Pattern With Double Quotes

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

Ty frowned. “I don’t hate all other animals.” “Horses. Dogs. Chipmunks.” “They’re twitchy, Zane. And chipmunks have shifty eyes.” “Moths?” “They have erratic flight patterns!” Zane doubled over, laughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Ty glared at him. “I’m glad my phobias amuse you.

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment.

One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . .

He looked at the road quite a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint. Or did they see, after all?

When we dedicate ourselves to a plan and it isn’t going as we hoped, our first instinct isn’t usually to rethink it. Instead, we tend to double down and sink more resources in the plan. This pattern is called escalation of commitment. Evidence shows that entrepreneurs persist with failing strategies when they should pivot, NBA general managers and coaches keep investing in new contracts and more playing time for draft busts, and politicians continue sending soldiers to wars that didn’t need to be fought in the first place.

Investors look at economic fundamentals; traders look at each other; ‘quants’ look at the data. Dealing on the basis of historic price series was once described as technical analysis, or chartism (and there are chartists still). These savants identify visual patterns in charts of price data, often favouring them with arresting names such as ‘head and shoulders’ or ‘double bottoms’. This is pseudo-scientific bunk, the financial equivalent of astrology. But more sophisticated quantitative methods have since proved profitable for some since the 1970s’ creation of derivative markets and the related mathematics. Profitable

He looked at the road white a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint. Or did they see, after all?

He looked at the road quite a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double, like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint? Or did they see, after all?

For within the very structure of family life, in families that do or did embrace the male religions, are the almost invisibly accepted social customs and life patterns that reflect the one-time strict adherence to the biblical scriptures. Attitudes towards double-standard premarital virginity, double-standard marital fidelity, the sexual autonomy of women, illegitimacy, abortion, contraception, rape, childbirth, the importance of marriage and children to women, the responsibilities and role of women in marriage, women as sex objects, the sexual identification of passivity and aggressiveness, the roles of women and men in work or social situations, women who express their ideas, female leadership, the intellectual activities of women, the economic activities and needs of women and the automatic assumption of the male as breadwinner and protector have all become so deeply ingrained that feelings and values concerning these subjects are often regarded, by both women and men, as natural tendencies or even human instinct.

And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?” “I think so.” Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.

As I went to stand up, I felt a tiny point of pressure on my back. "Don't move," Kasey whispered. I stayed bent over. "Drop the knife," she said. "Excuse me, I'm using it," I said. She swallowed hard. "For what?" "Mom and Dad. You." The pressure on my back increased. "Drop it, Alexis." Drop it? Like I was a bad dog running around with a sock in my mouth. "How long will this take?" I asked, setting the knife on the floor. "I'm in the middle of something." Get in the bathroom," she said. The faster I indulged her, the faster it would be over with. So I walked into the bathroom. She followed, kicking the knife toward the end of the hallway and flipping on the bathroom light. "What's this all about, Kasey?" I asked, turning around. At the sight of my face, she gasped, and the point of the fireplace poker she was holding wavered in her hands. I realized a second too late that I'd missed my chance to grab it and smash it into the side of her head. "What's happening to you?" she whispered. I glanced in the mirror. The darkness had begun to spread from my mouth and eyes. It leached out in inky puddles with thin tendrils of black snaking out in delicate feathery patterns. What's happening to me? What was she talking about? "So you have a pointy stick," I said. "Big deal. get out of my way." "What are you going to do?" I sneered. "Poke me?" 'I'll hit you, Lexi." Her face was stony. "As hard as I have to." Whatever. I'm really not in the mood. "Can we talk about this in the morning?" I asked. After I kill you? "No," her eyes hardened. "Get your toothbrush." "What?" "Pick up your toothbrush, and stick it down your throat." "Kasey-" "Do it," she said. "Ugh, fine. You're sick, you know that?" "Get in the tub." "Happy?" I stuck the toothbrush into my throat. Instantly, I gagged and doubled over. "Do it again," she said. "God Kasey," I cried. Stabbing people was one thing. But making them barf- that was just disturbing.

When you are constantly reacting to having been wronged (or perhaps to what you may regard as a wrong); when you are always giving in by practically living to defend, retaliating one time after another, again and again, you then spend double that time trying to prove the whole story: because to third parties, you will frequently appear to be on the attack, and therefore potentially receiving attacks once more - henceforth an unending pattern of misunderstood retaliations.

So often fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling. They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities. But the mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters. … And they have found patterns other than the wave to do this, or worked in a doubled, moiré relation with the wave, one pattern upon another. I believe they’ve done this organically: a meander or net or explosion was simply the pattern the material needed.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

He looked at the road quite a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double, like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint. Or did they see, after all?

These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Bohm believes the same is true at our own level of existence. Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy, it is a ripple on its surface, a comparatively small "pattern of excitation" in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. "This excitation pattern is relatively autonomous and gives rise to approximately recurrent, stable and separable projections into a three-dimensional explicate order of manifestation, " states Bohm.1 2 In other words, despite its apparent materiality and enormous size, the universe does not exist in and of itself, but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. More than that, it is not even a major production of this vaster something, but is only a passing shadow, a mere hiccup in the greater scheme of things. This infinite sea of energy is not all that is enfolded in the implicate order. Because the implicate order is the foundation that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it also contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be; every configuration of matter, energy, life, and consciousness that is possible, from quasars to the brain of Shakespeare, from the double helix, to the forces that control the sizes and shapes of galaxies. And even this is not all it may contain. Bohm concedes that there is no reason to believe the implicate order is the end of things. There may be other undreamed of orders beyond it, infinite stages of further development.

54. Exhibits many double standards. The message is loud and clear: “I’m too good for that, but you’re not.” Your spouse can sit around and watch hours of TV, but if you do it, you’re selfish and lazy. Your partner can yell and curse, but if you raise your voice, you’re acting like a bitch or a bastard. This emotional abuser gets carte blanche to do whatever suits him or her, but the same rules don’t apply to you.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Wagner found that after an initial exposure to the numerical test, “sleeping on the problem” more than doubled the test subjects’ ability to discover the hidden rule. The mental recombinations of sleep helped them explore the full range of solutions to the puzzle, detecting patterns that they had failed to perceive in their initial training period. The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible.

I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without. […] I am trying, from the living urge of my own life, to force open channels of communication so far mostly closed. […] To press out naked into the dark spaces of life is perhaps to build a small part of the path along which others like myself wish to travel.

Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past. That is underlined rather dramatically by a type of experiment thought up by physicist John Wheeler, called a delayed-choice experiment. Schematically, a delayed-choice experiment is like the double-slit experiment we just described, in which you have the option of observing the path that the particle takes, except in the delayed-choice experiment you postpone your decision about whether or not to observe the path until just before the particle hits the detection screen. Delayed-choice experiments result in data identical to those we get when we choose to observe (or not observe) the which-path information by watching the slits themselves. But in this case the path each particle takes—that is, its past—is determined long after it passed through the slits and presumably had to “decide” whether to travel through just one slit, which does not produce interference, or both slits, which does. Wheeler even considered a cosmic version of the experiment, in which the particles involved are photons emitted by powerful quasars billions of light-years away. Such light could be split into two paths and refocused toward earth by the gravitational lensing of an intervening galaxy. Though the experiment is beyond the reach of current technology, if we could collect enough photons from this light, they ought to form an interference pattern. Yet if we place a device to measure which-path information shortly before detection, that pattern should disappear. The choice whether to take one or both paths in this case would have been made billions of years ago, before the earth or perhaps even our sun was formed, and yet with our observation in the laboratory we will be affecting that choice. In

It was readily apparent that Millie was fond of geometric patterns. Today she wore double diamond checks. Her blouse in black and white, her skirt in bright teal. Around her neck she wore a scarf printed with random blocks of gray and gold. Out of sight, hanging in the tiny wardrobe of her room, were five striped blouses, two sweaters knit in intricate cables of intersecting colors. Also three tartan plaid skirts and one pair of unusual trousers, blue and yellow. She wore brown-and-white saddle shoes, which she constantly thought of decorating with fine black lines.

Charles Darwin formulated his idea 50 years before genes, 100 before the double helix, and 150 before the human genome was read. But they all say the same thing. Life is a chemical reaction. Life is derived from what came before. Life is imperfect copying. Life is the accumulation and refinement of information embedded in DNA. Natural selection explains how, once it had started, life evolved on Earth. We busy ourselves refining the theory, and working out the details with a scrutiny and precision that has been enabled and invigorated by reading genome after genome, and crunching those numbers until comprehensible patterns emerge. We are the data.

I've read your last missive and reread it- in memory, as you warned me I would so long ago, preparing myself for a fall. I see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. (My wolf, with the six legs and double-banked eyes.) I try not to think of you the same way twice. Thinking builds patterns in the brain, and those patterns can be read by one sufficiently determined, and Commandant, sometimes, is sufficiently determined - I think you'd like her. So I change your shape in my thoughts. It's amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look. You're different colors of flame: Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.

„I can't get it out of my head. I can't think,” he choked. „You can do it.” She reached up and found his face. She stroked her fingertips across his cheeks, finding a pattern of scales across the tops of his cheekbones. „You're stronger than anyone I know. You're tougher than everyone. I know you can do this.” She gripped his face in her hands, offering strenght and steady calm through the surety of her touch. He stilled. (…) The collar broke apart with a hiss of dying magic and disintegrating steel. „You did it.” She threw her arms around him, hugging him tight. „I knew you could!” He sagged on top of her, breathing hard, this time from exertion. He slid his arms around her and his wings curled down too, doubling the hug.

Drelmere and sons, fine outfitters for the discerning magician!” he was shouting, his voice barely carrying over the hubbub. “Robes! Pointy hats! Beard grooming supplies! Yes, you sir, how can OH GOD HURRAAARRGLAB.” I waited patiently for him to finish decorating the pavement with his stomach contents. “Sorry,” he said, bent double and gulping. Impressively, he immediately continued his sales pitch from that position. “Looking for a new robe?” “Yes, this one’s starting to whiff a bit.” “Yes, I . . . gathered that, sir.” He took a few deep, groaning breaths into a star-patterned hanky and seemed to gather himself. “What sort of price range were you OH GOD YOUR EYES HURRAAARRGLAB.” I tapped my now bile-sodden foot. “Shall I come back later?

Lambspun’s Whodunnit Shell   Very Easy Knit with Bulky Yarn GAUGE: 2 sts/in   MATERIALS: US size 15 needles (or size to obtain gauge), 14-inch straight Very bulky yarn with gauge of 2 sts per inch   INSTRUCTIONS:     BACK: With yarn required for gauge, CO 40, 44, 46, 50, 52 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Work 11, 12, 12, 14, 15 sts. Join second ball of yarn and bind off center 6, 8, 10, 10, 10 sts. Work remaining sts, turn. Working both sides at once, bind off 1 st from the neck edge 3 times. Continue working on reaming sts until piece measures 17, 18, 18.5, 19, 19.5 inches. Place remaining 8, 9, 9, 11, 12 sts on holders.   FRONT: CO 39, 43, 45, 49, 51 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Same as for back.   FINISHING: Join shoulders with three-needle bind off. Single crochet around every edge. Hand seam sides together. Pattern courtesy of Lambspun of Colorado, Fort Collins, Colorado.

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page. They’ll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang. By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They’ll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before. It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher ‘you are speaking gibberish’ and the continental philosopher responds with ‘exactly.

I am against the planned political assassinations by our intelligence and defense agents.The CIA-FBI-DIA and DISC (Defense Industry Security Command) were set up originally to protect citizens of the USA. They became their own judges and juries, private servants of corporations with investments at home and abroad. I am against the constant destruction of evidence in criminal matters and political assassinations. Prime witnesses are murdered before or after testifying. Diaries are forged and planted in obvious places. Doubles are created to confuse. The Police Departments manipulate facts in cooperation with conspirators. I am outraged that our judicial system since 1947 has been patterned after Nazi Germany. Patsies are dead or locked away. The assassins walk the streets or leave the country - "home free". I am against using the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy. When the highest court is corrupt, there is no hope at local levels.

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm [...]. [...] Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. [...] Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet [...] was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: "now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors". Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. [...] Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! [...] School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? [...] The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. [...] Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!

When he applied this approach to a gas of quantum particles, Einstein discovered an amazing property: unlike a gas of classical particles, which will remain a gas unless the particles attract one another, a gas of quantum particles can condense into some kind of liquid even without a force of attraction between them. This phenomenon, now called Bose-Einstein condensation,* was a brilliant and important discovery in quantum mechanics, and Einstein deserves most of the credit for it. Bose had not quite realized that the statistical mathematics he used represented a fundamentally new approach. As with the case of Planck’s constant, Einstein recognized the physical reality, and the significance, of a contrivance that someone else had devised.49 Einstein’s method had the effect of treating particles as if they had wavelike traits, as both he and de Broglie had suggested. Einstein even predicted that if you did Thomas Young’s old double-slit experiment (showing that light behaved like a wave by shining a beam through two slits and noting the interference pattern) by using a beam of gas molecules, they would interfere with one another as if they were waves. “A beam of gas molecules which passes through an aperture,” he wrote, “must undergo a diffraction analogous to that of a light ray.

The morning after / my death” The morning after my death we will sit in cafés but I will not be there I will not be * There was the great death of birds the moon was consumed with fire the stars were visible until noon. Green was the forest drenched with shadows the roads were serpentine A redwood tree stood alone with its lean and lit body unable to follow the cars that went by with frenzy a tree is always an immutable traveller. The moon darkened at dawn the mountain quivered with anticipation and the ocean was double-shaded: the blue of its surface with the blue of flowers mingled in horizontal water trails there was a breeze to witness the hour * The sun darkened at the fifth hour of the day the beach was covered with conversations pebbles started to pour into holes and waves came in like horses. * The moon darkened on Christmas eve angels ate lemons in illuminated churches there was a blue rug planted with stars above our heads lemonade and war news competed for our attention our breath was warmer than the hills. * There was a great slaughter of rocks of spring leaves of creeks the stars showed fully the last king of the Mountain gave battle and got killed. We lay on the grass covered dried blood with our bodies green blades swayed between our teeth. * We went out to sea a bank of whales was heading South a young man among us a hero tried to straddle one of the sea creatures his body emerged as a muddy pool as mud we waved goodbye to his remnants happy not to have to bury him in the early hours of the day We got drunk in a barroom the small town of Fairfax had just gone to bed cherry trees were bending under the weight of their flowers: they were involved in a ceremonial dance to which no one had ever been invited. * I know flowers to be funeral companions they make poisons and venoms and eat abandoned stone walls I know flowers shine stronger than the sun their eclipse means the end of times but I love flowers for their treachery their fragile bodies grace my imagination’s avenues without their presence my mind would be an unmarked grave. * We met a great storm at sea looked back at the rocking cliffs the sand was going under black birds were leaving the storm ate friends and foes alike water turned into salt for my wounds. * Flowers end in frozen patterns artificial gardens cover the floors we get up close to midnight search with powerful lights the tiniest shrubs on the meadows A stream desperately is running to the ocean The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage (The Post-Apollo Press, 1990)

But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me—but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless—but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don’t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn’t that best for everybody? So I learned very young to watch people stumbling through their one or two basic rituals, and then perform the same steps myself with flawless mimicry. This morning that talent served me well, because as I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing in my head except phlegm, and if I had not learned by rote what I was supposed to do each morning I don’t think I could have done it. The dull ache of a major cold had seeped into my bones and pushed all capacity for thinking out of my brain. But

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savouring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronised, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

It is a scandal—or, rather, it should be a scandal and one wonders why it isn’t—that the US prison population, after reaching a postwar low in the early 1970s, has since grown more than 500 percent. The United States locks up a higher percentage of its own population than any other nation in the world. Even with extraordinary prison construction projects over the last decades, the cells are still overfull. This massive expansion cannot be explained by a growing criminality of the US population or the enhanced efficiency of law enforcement. In fact, US crime rates in this period have remained relatively constant. The scandal of US prison expansion is even more dramatic when one observes how it operates along race divisions. Latinos are incarcerated at a rate almost double that of whites, and African Americans at a rate almost six times as high. The racial imbalance of those on death row is even more extreme. It is not hard to find shocking statistics. One in eight black US males in their twenties, for instance, is in jail or prison on any given day. The number of African Americans under correctional control today, Michelle Alexander points out, is greater than the number of slaves in the mid-nineteenth century. Some authors refer to the racially skewed prison expansion as a return to elements of the plantation system or the institution of new Jim Crow laws. Keep in mind that this differential racial pattern of imprisonment is not isolated to the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, if one considers immigrant detention centers and refugee camps as arms of the carceral apparatus, those with darker skin are disproportionately in captivity.

Cheobawn froze. The Dark of the Moons. Spider’s children knew of this time as well. It was the one night, in spring, as the snows melted from the high places, when the double moons stayed hidden from sight. It was the night that only occurred every thirty years, when Spider’s children awoke in their shells buried in the warm sand of a thousand nameless beaches on the shores of a thousand nameless seas on a thousand nameless planets. It was the night they remembered that they needed to go home, home to the shallow, salty ocean named Orson’s Sea by a race of humans who had thought themselves immune to the rules of the patterning of the place upon which they stood.

Page 11: Yet the very fact of contact over a period of time has inevitably produced changes among the overseas Chinese. Like Chinese everywhere they have a well-ingrained cultural pattern of adaptability and flexibility. Culturally and socially this minority in Thailand has learned to accept Thai ways without, however, losing its attachment to Things Chinese. The question is whether these changes represent simply protective coloration or true identification with Thai society. It is the seemingly opportunistic and vacillating quality of their cultural and social dualism which has made the Chinese, in the opinion of many responsible Thai, only summer patriots and fair-weather citizens. In the other countries of [Southeast Asia], the colonial powers protected and encouraged minority interests, and under colonialism these groups flourished.

Page 32: The phenomenal commercial success of the Chinese in Thailand, and indeed throughout Southeast Asia, has no single or simple explanation. Certainly this success is partly attributable to such personal qualities as perseverance, capacity for hard work, and business acumen, but one of the most important factors has been the tight social and economic organization developed by overseas Chinese communities. Such communities in Southeast Asia appear remarkable self-sufficient and to many observers seem to form alien societies within the host society. They have proved unusually effective, on the one hand, for encouraging mutual aid and co-operation among heterogeneous linguistic and socio-economic groups and, on the other, for providing protection from hostile or competitive individuals and governments. Better than most people the Chinese have learned the dictum that ‘in unity there is strength’. Their organizational cohesion furnishes much of the answer not only to the economic well-being of the Chinese as a group but also to the persistence of their cultural patterns and values in an alien and sometimes unfriendly social environment. This is a community of interest as well, for the wealth accumulated by the successful business man is used in part to support a multiplicity of ethnic organizations: trade guilds, a powerful Chinese Chamber of Commerce, dialect associations, benevolent and charitable organizations, surname associations, religious groups for both men and women, sports associations and social clubs.

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savouring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronised, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

There were a number of ways in which the homosexual dimension of these stories could be disguised or seemingly eliminated. For example, the obstacle to the heterosexual romance might be presented not as the love between the two men but as a shared attitude toward women, whether as contempt (often disguised as womanizing), distrust, or some other aversive reaction. In musicals, where double readings are nearly always possible, these kinds of “disguises” will seem either fully effective (from resolutely “straight” perspectives) or sure signs of a hidden subtext (for those inclined and equipped to read them).28 In Singin’ in the Rain, the male friendship between Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown may well have been patterned on An American in Paris (although potential models are legion), with Donald O’Connor’s dancing adding a spirited physical dimension to the cynical, wisecracking, piano-playing sidekick of Oscar Levant in the earlier film. The homoerotic overtones are somewhat more overt in the earlier film, especially given Levant’s narcissism and insinuating delivery, which always seems to hint at unspoken meanings.

The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, it’s actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost of deep connection to spouses, children, and friends.

I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if God acted, then surely my going to school was His will. The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong. While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery, perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the only one about which I felt confident. BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands. God would score the toss. I didn’t sleep the night before. My brain conjured so many scenes of disaster, it burned as if with a fever. At five I got out of bed, ate breakfast, and drove the forty miles to Utah State University. I was led into a white classroom with thirty other students, who took their seats and placed their pencils on their desks. A middle-aged woman handed out tests and strange pink sheets I’d never seen before. “Excuse me,” I said when she gave me mine. “What is this?” “It’s a bubble sheet. To mark your answers.” “How does it work?” I said. “It’s the same as any other bubble sheet.” She began to move away from me, visibly irritated, as if I were playing a prank. “I’ve never used one before.” She appraised me for a moment. “Fill in the bubble of the correct answer,” she said. “Blacken it completely. Understand?” The test began. I’d never sat at a desk for four hours in a room full of people. The noise was unbelievable, yet I seemed to be the only person who heard it, who couldn’t divert her attention from the rustle of turning pages and the scratch of pencils on paper. When it was over I suspected that I’d failed the math, and I was positive that I’d failed the science. My answers for the science portion couldn’t even be called guesses. They were random, just patterns of dots on that strange pink sheet. I drove home. I felt stupid, but more than stupid I felt ridiculous. Now that I’d seen the other students—watched them march into the classroom in neat rows, claim their seats and calmly fill in their answers, as if they were performing a practiced routine—it seemed absurd that I had thought I could score in the top fifteen percent. That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine.

The Viking invasions began as smash-and-grab raids to take as much as possible and go, but some groups decided to settle down and make a new life on the land they claimed. Their language was similar enough to Old English that they could communicate with the Anglo-Saxons without too much difficulty, and over time their own way of speaking mixed into the surrounding language, leaving vocabulary and expressions behind that don’t quite fit the rest of the pattern at the old Germanic layer. Much of the Scandinavian influence in English is so well absorbed that it doesn’t cause any weirdness. For example, there was a sequence in Germanic that became a ‘sk’ sound in Scandinavian and a ‘sh’ sound in English. When we mixed some Scandinavian words into English, we got some doubles like skirt and shirt, but we don’t even think of those as the same word, so the intrusion is unnoticeable.

Switching costs aren’t just financial expenditures; they can also include inconveniences and risks incurred when a customer changes from one vendor to another. Consider, for example, the costs and risks when switching dog walkers. A family must trust the new walker with keys to their residence, must brief the new walker on their pet’s patterns and preferences, and run the risk that their dog may not take to this new human in its life. Switching costs can be a double-edged sword. For example, to attract customers, Baroo had to overcome these barriers. However, once it did, Baroo retained customers because they faced the high cost of switching to a competitor.

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. So much by way of futile digression: the pattern is fixed and protest alone will not halt the iron glacier moving upon us.

We can see this diversity mechanism clearly in house hunting. If I were to give you a budget to choose your perfect house, you would have a clear idea of what to buy, but it would typically be a bit boring. That’s because when you have one house, it cannot be too weak in any one dimension: it cannot be too small, too far from work, too noisy or too weird, so you’ll opt for a conventional house. On the other hand, if I were to double your budget and tell you to buy two houses, your pattern of decision-making would change. You would now be looking to buy two significantly different properties with complementary strengths – perhaps a flat in the city and a house in the countryside.

British vs American Crochet Terms British English US-American English dc double crochet sc single crochet htr half treble crochet hdc half double crochet tr treble dc double crochet dtr double treble tr treble trtr triple treble dtr double treble miss skip tension gauge yoh yarn over hook yo yarn over *All pattern instructions use US-American English terms*

All part of the morning ritual: Astor never wanted anything Rita gave her to eat. And I found it oddly comforting that I knew what would happen next, as Rita and the kids followed the every-morning script and I waited for the cold pills to kick in and return to me the power of independent thought. Until then, no need to worry; I didn’t have to do anything but follow the pattern.

Savona escorted me back to the Residence. For most of our journey the talk was in our usual pattern--he made outrageous compliments, which I turned into jokes. Once he said, “May I count on you to grace the Khazhred ball tomorrow?” “If the sight of me in my silver gown, dancing as often as I can, is your definition of grace, well, nothing easier,” I replied, wondering what he would do if I suddenly flirted back in earnest. He smiled, kissed my hand, and left. As I trod up the steps alone, I realized that he had never really talked with me about any serious subject, in spite of his obvious admiration. I thought back over the picnic. No serious subject had been discussed there, either, but I remembered some of the light, quick flirtatious comments he exchanged with some of the other ladies, and how much he appeared to appreciate their flirting right back. Would he appreciate it if I did? Except I can’t, I thought, walking down the hall to my room. Clever comments with double meanings; a fan pressed against someone’s wrist in different ways to hint at different things; all these things I’d observed and understood the meanings of, but I couldn’t see myself actually performing them even if I could think of them quickly enough. What troubled me most was trying to figure out Savona’s real intent. He certainly wasn’t courting me, I realized as I pushed aside my tapestry. What other purpose would there be in such a long, one-sided flirtation? My heart gave a bound of anticipation when I saw a letter waiting and I recognized the style of the Unknown. You ask what I think, and I will tell you that I admire without reservation your ability to solve your problems in a manner unforeseen by any, including those who would consider themselves far more clever than you. That was all. I read it through several times, trying to divine whether it was a compliment or something else entirely. He’s waiting to see what I do about Tamara, I thought at last. “And in return?” That was what Tamara had said. This is the essence of politics, I realized. One creates an interest, or, better, an obligation, that causes others to act according to one’s wishes. I grabbed up a paper, dipped my pen, and wrote swiftly: Today I have come to two realizations. Now, I well realize that every courtier in Athanarel probably saw all this by their tenth year. Nonetheless, I think I finally see the home-thrust of politics. Everyone who has an interest in such things seems to be waiting for me to make some sort of capital with respect to the situation with Tamara, and won’t they be surprised when I do nothing at all! Truth to say, I hold no grudge against Tamara. I’d have to be a mighty hypocrite to fault her for wishing to become a queen, when I tried to do the same a year back--though I really think her heart lies elsewhere--and if I am right, I got in her way yet again. Which brings me to my second insight: that Savona’s flirtation with me is just that, and not a courtship. The way I define courtship is that one befriends the other, tries to become a companion and not just a lover. I can’t see why he so exerted himself to seek me out, but I can’t complain, for I am morally certain that his interest is a good part of what has made me popular. (Though all this could end tomorrow). “Meliara?” Nee’s voice came through my tapestry. “The concert begins at the next time change.” I signed the letter hastily, sealed it, and left it lying there as I hurried to change my gown. No need to summon Mora, I thought; she was used to this particular exchange by now.

The basis of Rickover's authority was his dual role which tied him to both the Commission and the Navy. Because he quickly sensed the possibilities of this arrangement, he was able to turn it to his advantage. Instead of a double infringement on his authority, the dual organization became a vehicle for unusual independence. Rickover achieved this independence, however, by avoiding routine procedures that would fix organizational patterns. In one instance he would act as a naval officer, in another as a Commission official. This unpredictable and pragmatic approach gave him the freedom he sought. The dual organization itself simply provided the opportunity for independence.

Libchaber's spectrum diagrams showed vividly the precise pattern of period-doubling predicted by the theory. The spikes of new frequencies stand out clearly above the experimental noise. Feigenbaum's scaling theory predicted not only when and where the new frequencies would arrive but also how strong they would be-their amplitudes.

This double diverge-converge pattern was first introduced in 2005 by the British Design Council, which called it the double-diamond design process model.

I am disturbed to discover that my colleagues have invented a new game which seems to involve attempting to kill me in every juvenile way that presents itself to them. They delight in surprising me with shoves into the paths of oncoming double-decker buses, constructing ridiculous rope-and-pulley devices with the aim of dropping heavy furniture on my head, placing tripwires at the tops of escalators, and other such inanities. They persist for some weeks, during which I become increasingly adept at avoiding sudden death by blackly humorous means. I feel that my senses are sharpened day by day, that my sight is keener, my reflexes quicker. Soon I can detect by the smell of linseed oil alone the presence of a cricket-bat wielding acquaintance in the bathroom. Everything is enhanced. Colours are richer, noises are louder. I awaken to the pattern of life, the weight of deeds. Eventually my heightened awareness evolves into a vividly focused paranoia. I can only retreat; I move surreptitiously to a small seaside resort on the east coast and wait, slowly, for a death of my own choosing.

I'm not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I've seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there's still so much to see. I double I'll ever cure this wanderlust, and I'm content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it.

What Can You Do About a Passive Child? Parents of passive children have a double problem. These kids have the same boundary problems of irresponsibility or resistance to ownership, but it’s harder to engage them in the learning process. Here are some ways children exhibit passivity: • Procrastination. The child responds to you at the last possible moment. He finishes school tasks late and “makes” you wait in the car for him to get ready for school or other meetings. When you ask him to turn the music down or set the dinner table, a normally energetic and quick-moving child slows his pace down immeasurably. He takes enormous time to do what he doesn’t want, and little time to do what he wants. • Ignoring. Your child shuts your instruction out, either pretending not to hear you or simply disregarding you. She keeps attending to her toy, her book, or her daydreaming. • Lack of initiative and risk-taking. Your child avoids new experiences, such as meeting new friends or trying out a sport or artistic medium, and he stays in familiar activities and patterns. • Living in a fantasy world. Your child tends to be more inward-oriented than invested in the real world. He seems happier and more alive when he is lost in his head, and he retreats there at the first sign of problems or discomfort. • Passive defiance. The child resists your requests by looking blankly or sullenly at you, then simply doing nothing. She is obviously angry or contemptuous of your authority, but shows you without words. • Isolation. Your child avoids contact with others, preferring to stay in her room. Rather than confront, argue, or fight with you, she instead reacts against some problem you present by leaving you. Passive kids aren’t bad or evil. They simply have a particular way of approaching life that

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment.

In the age of computer simulation, when flows in everything from jet turbines to heart valves are modeled on supercomputers, it is hard to remember how easily nature can confound an experimenter. In fact, no computer today can completely simulate even so simple a system as Libchaber's liquid helium cell. Whenever a good physicist examines a simulation, he must wonder what bit of reality was left out, what potential surprise was sidestepped. Libchaber liked to say that he would not want to fly in a simulated airplane-he would wonder what had been missed. Furthermore, he would say that computer simulations help to build intuition or to refine calculations, but they do not give birth to genuine discovery. This, at any rate, is the experimenter's creed. His experiment was so immaculate, his scientific goals so abstract, that there were still physicists who considered Libchaber's work more philosophy or mathematics than physics. He believed, in turn, that the ruling standards of his field were reductionist, giving primacy to the properties of atoms. "A physicist would ask me, How does this atom come here and stick there? And what is the sensitivity to the surface? And can you write the Hamiltonian of the system? "And if I tell him, I don't care, what interests me is this shape, the mathematics of the shape and the evolution, the bifurcation from this shape to that shape to this shape, he will tell me, that's not physics, you are doing mathematics. Even today he will tell me that. Then what can I say? Yes, of course, I am doing mathematics. But it is relevant to what is around us. That is nature, too." The patterns he found were indeed abstract. They were mathematical. They said nothing about the properties of liquid helium or copper or about the behavior of atoms near absolute zero. But they were the patterns that Libchaber's mystical forbears had dreamed of. They made legitimate a realm of experimentation in which many scientists, from chemists to electrical engineers, soon became explorers, seeking out the new elements of motion. The patterns were there to see the first time eh succeeded in raising the temperature enough to isolate the first period-doubling, and the next, and the next. According to the new theory, the bifurcations should have produced a geometry with precise scaling, and that was just what Libchaber saw, the universal Feigenbaum constants turning in that instant from a mathematical ideal to a physical reality, measurable and reproducible. He remembered the feeling long afterward, the eerie witnessing of one bifurcation after another and then the realization that he was seeing an infinite cascade, rich with structure. It was, as he said, amusing.

I gave him a sideways look and vowed in that moment I would learn—and not only learn, but master—the gladiatorial style of the dimachaerus: the double-sword-wielding warrior who fought with a blade in each hand. Mael had been the Cantii equivalent of a dimachaerus, an absolute genius with two blades. Growing up, he had developed a series of drills for himself. For two years he’d tried to get me to fight two-handed with him, but I’d been happy with my sword and shield and spear. And the other young Cantii warriors soon tired of getting themselves beaten black and blue fighting against him. So, mostly, he fought the weathered stump of an ancient, lightning-blasted oak. Mael used it as a practice post, and the old forest guardian bore the scars of its encounters with his blades graciously. I thought about all the times I’d sat in the grass watching him practice, and wondered if I could reproduce those patterns from memory. There was only one way to find out.

Writing and repairing software generally takes far more time and is far more expensive than initially anticipated. “Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”19 De Jager concurs: “If people have learned anything about large software projects, it is that many of them miss their deadlines, and those that are on time seldom work perfectly. … Indeed, on-time error-free installations of complex computer systems are rare.”20 Even small changes to code can require wholesale retesting of entire software systems. While at MIT in the 1980s, I helped develop some moderately complex software. I learned then that the biggest problems arise from bugs that creep into programs during early stages of design. They become deeply embedded in the software’s interdependent network of logic, and if left unfixed can have cascading repercussions throughout the software. But fixing them often requires tracing out consequences that have metastasized in every direction from the original error. As the amount of computer code in our world soars (doubling every two years in consumer products alone), we need practical ways to minimize the number of bugs. But software development is still at a preindustrial stage—it remains more craft than engineering. Programmers resemble artisans: they handcraft computer code out of basic programming languages using logic, intuition, and pattern-recognition skills honed over years of experience.

The similarity to Nintendo or PlayStation has a chilling implication: Researchers have found that when players do well at a video game, the amount of dopamine released in their brains roughly doubles, and that this surge can linger for at least a half-hour afterward. So the more “price points” you can see, the more your brain will fool itself into thinking it has detected a predictable pattern in the numbers—and the more powerfully your dopamine system will kick in. As we’ve seen, it can take as few as three price changes to make you think you’ve spotted a trend; in years past, when investors got their stock prices out of the newspaper, it could take three days to gather that much data, while today a market website will get you there in less than sixty seconds. No wonder, by the late 1990s, the typical “investor” in popular tech stocks like Qualcomm, VeriSign, and Puma Technology owned them for an average of less than eight days at a time.

Maclin’s Brownies Melt 9 ounces of Nestle’s semi-sweet chocolate bits over hot water (double boiler!) with 1 stick butter cut into pieces. Beat 2 eggs with ½ cup white sugar until thick. Add ½ cup white flour, sifted with ¼ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon baking powder. Add the chocolate mixture and 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 cup (or less if you prefer) of walnut bits. Pour batter into 8” x 8” greased pan. Mix about 2 tablespoons of brown sugar with 1 teaspoon of melted butter and dot the top of the brownies. Bake at 375° for about 20 minutes, sometimes longer. Test with a toothpick. Cool on a rack after baking. When brownies have cooled, sprinkle with powdered sugar (you may use a doily set over brownies if you prefer a sugar pattern). Choose Your Friends

The basic protocols of Aboriginal society, like most societies, include respecting and hearing all points of view in a yarn. Narcissists demand this right, then refuse to allow other points of view on the grounds that any other opinion somehow infringes their freedom of speech or is offensive. They destroy the basic social contract of reciprocity (which allows people to build a reputation of generosity based on sharing to ensure ongoing connectedness and support), shattering this framework of harmony with a few words of nasty gossip. They apply double standards and break down systems of give-and-take until every member of a social group becomes isolated, lost in a Darwinian struggle for power and dwindling resources that destroys everything. Then they move on to another place, another group. Feel free to extrapolate this pattern globally and historically.

A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs.

A closer look at still more refined educational elites amplifies this pattern. BAs from even modestly higher-ranked schools boost incomes by 10 to 40 percent more than BAs from lower-ranked schools and nearly double the rate of return on the tuition. Super-elite BAs generate still greater income boosts, more than doubling the gains produced by an average BA, and the top incomes from super-elite schools more than triple the incomes of the top earners with average BAs. (The highest-paid 10 percent of Harvard graduates average salaries of $250,000 just six years after graduation.) A recent broader survey reports—incredibly—that nearly 50 percent of America’s corporate leaders, 60 percent of its financial leaders, and 50 percent of its highest government officials attended only twelve universities.

you’re going to need a blade. Now …” He moved to the next box, tearing off the lid, nails and all. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and look through a few of these yourself? See if anything jumps out at you. Remember, you’re looking for a blade. Not a mace or a maul or a huge spiked chain that you’d probably hurt yourself with trying to learn.” “Fine.” I wandered down the aisle, looking at random articles. “But I still say the flail looked like it could bash in a vamp’s head pretty efficiently.” “Allison—” “I’m going, I’m going.” More wooden boxes lined the aisle to either side, covered in dust. I brushed back a film of cobwebs and grime to read the words on the side of the nearest carton. Longswords: Medieval Europe, 12th century. The rest was lost to time and age. Another read: Musketeer Rapie … something or other. Another apparently had a full suit of gladiator armor, whatever a gladiator was. A clang from Kanin’s direction showed him holding up a large, double-bladed ax, before he laid it aside and moved on to another shelf. One box caught my attention. It was long and narrow, like the other boxes, but instead of words, it had strange symbols printed down the side. Curious, I wrenched off the lid and reached in, shifting through layers of plastic and foam, until my fingers closed around something long and smooth. I pulled it out. The long, slightly curved sheath was black and shiny, and a hilt poked out of the end, marked with diamond pattern in black and red. I grasped that hilt and pulled the blade free, sending a metallic shiver through the air and down my spine. As soon as I drew it, I knew I had found what Kanin wanted. The blade gleamed in the darkness, long and slender, like a silver ribbon. I could sense the razor sharpness of the edge without even touching it. The sword itself was light and graceful, and fit perfectly into my palm, as if it had been made for me. I swept it in a wide arc, feeling it slice through the air, and imagined this was a blade that could pass through a snarling rabid without even slowing down. A chuckle interrupted me. Kanin stood a few yards away, arms crossed, shaking his head. His mouth was pulled into a resigned grin. “I should have known,” he said, coming forward. “I should have known you would be drawn to that. It’s very fitting, actually.

The first solar photovoltaic panel built by Bell Labs in 1954 cost $1,000 per watt of power it could produce.128 In 2008, modules used in solar arrays cost $3.49 per watt; by 2018, they cost 40 cents per watt.129 According to a pattern known as Swanson’s Law, the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to fall by 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. The full price of solar electricity (including land, labor to deploy the solar panels, and other equipment required) falls by about 15 percent with every doubling. The amount of solar-generated power has been doubling every two years or less for the past forty years—as costs have been falling.130 At this rate, solar power is only five doublings—or less than twelve years—away from being able to meet 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Power usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. Taking that into account, inexpensive renewable sources can potentially provide more power than the world needs in less than twenty years. This is happening because of the momentum that solar has already gained and the constant refinements to the underlying technologies, which are advancing on exponential curves. What Ray Kurzweil said about Craig Venter’s progress when he had just sequenced 1 percent of the human genome—that Venter was actually halfway to 100 percent because on an exponential curve, the time required to get from 0.01 percent to 1 percent is equal to the time required to get from 1 percent to 100 percent—applies to solar capture too.

The Baldwin strategy was the best way to play the game when nothing was known about which cards had already been played. Their analysis was for a single deck because that was the only version played in Nevada at the time. The Baldwin group also showed that the advice of the reigning gambling experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra 2 percent advantage. Any strategy table for blackjack must tell the player how to act for each case that can arise from the ten possible values of the dealer’s upcard versus each of the fifty-five different pairs of cards that can be dealt to the player. To find the best way for the player to manage his cards in each of these 550 different situations, you need to calculate all the possible ways subsequent cards can be dealt and the payoffs that result. There may be thousands, even millions of ways each hand can play out. Do this for each of the 550 situations and the computations just for the complete deck become enormous. If you are dealt a pair, the strategy table must tell you whether or not to split it. The next decision is whether or not to double down, which is to double your bet and draw exactly one card to the first two cards of a hand. Your final decision is whether to draw more cards or to stop (“stand”). Once I had figured out a winning strategy, I planned to condense these myriad decisions onto tiny pictorial cards, just as I had with the Baldwin strategy. This would allow me to visualize patterns, making it much easier to recall what to do in each of the 550 possible cases.

In 1949, the African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he saw the ruins of the ghetto the Nazis had established there and then completely destroyed after suppressing the uprising. Three years later, Du Bois wrote a short article a recounting his trip called “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”: “In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind as a separate and unique thing, as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery…. The race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status, and was a matter of cultural patterns, teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.» [...] Moving beyond a conception of his own experience as “a separate and unique thing”, Du Bois comes to an understanding of race that is instead multidirectional. […] Du Bois’s post-Warsaw vision brings black and Jewish histories into relation without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness. Proximate pasts are neither “separate and unique” nor “equal”; rather, a form of modified “double consciousness” arises capable of conjoining them in an open-ended assemblage.

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming 9 feet tall, and we certainly don’t want them to grow on an endless exponential curve; rather, we want them to grow to a point of maturity, and then to maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to grow, but only until they are ripe, at which point we harvest them and plant afresh. This is how growth works in the living world. It levels off. The capitalist economy looks nothing like this. Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. It is the definition of absurdity. We do see this pattern playing out in nature, sometimes, but only with devastating consequences: cancer cells are programmed to replicate for the sake of replicating, but the result is deadly to living systems.

The knurl-forming process, he says, “is the machining equivalent of magic.” The diamond pattern is produced by two knurling wheels that cut intersecting troughs in opposite directions. Each wheel is like a tractor plowing furrows in a farm field—when it moves to an adjacent strip of field, it needs to fall into the exact same groove in the area of overlap, or the tracking will be off. For that to happen on a knurling machine, the wheels have to match perfectly. A discrepancy of two-thousandths of an inch can create double-tracking, which compromises the grip value of the knurl. Knurling wheels sold as identical typically vary by five-thousandths of an inch.

The relative absence of poor Jews has led many non-Jews to believe all Jews have money. But Jews have simply aided their needy more than other groups have aided theirs. This pattern continues. To cite one large-scale example, between 1948 and 1951, Israel almost doubled its population by absorbing more than 500,000, largely penniless, Jewish refugees who had fled the Arab world. The 650,000 Jews of Israel, with help from Jews elsewhere, housed, clothed, fed, educated, and provided a livelihood for these Jews. In contrast, at the very same time, an equal number of Palestinian refugees were left in great poverty by all the Arab states, and this never changed, despite the enormous growth of Arab oil wealth. It was non-Arabs who have provided the large majority of the Arab refugees’ aid. Jews’ aid to other Jews has led to the anti-Jewish canard that “Jews only care for their own.” Aside from this being untrue, that is not the point. Those who make this charge are not so much complaining that “Jews only care for their own” as that “only Jews care for their own.” THE

Poor Communication As one of the most important elements of a healthy and functioning family is communication, one of the first things to go in a dysfunctional family is communication. In a dysfunctional family there is no communication or communication that is done is shared in an indirect, abusive, and dishonest manner.  This communication, rather than being done to understand one another is done in order to control another. Often it will restrict the free expression of the members of the family and will neglect the feelings and opinions of the children. It will also lead to arguing and shouting matches that do not lead to the individuals being heard.   Additionally, the communication is often a vehicle for blame and shame. Another toxic pattern is the prevailing’s of double messages, which is when a parent says one thing but does another. From this the child learns that they cannot trust their parents and that it is justified to lie.

On the table beside the bowl, a peach is cut in half, revealing its pit. This use of light may support speculation among art historians that Vermeer used a mechanical optical device, such as a double concave lens mounted in a camera obscura, to help him achieve realistic light patterns in his paintings.

generous sprinkling of stars in the night sky poured down a silver-blue glow that filtered through the tree leaves and cast everyone in mottled patterns of shadow and specks of light. "It would be an audacious move," Lord Reginald was saying, having just heard the outline of McGantry’s plan. "Enough so, I dare say, to stand a good chance of succeeding." "All we need is for the wind to hold," O’Malley pointed out. "Then the rest of it can work." "It’s held this long, it’ll last at least until daybreak. That’ll give us all the time we need," said McGantry. Lufkin, whose nature and station caused him to usually remain a strong but silent presence on the periphery of things, surprised

Choose a dojo. There’s Ross Jeffries and the school of Speed Seduction, where subliminal language patterns are used to get a girl aroused. Or Mystery and the Mystery Method, in which social dynamics are manipulated to snag the most desirable woman in a club. Or David DeAngelo and Double Your Dating, in which he advocates keeping the upper hand over a woman through a combination of humor and arrogance that he calls cocky funny. Or Gunwitch and Gunwitch Method, in which the only thing students have to do is project animalistic sexuality and escalate physical contact until the woman stops them. His crude motto: “Make the ho say no.” Or there’s David X, David Shade, Rick H., Major Mark, and Juggler—the newest guru on the scene, who appeared online one day claiming he could pick up women better and faster than any other PUA simply by reading his grocery list. Then there are the inner-circle teachers, like Steve P. and Rasputin, who reveal their techniques only to those they deem worthy. Yes, there are plenty of mentors to choose from, each with his own methods and disciples, each operating under the belief that his way is the way. And the giants do battle constantly

she was going straight into Hollywood Station. 9 Ballard kept all her work suits in her locker at the station and dressed for her shifts after arriving each night. She had four different suits that followed the same cut and style but differed in color and pattern. She dry-cleaned them two at a time so that she always had a suit and a backup available. After arriving nearly eight hours early for her shift, Ballard changed into the gray suit that was her favorite. She accompanied it with a white blouse. She kept four white blouses and one navy in her locker as well. It was Friday and that meant Ballard was scheduled to work solo. She and Jenkins had to cover seven shifts a week, so Ballard took Tuesday to Saturday and Jenkins covered Sunday to Thursday, giving them three overlap days. When they took vacation time, their slots usually went unfilled. If a detective in the division was needed during the early-morning hours, then someone had to be called in from home. Working solo suited Ballard because she didn’t have to run decisions by her partner. On this day, if he had known what Ballard’s plan was, Jenkins would have put the kibosh on it. But because it was Friday, they would not be working together again until the following Tuesday, and she was clear to make her own moves. After suiting up, Ballard checked herself in the mirror over the locker room sinks. She combed her sun-streaked hair with her fingers. That was all she usually had to do. Constant immersion in salt water and exposure to the sun over years had left her with broken, flyaway hair that she kept no longer than chin length out of necessity. It went well with her tan and gave off a slightly butch look that reduced advances from other officers. Olivas had been an exception. Ballard squeezed some Visine drops into her eyes, which were red from the salt water. After that she was good to go. She went into the break room to brew a double-shot espresso on the Keurig. She would be operating now and through the night on less than three hours of sleep. She needed to start stacking caffeine. She kept her eye on the wall clock because she wanted to time her arrival in the detective bureau at shortly before four p.m., when she knew the lead detective in the CAPs unit would also be watching the clock, getting ready to split for the weekend. She had at least fifteen minutes to kill, so she went upstairs to the offices of the buy-bust team next to the vice unit. Major Narcotics was located downtown but each division operated

Theory, as Gayatri Spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: I am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. I am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought.

A stronger analogy to Eisenstein's analysis of the rising pattern in the music and the visuals can be found in the contrapuntal practice in music whereby a theme is juxtaposed against either an augmented (the note values are doubled) or diminished (the note values are halved) version of itself. The listener can thus simultaneously experience two different temporal elaborations of the same melodic line across a single block of chronological time, just as the viewer/listener in Alexander Nevsky can experience two different temporal elaborations of the rising motion across a single block of chronological time. (Needless to say, an oppositional "counterpoint" could also be set up by creating, for instance, an upward movement in the music and a downward one in the visuals.) But the experience here is doubly enriched, since the simultaneity also includes two different modes of perception, visual and aural, which is, one suspects, one of the underlying raisons d'être of the gesamtkunstwerk. Even on the simplest of levels, then, Eisenstein's "vertical montage" involves the simultaneous, layered presentation of a number of different elements. For the first shot, these layers would stack up as follows: 1. Graphic perception (photography) 2. Musical perception (score) 3. Upward movement 1 (graphic) 4. Upward movement 2 (musical) 5. Synchronicity 1 (graphic) 6. Synchronicity 2 (musical)

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.

Kundalini is a primitive spirit, a creative force that typically resides in a dormant state within our bodies. We realize our innate power and completeness upon awakening. We know there is everything within us that we need to be happy and fulfilled. Kundalini is not a physical reality but a perceptible reality. Once we have been awakened, we are shedding our old tendencies, and negativity like a snake sheds off its old skin. The kundalini is said to empower us with Shakti — that Divine Mother's primordial energy. Charged with this feminine creative force, we get filled with the vigor, enthusiasm, willpower, and self-confidence that we need to shake off negative memories and emotions hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Our mind is getting dormant. Issues and issues that had once held our focus now seem insignificant. Such a mind-state automatically produces intuitive wisdom.  Released from the endless chain of uncertainty and misunderstanding, insight is our guardian and guide.  The strength of discernment is unfailing. The reason kundalini awakening is such a remarkable aspect of spiritual awakening is that it is not based on complex theological arguments or religious norms that are culturally defined. Instead, Kundalini concentrates on the divine's immediate, ultimate experience within us. And regardless of your particular religious background and values, we can all use kundalini yoga to assist in our spiritual evolution. Most ancient myths allude to the meaning of kundalini. Tiresias narrative is a prime example. If Tiresias–the ancient Greek seer discovered two copulating snakes, he would stick his staff between them to distinguish them. He was immediately turned into a woman and remained like that for seven years until he was able to repeat his action and turn back into a male. In this novel, the force of change, powerful enough to completely reverse both male and female physical polarities, emerges from the fusion of the two serpents, passed on by the ring. Tiresias staff was later passed on to Hermes along with serpents. Several medical organizations use the ancient Greek icon of Hermes, the Greek god and messenger of all gods, called “Karykeion.” In occult Hermetic philosophy, Hermes Caduceus represents the masculine's potential as a central phallic rod surrounded by two coupling serpents ' writhing, woven Shakti energies. The rod also represents the spine (sushumna), while the serpents perform metaphysical currents (pranas) along the inda and pingala channels from the chakra at the base of the spine to the pineal gland in a double helix pattern.

It took quantum theory … to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other subatomic particles—electrons, protons, and so forth—exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, “wavicles.” To explain the idea … physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young’s double-slit demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light. Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light. Particles would act like waves.311 In 1961, this idea was actually tested with electrons, and it worked as expected. Elementary particles, chunks of stuff like little billiard balls, behave like waves, provided that you aren’t looking. This can be demonstrated easily even if you shoot a single photon one at a time through a double-slit apparatus.312 However—and this is the frosting on the quantum measurement problem—those very same chunks of stuff behave like particles when you do look at them. Technically, the process of looking is called gaining “which-path” information, in which you learn which path a photon took as it traveled through the double-slit apparatus. To repeat: If you know that it goes through the left slit or the right slit, typically determined using a detector placed behind each slit, then the photon will behave like a particle. But if you don’t know, then it will behave like a wave. Assumptions The experiment we conducted took advantage of this intriguing effect. It was based on two assumptions: (A) If information is gained—by any means—about a photon’s path as it travels through two slits, then the quantum wavelike interference pattern, produced by photons traveling through the slits, will “collapse” in proportion to the certainty of the knowledge obtained. (B) If some aspect of consciousness is a primordial, self-aware feature of the fabric of reality, and that property is modulated by us through capacities we enjoy as attention and intention, then focusing human attention on a double-slit system may extract information about the photon’s path, and in turn that will affect the interference pattern.

[The double-slit experiment] has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. —Richard Feynman296 The mystery Feynman was referring to in the preceding quote is the curious fact that a quantum object behaves like a particle when it is observed, but it behaves like a wave when it’s not observed. This can be easily demonstrated in a double-slit interferometer, which is a simple device in which one sends particles of light (or electrons, or any elementary particle) through two tiny slits and then records the pattern of light that emerges onto a screen, or a camera. One might expect that if particles of light (called photons) behaved like separate hunks of stuff, like tiny marbles, then the pattern of light emerging from two slits would always be two bright bands of light. And indeed, if you track each photon as it passes through the slits, then that is what you will see on the screen. However, if you do not trace the photons’ paths, then you will see an alternating sequence of light and dark bands, called an “interference pattern.” This then is the mystery of the dual nature of light—whether you see a wavelike or particle pattern on the screen depends on how you’re looking at it. It’s as though all matter—photons, electrons, molecules, and so on297—“knows” that it is being watched. This exquisitely sensitive bashfulness, known in physics jargon as wave-particle complementarity, lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. It is also known as the quantum measurement problem, or QMP. It’s a problem because it violates the commonsense assumption that we live in an objective reality that is completely independent of observers. The founders of quantum theory, including Neils Bohr, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein, knew that introducing the notion of the observer into quantum theory was a radical change in how physics had been practiced, and they all wrote about the consequences of this change. A few physicists, like Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, and Eugene Wigner, believed that consciousness was not merely important but was fundamentally responsible for the formation of reality. Jordan wrote, “Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it.… We compel [the electron] to assume a definite position.… We ourselves produce the results of measurement

impossibly complex pattern spread between his fingers. His eyes glittered. “Any questions?” “Any questions?” my father said. We had stopped early for the day because of a greystone. He sat tuning his lute and was finally going to play his song for my mother and me. We had been waiting so long. “Are there any questions?” he repeated, as he sat with his back against the great grey stone. “Why do we stop at the waystones?” “Tradition mostly. But some people say they marked old roads—” My father’s voice changed and became Ben’s voice, “—safe roads. Sometimes roads to safe places, sometimes safe roads leading into danger.” Ben held one hand out to it, as if feeling the warmth of a fire. “But there is a power in them. Only a fool would deny that.” Then Ben was no longer there, and there was not one standing stone, but many. More than I had ever seen in one place before. They formed a double circle around me. One stone was set across the top of two others, forming a huge arch with thick shadow underneath. I reached out to touch it…. And awoke. My mind had covered a fresh pain with the names of a hundred roots and berries, four ways to light

Dahmer then cut the flesh off. He started by stripping the flesh from the arms and biceps, then the chest, and worked his way down to the feet. He sliced all the strips of flesh into small pieces and placed them into approximately three bags. He was careful not to place too much in each bag, about twenty-five pounds worth each. In the beginning, he then wrapped the skeleton in a sheet and pounded it into small parts with a sledgehammer, placing the upper torso in one bag and the lower in another. However, after he hit upon the idea of dissolving his victims in the muriatic acid, he simply dropped the dismembered skeletal remains into the industrial drum he had purchased. There, the acid would do its work. This was his usual pattern. “I normally used five double-wrapped garbage bags to dispose of a single body.

The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us. The Psalms do this, to begin with, simply because they are poetry set to music: a classic double art form. To write or read a poem is already to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions. Sometimes