)* overweights low probabilities* shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)* responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)* frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*
”
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
If I sequenced my own genome and showed it to a geneticist, she would be able to say approximately where on the planet I or my ancestors came from by matching variants in my genome with the geographic patterns of variants across the globe. She would not, however, be able to tell whether I was smart or dumb, tall or short, or almost anything else that matters with respect to how I function as a human being. Indeed, despite the fact that most efforts to understand the genome have sprung from efforts to combat disease, for the vast majority of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, our current understanding allows us only to assign vague probabilities to the likelihood that an individual will develop them.
”
”
Svante Pääbo (Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes)
“
The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
”
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Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Characteristics of System 1:
• generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions
• operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
• can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
• executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
• creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory
• links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
• distinguishes the surprising from the normal
• infers and invents causes and intentions
• neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt
• is biased to believe and confirm
• exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)
• focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)
• generates a limited set of basic assessments
• represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate
• matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)
• computes more than intended (mental shotgun)
• sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
• is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)*
• overweights low probabilities*
• shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)*
• responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)*
• frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another*
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
When I touch her, my fingers don’t question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am. She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love. And you may say that only death has brought us to this. That one intensity must match another. That we have found each other because there is no one else, nothing else to find. It doesn’t matter – not the reasons for the death, nor the explanation of the love. It is happening, both together, and it is where we are, both together.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods)
“
ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia’s skirt and devoured Leonard’s proofs. “But”, writes Virginia, “she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day”. For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time she became essentially Leonard’s dog. Loved as she was, the pattern of her life naturally became woven into the pattern of theirs. The daily habits; her walk with Leonard round Tavistock Square garden in the morning before the day’s work began. Her joke of extinguishing, with her paw, Virginia’s match when she lit a cigarette, and so on. Virginia mentions her again and again in letters and diaries.
”
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Virginia Woolf (Flush)
“
The rosary is being prayed perfectly when all the members pray it at the same natural and prayerful pace. This gives the rosary a beautiful rhythm, flow, and harmonious timing that match normal breathing patterns. On the other hand, if one member prays too loudly, allowing his voice and pace to dominate the others, everyone automatically begins to focus on his voice and is no longer able to meditate; the vocal aspect becomes a distraction for all the other members. Similarly, if a person places an emphasis on one particular word of the Hail Mary prayer, it breaks the flow and rhythm of the group’s timing. All of the above aspects should be taken seriously, because a group’s failure to pray the rosary well and harmoniously is often the reason why many people do not join in praying the rosary before or after Mass. Very few people are interested in praying a rosary that is chaotic and a verbal wrestling match.
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Donald H. Calloway (Champions of the Rosary: The History and Heroes of a Spiritual Weapon)
“
The beauty of the principle idea of string theory is that all the known elementary particles are supposed to represent merely different vibration modes of the same basic string. Just as a violin or a guitar string can be plucked to produce different harmonics, different vibrational patterns of a basic string correspond to distinct matter particles, such as electrons and quarks. The same applies to the force carriers as well. Messenger particles such as gluons or the W and Z owe their existence to yet other harmonics. Put simply, all the matter and force particles of the standard model are part of the repertoire that strings can play. Most impressively, however, a particular configuration of vibrating string was found to have properties that match precisely the graviton-the anticipated messenger of the gravitational force. This was the first time that the four basic forces of nature have been housed, if tentatively, under one roof.
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Mario Livio (The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry)
“
The room was two-tiered,
its marble balconies filled with rams and water nymphs in fancy
dress; a kaleidoscope of colours swayed in time to the beat of
hypnotic music. A concerto of absent musicians, it played only in
her mind. The numerous chandeliers with sculptured metal frames
hung down from chains, with endless fireflies attached. At the far
end stretched a grand staircase, dressed with a plush velvet carpet
in deep cerise, and ceiling paintings edged with gold embossed
dado rails clung to the walls.
Then Eve honed in on herself and saw that she wore a crushed
white taffeta A-line gown that fit her trim figure like a glove. Her
butterfly mask with floral patterns embroidered in red and gold
silk sat against her pale skin, her reflection like that of a porcelain
doll. A matching shawl rested softly on her shoulders. Everything
was so beautiful that she almost totally lost herself in the mirror’s
reflection."
(little snippet from our book)
”
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L. Wells
“
Your original learned in childhood what attraction leads to, and that love is a loss of power. These lessons hold more influence than you think they do, and you understand them less than you should. You prefer the emotional patterns you know, and these were set at the orphanage for Kodiak, with your Cusk siblings and caretakers for you. Ambrose, "first sight" love is when you meet someone who accords with your childhood lessons, learned from your parents, of what you think love should look like. What did your mother teach us? Who kept her son but sent his clones off to live a season at a time with a stranger, with no thought to their suffering? Who felt her and Ambrose's legacy was worth putting so many copies of him through this torture? Kodiak does not match the models you learned as a child, and you don't match his. But that seemingly natural sense of "fitting together" is a construction. The love Kodiak and I share in this lifetime is proof of it.
”
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Eliot Schrefer (The Darkness Outside Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #1))
“
In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.
”
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G.M.W. Wemyss
“
For example, when I observe something unusual in an experiment, it reverberates in my brain for a long while. Many circuits, especially the giant recurrent network of the hippocampus, can generate large numbers of neuronal trajectories without any signals from outside the brain. Even cultured brain tissue in a dish can induce a variety of spontaneous events. That is what neuronal circuits do.38 They do not just sit and wait to be stimulated. Based on these examples, now we may consider the possibility that learning is not an outside-in superimposition process where new neuronal sequences are built up with each novel experience. Instead, learning may be an inside-out matching process: when a spontaneously occurring neuronal trajectory, drawn from the available huge repertoire of trajectories, coincides with a useful action, that trajectory acquires meaning to the brain. The richer the experience, the higher the fraction of the meaningful trajectories, but there is always a large reservoir of available patterns.
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György Buzsáki (The Brain from Inside Out)
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Excellence itself, aretē as the Greeks, virtus as the Romans would have called it, has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, could distinguish oneself from all others. Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors.40 Not even the social realm—though it made excellence anonymous, emphasized the progress of mankind rather than the achievements of men, and changed the content of the public realm beyond recognition—has been able altogether to annihilate the connection between public performance and excellence. While we have become excellent in the laboring we perform in public, our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private. This curious discrepancy has not escaped public notice, where it is usually blamed upon an assumed time lag between our technical capacities and our general humanistic development or between the physical sciences, which change and control nature, and the social sciences, which do not yet know how to change and control society. Quite apart from other fallacies of the argument which have been pointed out so frequently that we need not repeat them, this criticism concerns only a possible change in the psychology of human beings—their so-called behavior patterns—not a change of the world they move in. And this psychological interpretation, for which the absence or presence of a public realm is as irrelevant as any tangible, worldly reality, seems rather doubtful in view of the fact that no activity can become excellent if the world does not provide a proper space for its exercise. Neither education nor ingenuity nor talent can replace the constituent elements of the public realm, which make it the proper place for human excellence. 7
”
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Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition)
“
And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2n possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian 35 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.
”
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée.
It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi?
Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel.
How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.
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Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges; while the old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges.
Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone.
”
”
John Ruskin (On Art and Life (Penguin Great Ideas))
“
The information in this topic of decision making and how to create and nurture it, is beneficial to every cop in their quest to mastering tactics and tactical decision making and are a must read for every cop wanting to be more effective and safe on the street. My purpose is to get cops thinking about this critical question: In mastering tactics shouldn’t we be blending policy and procedure with people and ideas? It should be understandable that teaching people, procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully doesn’t always apply. Procedures are most useful in well-ordered situations when they can substitute for skill, not augment it. In complex situations, in the shadows of the unknown, uncertain and unpredictable and complex world of law enforcement conflict, procedures are less likely to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development. Here is a different way of putting it as Klein explains: In complex situations, people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and to go beyond them when necessary.3 For stable and well-structured tasks i.e. evidence collection and handling, follow-up investigations, booking procedures and report writing, we should be able to construct comprehensive procedure guides. Even for complex tasks we might try to identify the procedures because that is one road to progress. But we also have to discover the kinds of expertise that comes into play for difficult jobs such as, robbery response, active shooter and armed gunman situations, hostage and barricade situations, domestic disputes, drug and alcohol related calls and pretty much any other call that deals with emotionally charged people in conflict. Klein states, “to be successful we need both analysis (policy and procedure) and intuition (people and ideas).”4 Either one alone can get us into trouble. Experts certainly aren’t perfect, but analysis can fail. Intuition isn’t magic either. Klein defines intuition as, “ways we use our experience without consciously thinking things out”. Intuition includes tacit knowledge that we can’t describe. It includes our ability to recognize patterns stored in memory. We have been building these patterns up all our lives from birth to present, and we can rapidly match a situation to a pattern or notice that something is off, that some sort of anomaly is warning us to be careful.5
”
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Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
“
When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything.
She’d gone and changed her dress.
Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin.
She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief.
Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen.
Therefore, he knew he ought to look away.
He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable.
He looked at her again.
Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog.
Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone.
But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air.
He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.”
And then he walked away.
”
”
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: • Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. • Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. • Colors are processed in area V4. • Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known.
To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541):
The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body.
Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3).
By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week.
Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
”
”
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction)
“
Once the solar years blended into my rhythmic patterns on stone and critical screens, millions telling me the same old twisted scenes, glimmering glances of delight disguised as silver lining pause and model frames. Be very careful which universe you dwell in from now on, for even my own territory is casted within many phrases gone into the cracks where smoke can't escape, many have slit their tongues and throats for a splash of Spanish haze, and lost thick jungle heat only chest and breath could ever match in mid sonic reframe of resonance imagined in west coast hues scanning my pupils to yours, at once and foreseen many summer moons ago when the unknown was merely an oasis of water falling from heavenly thrones, getting off on this planet; getting off on your tones in phantom cosmic zones.
”
”
Brandon Villasenor (Prima Materia (Radiance Hotter than Shade, #1))
“
John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above.
His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls.
On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.
”
”
Alan Moore (Jerusalem, Book One: The Boroughs (Jerusalem, #1))
“
Do you also have an empty feeling inside of you that you are never good enough and that you are only as good as your accomplishments that others can see? If so, welcome to the achievers’ club. Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with achievement. But there is more to life. The achiever pattern is very difficult to break for men because it is so much a part of our culture. We simply believe we are what we do, and we are nothing if we haven’t done anything. The achiever pattern develops very early for the silent son. It was often through his achievements and only his achievements that he got any recognition in his family. Therefore, if he wanted attention, which he equated with approval, he had better perform. Many men who fall into this pattern become workaholics. They are driven by external forces, such as the need for validation, which unfortunately they believe only comes from others. They seldom have an internal sense of self-worth and they feel inadequate most of the time, even when they do something well. Nothing is ever enough for them. It might be enough for others, but not for them. Many achievers are perfectionists. Being a perfectionist is bad enough, but it is much worse when an achiever projects onto other people or other things. For example, most achievers spend most of their lives being disappointed. Nothing ever lives up to their expectations. They have such high ideals about people and things that no one or no thing can match them. It seldom occurs to achievers that their ideals are not realistic. They often find themselves asking why others can’t do what they are supposed to do.
”
”
Robert J. Ackerman (Silent Sons: A Book for and About Men)
“
What Winterborne needs most is something he can’t purchase.”
“Whatever Winterborne can’t purchase isn’t worth having.”
“What about an aristocrat’s daughter?”
West wandered past the bookshelves, perusing titles. He pulled a volume from a shelf and examined it dispassionately. “Why the devil are we talking about arranging a match for Lady Helen? Her future is none of your concern. After we sell the estate, you’ll likely never see her again.”
Devon traced the pattern of inset bees as he replied, “I’m not going to sell the estate.”
West fumbled with the book, nearly dropping it. “Have you gone mad? Why?”
He didn’t want to have to explain his reasons, when he was still trying to sort through them. “I have no desire to be a landless earl.”
“When has your pride ever mattered?”
“It does now that I’m a peer.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Octopuses can change what they look like in less than 30 milliseconds by expanding tiny pigment sacs in the skin, chromatophores. They can go from dark to pale, plain to patterned, rough to smooth, and a clumped shape to an elongated form. They change their appearance mostly to hide from predators, camouflaging to match the colors and the patterns of their background.
”
”
Jennifer A. Mather (Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate)
“
They can make half of the body pale and the other half dark (see plate 2). And when an octopus is finished matching its background and lifts off to swim away, it can put on a striped pattern, making it harder for a predator to track it. If all else fails, an octopus can squirt out a cloud of ink so the predator loses sight of it.
”
”
Jennifer A. Mather (Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate)
“
Napoleon’s intuition was a mix of homeostatic pressure – strong urges felt whenever he saw opportunity or felt threatened – followed by his default responses through entrained behavior over the years as an artillery officer and commander, and likewise matching patterns of unfamiliar situations to previously known situations. In order to have secured France’s place in the world, Napoleon would have needed to start acting against his intuition at some point, and taking a counter-intuitive position (to him) in regards to opportunities and threats.
”
”
Sebastian Marshall (PROGRESSION)
“
You have homeostatic pressures. Don’t naively assume they’re “real” – reason through them to the root cause. 2. You have default entrained responses – don’t deploy them blindly without occasional checking and re-checking them, searching for better ways. 3. Your brain naturally matches and finds patterns – don’t be satisfied until you’ve fully explored what other patterns might be more applicable or superior for your situation.
”
”
Sebastian Marshall (PROGRESSION)
“
Sorting Laundry"
Folding clothes,
I think of folding you
into my life.
Our king-sized sheets
like tablecloths
for the banquets of giants,
pillowcases, despite so many
washings, seems still
holding our dreams.
Towels patterned orange and green,
flowered pink and lavender,
gaudy, bought on sale,
reserved, we said, for the beach,
refusing, even after years,
to bleach into respectability.
So many shirts and skirts and pants
recycling week after week, head over heels
recapitulating themselves.
All those wrinkles
To be smoothed, or else
ignored; they're in style.
Myriad uncoupled socks
which went paired into the foam
like those creatures in the ark.
And what's shrunk
is tough to discard
even for Goodwill.
In pockets, surprises:
forgotten matches,
lost screws clinking the drain;
well-washed dollars, legal tender
for all debts public and private,
intact despite agitation;
and, gleaming in the maelstrom,
one bright dime,
broken necklace of good gold
you brought from Kuwait,
the strangely tailored shirt
left by a former lover…
If you were to leave me,
if I were to fold
only my own clothes,
the convexes and concaves
of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras
turned upon themselves,
a mountain of unsorted wash
could not fill
the empty side of the bed.
”
”
Elisavietta Ritchie
“
Flow is characterised by nine different elements: Clear goals at each step of the way Immediate feedback: knowing that you are doing it properly A balance between challenge and skills: if it is too difficult it will lead to anxiety and if too easy it will cause boredom The merging of action and awareness No distractions No fear of failure No feeling of self-consciousness Sense of time is distorted It is done for its own sake (such as playing a musical instrument) You can go through your own list and see which ones match the criteria for being ‘flow’ activities. Csikszentmihalyi defines happiness as having an active sense of accomplishment and improvement, whereas pleasure is the satisfaction of basic biological desires or static contentment. So the state of happiness would be at the top of Maslow’s triangle, and the best way to achieve it would be through ‘flow’ (whereas pleasure would be included within physical needs). This is not to say that we don’t need pleasure, but it can be short-lived and, it is argued, mindless. In other words, ‘flow’ requires more mental energy and effort but is, ultimately, more rewarding and leads to increased skill and challenge because the activities are more complex. Csikszentmihalyi claims that flow means that all the brain’s available inputs are occupied with one activity. This means, of course, that it is impossible for negative and chaotic thoughts to come charging into your head. He says that the mind ‘with nothing to do, begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations.’ So the mind with nothing to do becomes a mind full of negativity, whereas a mind in a state of flow is so engaged there is no room for undesirable thoughts. The more flow activities that you have in your life, the more rewarding and happy your life will be.
”
”
Sue Hadfield (Brilliant Positive Thinking)
“
felt a prickle at the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized—your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a preexisting pattern.
”
”
Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
“
The longer I work in AI, the more I think humans are just simple pattern matching machines with a small scratch pad for memory.
”
”
Peter Welinder
“
You know how dreams work, right? Our brains are full of static; neurons just fire off at random sometimes, not thoughts or anything, just—background noise. The visual cortex gets its share, but normally you don’t notice ’cause the signals coming in over your optic nerves are so much stronger, they just swamp everything else. When you’re asleep, though, there’s nothing coming in through the main cables. Nothing to drown out the static. And the brain—notices. It’s got these pattern-matching circuits and when static’s all they’ve got to work with, they’ll find signal in that noise even if there isn’t any signal to find. They try and shoehorn these random flickers into the experiential database. Same reason we see faces in clouds.
”
”
Peter Watts (Crysis: Legion)
“
she had accepted that doling out sarcastic criticism invited a cutting response. They circled each other, in consequence, like exactly matched opponents unwilling to declare open war. For as long as he could remember William had been irresistibly attracted to horses and had long affirmed his intention to be a jockey, of which Sarah strongly and I mildly disapproved. Security, William said, was a dirty word. There were better things in life than a safe job. Sarah and I, I suppose, were happier with pattern and order and achievement. William increasingly as he grew through thirteen, fourteen, and now fifteen, seemed to hunger for air and speed and uncertainty. It was typical of him that he proposed to spend the week’s mid-term break in riding horses instead of working for the eight ‘O’ Level exams he was due to take immediately afterwards. I left his letter on my desk to remind myself to send him a cheque and unlocked the cupboard where I kept my guns. The air-gun that I’d taken to school was little more than a toy and needed no licence or secure storage, but I also owned two Mauser 7.62s, an Enfield No. 4 7.62 and two Anschütz .22s around which all sorts of regulations bristled, and also an old Lee Enfield .303 dating back from my early days which was still as lethal as ever if one could raise the ammunition for it. The little I had, I hoarded, mostly out of nostalgia. There
”
”
Dick Francis (Twice Shy (Francis Thriller))
“
Sublimation Football Jerseys Las Vegas Pattern, Printed, Sleeve, Half Sleeve We are committed to providing a one-of-a-kind collection of football uniforms. To customize your appearance, mix and match our customer base layers, athletic shirts, jeans, accessories, team towels, and more. It's all about putting on a performance while under duress in football. Our outfits were made to last a long time. To face the rigors of excellent route running and accurate passing, these pants are comfortable and well-cut.
”
”
Genre-Sports
“
If you take a scan of your life right now, can you see where your choices and actions match with your core beliefs, values, and true self, and where they don’t? Be gentle and honest with yourself here. If you were living authentically, what would be different?
”
”
Vienna Pharaon (The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love)
“
It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival.
Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34
Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.
”
”
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
“
To conclude: time doesn’t pass. (I hope the reader is now convinced!)
Well, what does pass, then? I shall argue that it is the conscious awareness of the fleeting self that changes from moment to moment. The misconception that time flows or passes can be traced back to the tacit assumption of a conserved self. It is natural for people to think that ‘they’ endure from moment to moment while the world changes because ‘time flows’. But as Alice remarked in Lewis Carroll’s story, ‘It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’ Alice was right: ‘you’ are not the same today as you were yesterday. To be sure, there is a very strong correlation – a lot of mutual information, to get technical about it – between today’s you and yesterday’s you – a thread of information made up of memories and beliefs and desires and attitudes and other things that usually change only slowly, creating an impression of continuity. But continuity is not conservation. There are future yous correlated with (that is, observing) future states of the world, and past yous correlated with (observing) past states of the world. At each moment, the you appropriate to that world-state interprets the correlation with that state as ‘now’. It is indeed ‘now’ for ‘that you’ at ‘that time’. That’s all!
The flow-of-time phenomenon reveals ‘the self’ as a slowly evolving complex pattern of stored information that can be accessed at later times and provide an informational template against which fresh perceptions can be matched. The illusion of temporal flow stems from the inevitable slight mismatches.
”
”
Paul C.W. Davies (The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life)
“
Are My Thoughts in My Dreams, Creating?
Jerry: I would like to understand the dream world. Are we creating in our dreams? Are we attracting anything through the thoughts we're having or experiencing in our dreams?
Abraham: You are not. While you sleep, you have withdrawn your consciousness from your physical time-space reality, and you are temporarily not attracting while you are sleeping.
Whatever you are thinking (and therefore feeling) and that which you are attract is always a match. Also, what you are thinking and feeling in the dream state and what is manifesting in your life experience is always a match. Your dreams give you a glimpse into what you have created or what you are in the process of creating - but you are not in the process of creating while you are dreaming.
Often you are unaware of the pattern of your thoughts until they actually manifest in your experience because you have developed your habit of thought gradually over a long period of time. And while it is possible, even after something unwanted that has manifested, to focus and change it to something you do want, it is more difficult to do that after it has manifested. An understanding of what your dream state really is can help you recognize the direction of your thoughts before they actually materialize in your experience. It is much easier to correct the direction of your thoughts when your dream is your indication that it is when a real-life manifestation is your indication.
”
”
Esther Hicks (The Law of Attraction Essential Collection)
“
It's not out of the question that eventually, using Ai, to realistically shield and synthesize the "envelope" of a specific environment, and then actualizing destructive and constructive interference patterns will lead to, if not instantaneous materialization, then certainly a directional indication towards the most visible source of that matching vibrational resonance model. I call this the "frequencies equation." Envelope, vibrational resonance model, and frequencies equation are the same concept.
”
”
Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
“
False positives unfold in two ways. With both patterns, entrepreneurs mistakenly assume that the behavior of early adopters will be matched by that of mainstream customers. With the first pattern, an entrepreneur tailors a solution for early adopters, commits resources to this solution, and then learns that the solution doesn’t meet the needs of the larger mainstream market. Without mainstream customers, the venture won’t earn enough revenue to survive. By the time the entrepreneur recognizes the need to pivot, he’s amassed resources of the wrong type, and a cash-constrained startup lacks the wherewithal to replace them.
”
”
Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
“
When your tissues are more lax, your joints don’t have the integrity they should because they’re stretched out,” says Dr. Starrett. This impairs your proprioception, the sense of where your limbs are oriented in space and in relation to one another, which is a huge factor in mobility and stability. When you’re not getting that proprioceptive feedback, your movement patterns are thrown
”
”
Stacy T. Sims (Roar: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life)
“
It's not out of the question that eventually, using Ai, to realistically shield and synthesize the "envelope" of a specific environment, and then actualizing destructive and constructive interference patterns will lead to, if not instantaneous materialization, then certainly a directional indication towards the most visible source of that matching vibrational resonance model. I call this the "frequencies equation.
”
”
Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
“
She was gracious and welcoming. She immediately showed us to the room we would share: twin beds under flesh-pink chenille spreads, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Cut lilacs in a big vase and a crystal carafe of water with matching glasses, which I thought very elegant. When we came downstairs again, she led us out to the back porch, where a table was already set—rose-patterned china and linen napkins and a small candelabra not yet lit. Her husband, the professor, was mixing drinks at a wicker cart. “Mint juleps, no less,” he said, by way of welcome, the mint—he held a bunch in his hand—plucked from a mess of it growing wild beside the back steps.
”
”
Alice McDermott (Absolution)
“
The reason you have not already gotten what you desire is because you are holding yourself in a vibrational holding pattern that does not match the vibration of your desire. That is the only reason—ever! And an important thing for you to now understand is that if you will stop and think about it, or, more important, stop and feel about it, you can identify your very discord.
”
”
Esther Hicks (Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires (Law of Attraction Book 7))
“
The reason you have not already gotten what you desire is because you are holding yourself in a vibrational holding pattern that does not match the vibration of your desire. That is the only reason—ever!
”
”
Esther Hicks (Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires)
“
But the grand thing about people was that you could also choose to focus on particular faces, really see them, and find a wealth of stories. So many people with so many lives, each a separate little mystery. Infinite detail, like Pattern. Look close at his fractal lines, and you’d realize each little ridge had an entire architecture of its own. Look close at a given person, and you’d see their uniqueness—see that they didn’t quite match whatever broad category you’d first put them in.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3))
“
The action of the virus is unique. It begins by attacking the respiratory system, the lining of the lungs and the bronchial in particular. The victim develops a cough, which serves to propagate the virus. Then it spreads to the other internal organs and the brain. We know of no other viral epidemic where the pattern of symptoms match this one. It's a virus that we've never seen before.
”
”
Patrick Lynch (Carriers)
“
Shirt"
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—
Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
”
”
Robert Pinsky
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1.1M ./scripts 58M ./cloud9 74M . You can also use tee to write the output to several files at the same time, as shown in this example: root@beaglebone:/opt# du ‐d1 ‐h | tee /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt /tmp/3.txt Filter Commands (from sort to xargs) There are filtering commands, each of which provides a useful function: sort: This command has several options, including (‐r) sorts in reverse; (‐f) ignores case; (‐d) uses dictionary sorting, ignoring punctuation; (‐n) numeric sort; (‐b) ignores blank space; (‐i) ignores control characters; (‐u) displays duplicate lines only once; and (‐m) merges multiple inputs into a single output. wc (word count): This can be used to calculate the number of words, lines, or characters in a stream. For example: root@beaglebone:/tmp# wc < animals.txt 4 4 18 This has returned that there are 4 lines, 4 words, and 18 characters. You can select the values independently by using (‐l) for line count; (‐w) for word count; (‐m) for character count; and (‐c) for the byte count (which would also be 18 in this case). head: Displays the first lines of the input. This is useful if you have a very long file or stream of information and you want to examine only the first few lines. By default it will display the first 10 lines. You can specify the number of lines using the ‐n option. For example, to get the first five lines of output of the dmesg command (display message or driver message), which displays the message buffer of the kernel, you can use the following: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | head ‐n5 [ 0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0 [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct [ 0.000000] Linux version 3.13.4-bone5(root@imx6q-sabrelite-1gb-0) tail: This is just like head except that it displays the last lines of a file or stream. Using it in combination with dmesg provides useful output, as shown here: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg | tail ‐n2 [ 36.123251] libphy: 4a101000.mdio:00 - Link is Up - 100/Full [ 36.123421] IPv6:ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0:link becomes ready grep: A very powerful filter command that can parse lines using text and regular expressions. You can use this command to filter output with options, including (‐i) ignore case; (‐m 5) stop after five matches; (‐q) silent, will exit with return status 0 if any matches are found; (‐e) specify a pattern; (‐c) print a count of matches; (‐o) print only the matching text; and (‐l) list the filename of the file containing the match. For example, the following examines the dmesg output for the first three occurrences of the string “usb,” using ‐i to ignore case: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i ‐m3 usb [ 1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs [ 1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub [ 1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb You can combine pipes together. For example, you get the exact same output by using head and displaying only the first three lines of the grep output: root@beaglebone:/tmp# dmesg |grep ‐i usb |head ‐n3 [ 1.948582] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbfs [ 1.948637] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub [ 1.948795] usbcore: registered new device driver usb xargs: This is a very powerful filter command that enables you to construct an argument list that you use to call another command or tool. In the following example, a text file args.txt that contains three strings is used to create three new files. The output of cat is piped to xargs, where it passes the three strings as arguments to the touch command, creating three new files a.txt, b.txt,
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Derek Molloy (Exploring BeagleBone: Tools and Techniques for Building with Embedded Linux)
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Opportunities to Build Valuable Skills Case discussions present students with the opportunity to improve their ability to speak publicly, think on their feet, and improve their problem-solving and pattern-matching skills. While being forced to use these skills will provoke anxiety for many students, they will also have an opportunity to get past that anxiety and build skills that will help them succeed in both their academic and work careers. It is easy to draw direct parallels for students between the skills employed in a case discussion and those needed in a job interview or in their careers. After all, isn’t it better to fail and learn in the simulated environment of a classroom, than make your first fumbling mistakes with real money and your job on the line?
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Espen Anderson (Teaching with Cases: A Practical Guide)
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Some have objected that if Jesus did not sin, then he was not truly human, for all humans sin. But those making that objection simply fail to realize that human beings are now in an abnormal situation. God did not create us sinful, but holy and righteous. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they sinned were truly human, and we now, though human, do not match the pattern that God intends for us when our full, sinless humanity is restored.
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Wayne Grudem (Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine)
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1. Give your toddler some large tubular pasta and a shoelace. Show her how to thread the shoelace through the pasta. 2. Take an empty long wrapping paper tube and place one end on the edge of the sofa and the other end on the floor. Give him a small ball such as a Ping Pong ball to roll down the tube. 3. Give her some individually wrapped toilet tissues, some boxes of facial tissue or some small tins of food such as tomato paste. Then let her have fun stacking them. 4. Wrap a small toy and discuss what might be inside it. Give it to him to unwrap. Then rewrap as he watches. Have him unwrap it again. 5. Cut such fruits as strawberries and bananas into chunks. Show her how to slide the chunks onto a long plastic straw. Then show her how you can take off one chunk at a time, dip it into some yogurt and eat it. 6. Place a paper towel over a water-filled glass. Wrap a rubber band around the top of the glass to hold the towel in place. Then place a penny on top of the paper towel in the centre of the glass. Give your child a pencil to poke holes in the towel until the penny sinks to the bottom of the glass. 7. You will need a small sheet of coarse sandpaper and various lengths of chunky wool. Show him how to place these lengths of wool on the sandpaper and how the strands stick to it. 8. Use a large photo or picture and laminate it or put it between the sheets of clear contact paper. Cut it into several pieces to create a puzzle. 9. Give her two glasses, one empty and one filled with water. Then show her how to use a large eyedropper in order to transfer some of the water into the empty glass. 10. Tie the ends/corners of several scarves together. Stuff the scarf inside an empty baby wipes container and pull a small portion up through the lid and then close the lid. Let your toddler enjoy pulling the scarf out of the container. 11. Give your child some magnets to put on a cookie sheet. As your child puts the magnets on the cookie sheet and takes them off, talk about the magnets’ colours, sizes, etc. 12. Use two matching sets of stickers. Put a few in a line on a page and see if he can match the pattern. Initially, you may need to lift an edge of the sticker off the page since that can be difficult to do. 13. You will need a piece of thin Styrofoam or craft foam and a few cookie cutters. Cut out shapes in the Styrofoam with the cookie cutters and yet still keep the frame of the styrofoam intact. See if your child can place the cookie cutters back into their appropriate holes. 14. Give her a collection of pompoms that vary in colour and size and see if she can sort them by colour or size into several small dishes. For younger toddlers, put a sample pompom colour in each dish. 15. Gather a selection of primary colour paint chips or cut squares of card stock or construction paper. Make sure you have several of the same colour. Choose primary colours. See if he can match the colours. Initially, he may be just content to play with the colored chips stacking them or making patterns with them.
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Kristen Jervis Cacka (Busy Toddler, Happy Mom: Over 280 Activities to Engage your Toddler in Small Motor and Gross Motor Activities, Crafts, Language Development and Sensory Play)
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Things accumulated in purses. Unless they were deliberately unloaded and all contents examined for utility occasionally, one could find oneself transporting around in one’s daily life three lipstick cases each with just a crumb of lipstick left, an old eyebrow pencil sharpener without a blade, pieces of defunct watch, odd earrings, handkerchiefs (three crumpled, one uncrumpled), two grubby powder puffs, bent hairpins, patterns of ribbon to be matched, a cigarette lighter without fuel (and two with fuel), a spark plug, some papers of Bex and a sprinkling of loose white aspirin, eleven train tickets (the return half of which had not been given up), four tram tickets, cinema and theatre stubs, seven`pence three farthings in loose change and the manda-tory throat lozenge stuck to the lining. At least, those had been the extra contents of Phryne’s bag the last time Dot had turned it out. The
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Kerry Greenwood (Murder In Montparnasse (Phryne Fisher, #12))
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Imagine if you could have a series of short online speed dates on a Skype or FaceTime-like system over the course of an evening. Siri-type technology could track your language patterns, while image recognition software could keep a log of your body language. At the end of your evening, a realistic and meaningful compatibility statistic for your matches could be delivered, giving you a much better basis on which to judge who is worthy of being graced with your real-life presence. And mathematics, as the language of science, will play a pivotal role in every one of these developments.
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Hannah Fry (The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation)