Picture A Vacuum Quotes

She was a woman with a broom or a dust- pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a night, as relaxed as a White glove to which, at dawn, a brisk hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight.

Like a picture out of focus, I’m starting to think that I don’t even know who I am anymore. And that feeling – like being sucked out into the vacuum of space without a suit – is the most terrifying of all.

Immediately after discussing the Spirit-filled life, Paul turns to the subject of marriage, showing the tight connection between marriage and the life in the Spirit. And this connection teaches us two things. First, the picture of marriage given here is not of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another’s arms. If you add two vacuums to each other, you only get a bigger and stronger vacuum, a giant sucking sound. Rather, Paul assumes that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life—why they were made by God and who they are in Christ.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the “young married set,” there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.

He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. As for psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a nihilistic philosophy; otherwise it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's "nothingbutness," the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions. As I once put it: "As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I am a survivor of four camps-concentration camps, that is-and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.

So we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon Well, he knew exactly who to blame And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop) Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix! Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best! He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!

He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

This picture of matter curving space and curvaceous space dictating how matter and light will move has several striking features. It brings the non-Euclidean geometries that we talked about in the last chapter out from the library of pure mathematics into the arena of science. The vast collection of geometries describing spaces that are not simply the flat space of Euclid are the ones that Einstein used to capture the possible structures of space distorted by the presence of mass and energy.

The tea ceremonies of Japan are conceived in the spirit of the Taoist earthly paradise. The tearoom, called “the abode of fancy,” is an ephemeral structure built to enclose a moment of poetic intuition. Called too “the abode of vacancy,” it is devoid of ornamentation. Temporarily it contains a single picture or flower-arrangement. The teahouse is called “the abode of the unsymmetrical”: the unsymmetrical suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour.

Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it. The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. As for psychotherapy, however, it will never be able to cope with this state of affairs on a mass scale if it does not keep itself free from the impact and influence of the contemporary trends of a nihilistic philosophy; otherwise it represents a symptom of the mass neurosis rather than its possible cure. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man.

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

Todd closed his eyes, then, and found himself picturing the other boy involuntarily—surprising himself with the intrusiveness of the thought. It was that fucking smile: there was something about the way the corners of Zack’s eyes had crinkled—the sincerity of it. Todd had felt that smile like it hurt. That smile was sparks. That smile was fireworks. That smile sizzled across the dark landscape of his soul, racing toward the shadows and lighting them up in brief eruptions of pure electric intensity, banishing the corruption in moments of flickering respite. Todd felt them coursing through him like thousands of tiny explosions. Like a squadron of gemstones erupting all at once into an armageddon of prismatic color. Like all that energy was going to carry him to some unknown destination where he could be weightless: wrapped in all its warmth and light and certainty forever and ever. And while he might not know where that place was he desperately needed to go there. To be there, always. Even if the process consumed him entirely. Even if it unmade him. Todd felt as though a sun erupted to life inside of him, then. He felt awake. Alive. And for the first time in so very long he felt the fullness of warmth filling him to the very boundaries of every expanse of himself—defiantly radiating against the cold and dark and shadow that had made it’s home across so much of him for so much of his life. And then—just like that—just as he’d arrived in Todd’s life: Zack was gone. And there was an emptiness that followed in the vacuum of the next few moments. A dark. And Todd felt it—deeply—as all those fireworks and all those sparks and all that color that had momentarily lit up so brilliantly across the insides of him lost the gravity that had once possessed it. The sparkle. And then it was just him there: Todd. Alone. But not entirely. Not ever. Because there was always that other thing. The shadowy thing. The one that he did his very best not to think about at all. It lived out along the wildest fringes of his mind—dancing along the tattered edges of the real—onyx eyes glittering, always. And it was hungry, too.

community service. Then they were asked to pick between two rewards: an indulgent one (a pair of designer jeans) and a practical one (a vacuum cleaner). If they were told to imagine that they had been sentenced to community service for a driving violation, they were much less likely to choose the jeans than if they pictured themselves as volunteers. The best way to get people to do good, it seems, is to make them feel bad about themselves. * “BYOB: How Bringing your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself and the Environment”, Harvard Business School working paper, December 2014.

faster but the picture remained entirely static. The stillness of a deserted office descended and held steady as time rushed by. “When do the cleaners come in?” Reacher asked. “Just before midnight,” Froelich said. “That late?” “They’re night workers. This is a round-the-clock operation.” “And there’s nothing else visible before then?” “Nothing at all.” “So spool ahead. We get the picture.” Froelich operated the buttons and shuttled between fast-forward with snow on the screen and regular-speed playback with a picture to check the timecode. At eleven-fifty P.M. she let the tape run. The counter clicked ahead, a second at a time. At eleven fifty-two there was motion at the far end of the corridor. A team of three people emerged from the gloom. There were two women and a man, all of them wearing dark overalls. They looked Hispanic. They were all short and compact, dark-haired, stoic. The man was pushing a cart. It had a black garbage bag locked into a hoop at the front, and trays stacked with cloths and spray bottles on shelves at the rear. One of the women was carrying a vacuum cleaner. It rode on

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It’s a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There’s a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he’s loading the washing machine. The caption reads: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.” There’s another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, “Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair”. Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you.

By afternoon Jack found her down on her hands and knees scouring the bathroom floor around the toilet and tub. “For the love of God,” he said. “What?” “What the hell are you doing? If you want the bathroom cleaned, why don’t you just tell me? I know how to clean a goddamn bathroom.” “It wasn’t all that dirty, but since I’m in the cleaning mood, I thought I’d whip it into shape.” “David is ready for his nap. Why don’t you join him.” “I don’t feel like a nap. I’m going to vacuum the area rugs.” “No, you’re not,” he said. “I’ll do that if it has to be done right now.” “Okay,” Mel said, smiling. “I’ve been tricked.” “Only by yourself, darling,” she said, whirling away to get the Pledge and Windex. After that was done—and there was a lot of wood and glass and stainless steel to occupy her—she was sweeping off the porch and back steps. Not long after that, she was caught dragging the cradle into the master bedroom. “Melinda!” he shouted, startling her and making her jump. “Jack! Don’t do that!” “Let go of that thing!” He brushed her out of the way and grabbed the cradle. “Where do you want it?” “Right there,” she said. He put it beside the bed. “No,” she said. “Over there, kind of out of the way.” He put it there. “No,” she said. “Against that wall—we’ll put it where we need it when she comes.” He moved it again. “Thank you,” she said. The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” he said. He picked up a pencil and put it in her face. “If you lift anything heavier than this, I’m going to beat you.” Then he turned and left the room. He has cabin fever, she thought. Spending too much time at home with me, making sure I don’t pick up anything heavier than a pencil. He should get out more, and out of my hair. When Jack was done with the phone, she was on her knees in front of the hearth, brushing out the barely used fireplace. “Aw, Jesus Christ,” he said in frustration. “Can that not wait until at least frickin’ winter?” She sat back on her heels. “You are really getting on my last nerve. Don’t you have somewhere you can go?” “No, but we do. Go shower and get beautiful. Paul and Vanessa are back and after they view the prom couple, they’re going to the bar for dinner. We’ll all meet there, look at some pictures.” “Great,” she said. “I’m in the mood for a beer.” “Whatever you want, Melinda,” he said tiredly. “Just stop this frickin’ cleaning.” “You know I’m not going to be able to do much of this after the baby comes, so it’s good to have it all done. And the way I like it.” “You’ve always been good at cleaning. Why couldn’t you just cook?” he asked. “You don’t cook anything.” “You cook.” She smiled. “How many cooks does one house need?” “Just go shower. You have fireplace ash on your nose.” “Pain in the ass,” she said to him, getting clumsily to her feet. “Ditto,” he said. An

I scroll through iPhone photos and see that if I delete pictures of myself with a double chin, I will erase all proof of my glorious life. I fix myself a hot chocolate because it is a gateway drug to reading. I think I couldn't love my husband more, and then he vacuums all the glitter.

First, the picture of marriage given here is not of two needy people, unsure of their own value and purpose, finding their significance and meaning in one another’s arms. If you add two vacuums to each other, you only get a bigger and stronger vacuum, a giant sucking sound. Rather, Paul assumes that each spouse already has settled the big questions of life—why they were made by God and who they are in Christ. No one lives a life of continual joy in God, of course. It is not automatic and constant. If that were the case, Paul would not have had to start verse 18 with an imperative, exhorting them literally to “go on being filled with the Spirit!” We are often running on fumes, spiritually, but we must know where the fuel station is and, even more important, that it exists. After trying all kinds of other things, Christians have learned that the worship of God with the whole heart in the assurance of his love through the work of Jesus Christ is the thing their souls were meant to “run on.” That is what gets all the heart’s cylinders to fire. If this is not understood, then we will not have the resources to be good spouses. If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.

A CHANGING SOCIETY What does today’s high incidence of social anxiety tell us about modern society? As we’ve seen, social anxiety is connected to a person’s drive for self-preservation and a feeling of safety. It is natural to withdraw from situations that we expect will lead to pain. Avoidance—while not necessarily healthy—is logical. Because the negative social experience of a growing number of people has caused them emotional pain and suffering, the number of individuals who choose to avoid socializing is increasing at an alarming rate. The sometimes wide distance among family members these days only adds to isolation. And the anonymity of large cities creates a vacuum in which many lonely people co-exist, often leading solitary lives in which they pursue their interests and activities alone. We live in a society in which social fears are perhaps not unjustified. As cities become denser, isolation seems to be the best way to counter urban decay. Consider the dangers of the outside world: Crime rates are soaring. Caution—and its companion, fear—are in the air. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves in a society where meeting people can be difficult. These larger forces can combine to create a further sense of distance among people. Particularly significant is the change that has taken place as the social organization of the smaller-scale community gives way to that of the larger, increasingly fragmented city. In a “hometown” setting, the character of daily life is largely composed of face-to-face relations with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. But in the hustle and bustle of today’s cities, whose urban sprawls extend to what author Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities—creating light industrial suburbs even larger than the cities they surround—the individual can get lost. It is common in these areas for people to focus solely on themselves, seldom getting to know their neighbors, and rarely living close to family. We may call these places home, but they are a far cry from the destination of that word as we knew it when we were children. Today’s cities are hotbeds of competition on all levels, from the professional to the social. It often seems as if only the most sophisticated “win.” To be ready for this constant challenge, you have to be able to manage in a stressful environment, relying on a whole repertoire of social skills just to stay afloat. This competitive environment can be terrifying for the socially anxious person. The 1980s were a consumer decade in which picture-perfect images on television and in magazines caused many of us to cast our lots with either the haves or the have-nots. Pressure to succeed grew to an all-time high. For those who felt they could not measure up, the challenge seemed daunting. I think the escalating crime rate in today’s urban centers—drugs, burglary, rape, and murder—ties into this trend and society’s response to the pressure. In looking at the forces that influence the social context of modern life, it is clear that feelings of frustration at not “making it” socially and financially are a component in many people’s choosing a life of crime. Interactive ability determines success in establishing a rewarding career, in experiencing relationships. Without these prospects, crime can appear to be a quick fix for a lifelong problem.

She lives here now, Mom. With me. And it won’t be long before you can meet her, but there’s one more thing. During that short time we knew each other in Grants Pass, we had a little…ah, a little…blessing, that’s what it was. We had a blessing. Well, actually a couple of blessings. On the way. Soon.” Dead silence answered him. “It came as a shock to poor Abby at first, and I admit—I was pretty surprised, but we’re very happy about it. Happy and excited.” Silence. It stretched out. “Mom? Twins. We know one is a boy, but the other one is hiding.” Again, a vacuum. Then he heard his mother shriek, “Edward! Come here! Cameron got some girl pregnant!” “Mom! Just have a little sip of that wine!” “I think it’s going to take something a little stronger! Twins? You got some girl pregnant with twins?” He couldn’t help it—he laughed. “Mom,” he said. “She’s not some girl—she’s not a girl. Her name is Abby and she’s thirty-one.” “Cameron, how in the world—” “Now, Mother, I’m not going to explain. You’ll just have to trust me, I’ve never been careless and neither has Abby. So—here’s the deal. She’s probably going to go early, though the babies are due the second of July. Anytime, Mom. Abby wants to have her mother come as soon as they’re delivered, so I hope you can be a little patient. Twins is a pretty big—” “Cameron! Are you married?” “Not yet, Mom. Even though we’re in this together, completely, we just haven’t had time to get married. That will come—we’ll take care of the details. No point in rushing it now. Besides, we’re not going to be fooling anybody, including the great-grandmothers and great-aunt Jean, by rushing into it right now. They’re nearly here.” “Dear God in heaven,” his mother said. And in the background he could hear his father, Ed, saying, “What? What? What?” “I’ll call you the moment they’re born. Tomorrow, when I’m at the clinic, I’ll get Mel to take a picture of me and Abby and e-mail it to you. By then you will have calmed down.” “But, Cameron,” she said, “you haven’t given me time to knit anything!” He laughed again. “Well, get started. Abby’s really ready to unload. She just has to make it a couple more weeks to be completely safe.” “Oh, dear God in heaven,” she muttered.

First, energy is quantised: in atoms it does not take on all possible values but only a ladder of specific values whose separation is fixed by the value of a new constant of Nature, dubbed Planck's constant and represented by the letter h. An intuitive picture of how the wavelike character of the orbital behaviour leads to quantisation can be seen in Figure 7.1, where we can see how only a whole number of wave cycles can fit into an orbit. Second, all particles possess a wavelike aspect. They behave as waves with a wavelength that is inversely proportional to their mass and velocity. When that quantum wavelength is much smaller than the physical size of the particle it will behave like a simple particle, but when its quantum wavelength becomes at least as large as the particle's size then wavelike quantum aspects will start to be significant and dominate the particle's behaviour, producing novel behaviour. Typically, as objects increase in mass, their quantum wavelengths shrink to become far smaller than their physical size, and they behave in a non-quantum or 'classical' way, like simple particles.

He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

Washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other appliances came to the aid of three quarters of American housewives. Motion pictures and the wireless brought new enjoyment to millions during their hours of leisure.

Aza [Raskin] said: 'For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day ... They could do that tomorrow.' ....So instead of getting 'this constant drip of behavioural cocaine,' telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on - you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You'd be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. 'Here's another one,' he said 'Infinite scroll. ...it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.' Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll - so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling. Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan [Harris] told one interviewer: 'Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.' It's not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next. Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ...there could be a button that says 'here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they'd like to meet up today.' You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see. Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. ...then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down. In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: 'It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] - do I really want to be here? No.' In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals - what changes do you want to make to your life? ...then match you up with other people nearby... who say they also want to make that change and have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies. ...A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same. At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them. Tristan and Aza told me that it's just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn't it happened? It comes back... to the business model.

    We didn't know the nature of lightning or rainbows for three and a half million years, pet. Don't reject it just because it seems impossible. If we closed our minds, there would never be the Gravitube, antimatter, Prose Portals, thermos flasks—"     "Wait!" I interrupted. "How does a thermos fit in with that lot?"     Because, my dear girl," replied Mycroft, cleaning the blackboard and drawing a crude picture of a thermos with a question mark, "no one has the least idea why they work." He stared at me for a moment and continued: "You will agree that a vacuum flask keeps hot things hot in the winter and cold things cold in the summer?"     "Yes—?"     "Well, how does it know? I've studied vacuum flasks for many years and not one of them gave any clues as to their inherent seasonal cognitive ability. It's a mystery to me, I can tell you.

Abnormality departed with a leisurely step. First there was the dry beach, ten days of vacuum. Then the period of the beach and the waves. Then there was Something, that heavy hand of urgent hunches. Then the four- or five-day period when Something demonstrated its frightening and profitable talent for extending. Then the novel-writing days, strangest of all, perhaps, when words from nowhere somehow reached my fingers, ignoring the dry beach altogether. And the pictures, flashing like bright telegrams. The three months of unusual phenomena were as weird in their way as the voices of the Operators. But the anchor remained solidly hooked and, except for a few days when Something seemed to be showing off what it could do in the way of telepathy and precognition if it really tried, I wandered calmly from one stage to another, undisturbed by what was happening, undisturbed by what might lie around the corner. And then abruptly, overnight, the strange equipment was put away in storage, the regular machinery was hauled onto the dry beach and connected. Reason, as I had known reason, returned.

and beyond. Some of this evolution toward more secular, bureaucratic schooling followed necessarily from the Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer and religious instruction in the 1960s. Regardless of whether you believe children should have prayer or study religion in school, the removal of those activities had the unintended consequence of removing existential questions about how the individual fits into the bigger, cosmic picture; about our life’s purpose. The moral hollowing of schooling is also attributable to the erosion of secondary education’s previously secure place and purpose in preparing kids for steady jobs right after graduation. Education historian Paula Fass traces the drift toward the “warehousing” of our young to schools’ loss of their tangible, culminating purpose—to prepare the emerging generation for conclusive entry into adult productivity. Instead, “going to high school became a stop-over during the teen years, with very little to offer beyond academic selection for those who would go on to college . . .” When a diploma was no longer a predictable ticket to a full-time, middle-class job and a set of expectations about adulthood, high schools began to fray. Peer culture metastasized to fill the vacuum of purpose. Instead of learning how to behave from their teachers, who no longer really saw their jobs as moral instruction and instilling wisdom acquired through age and experience, kids were learning how to behave from other kids, with predictable results. Fifth, the protest era of the 1960s saw an atypical amount of conflict about what America means, about whether our experiment in self-governance was really all that special. Some of the struggles—chiefly civil rights—were essential to America’s finally living up to the Declaration of Independence’s vision of universal,

What's even more breathtaking is that all electron-those in your body, those in stars, and those distributed across the universe-arise as vibrations from one universal electron field that permeates the vacuum. So if this picture is true, then why isn't the universe completely filled with electrons, photons, and other particles everywhere? Well, one immediate surprise is that the universe can be filled with fields but be absent of particles. Something has to trigger all that potential energy in the fields to become particles, just like a push can make a ball roll down a hill to accumulate kinetic energy.

listened to the rhythm of the waves and imagined the crystal clear blue waters cleansing her of any lower energies, any remnants of shadows. She pictured the sun as God’s golden light filling her from within. As she did every morning and night, she cleared, grounded, and protected herself, calling on the archangels and ascended masters to help her along the way. Her mother taught her long ago that shielding herself psychically and spiritually was every bit as important as protecting herself physically. She took in a deep, cleansing breath, then another, and another. On each inhale, she imagined herself breathing in the essence of the Universe—Divine white light and perfect love. With each exhale, she imagined herself eliminating a gray mist that represented any negativity or fear. She invoked Archangel Michael to cut any cords of fear. She asked Archangel Michael, Archangel Raguel, Archangel Jophiel, Archangel Haniel, and the Ascended Masters El Morya and Lady Nada to turn on the spiritual vacuum cleaner and vacuum away any lower energies or remnants of shadows that might be in her field. She imagined the pure waters of a beautiful waterfall washing away any lingering energies. Then she called upon Archangel Metatron to use his geometric shapes to clear and open all of her chakras.

This aspect of the creative process, the fact that it emerges in response to a particular difficulty, has spawned its own terminology. It is called the “problem phase” of innovation. “The damn thing had been bugging me for years,” Dyson says of the conventional vacuum cleaner. “I couldn’t bear the inefficiency of the technology. It wasn’t so much a ‘problem phase’ as a ‘hatred phase.’” We often leave this aspect of the creative process out of the picture. We focus on the moment of epiphany, the detonation of insight that happened when Newton was hit by the apple or Archimedes was taking a bath. That is perhaps why creativity seems so ethereal. The idea is that such insights could happen anytime, anywhere. It is just a matter of sitting back and letting them flow. But this leaves out an indispensable feature of creativity. Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot. As Dyson puts it: “Creativity should be thought of as a dialogue. You have to have a problem before you can have the game-changing riposte.

The problem with academia is that it is about being good at remembering things like chemical formulae and theories, because that is what you have to regurgitate. But children are not allowed to learn through experimenting and experience. This is a great pity. You need both.” One of the most powerful aspects of the Dyson story is that it evokes a point that was made in chapter 7; namely, that technological change is often driven by the synergy between practical and theoretical knowledge. One of the first things Dyson did when he had the insight for a cyclone cleaner was to buy two books on the mathematical theory of how cyclones work. He also went to visit the author of one of those books, an academic named R. G. Dorman.22 This was hugely helpful to Dyson. It allowed him to understand cyclone dynamics more fully. It played a role in directing his research and gave him a powerful background on the mathematics of separation efficiency. But it was by no means sufficient. The theory was too abstract to lead him directly to the precise dimensions that would deliver a functional vacuum cleaner. Moreover, as Dyson iterated his device, he discovered that the theory had flaws. Dorman’s equation predicted that cyclones would only be able to remove fine dust down to a lower limit of 20 microns. But Dyson quickly broke through this theoretical limit. By the end, his cyclone could separate dust smaller than 0.3 micron (this is approximately the size of the particles in cigarette smoke). Dyson’s practical engagement with the problem had forced a change in the theory. And this is invariably how progress happens. It is an interplay between the practical and the theoretical, between top-down and bottom-up, between creativity and discipline, between the small picture and the big picture. The crucial point—and the one that is most dramatically overlooked in our culture—is that in all these things, failure is a blessing, not a curse. It is the jolt that inspires creativity and the selection test that drives evolution.