Procedures Sayings And Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Procedures Sayings And. Here they are! All 200 of them:

You do realize this makes your wings even more unique." "Are you saying you shot me as a cosmetic procedure?
Nalini Singh (Angels' Blood (Guild Hunter, #1))
MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
Those look like broken ribs," Hunt said wryly. "Definitely broken ribs, Athalar," Bryce replied, sitting back on her heels. "And a broken arm, from the way he's cradling it." "Skull fracture's healed," Hunt observed with equal distance, as if they were on one of his favorite Vanir crime show procedurals. Ithan's eyes flashed again. "I'm sensing hostility and a good dose of male pride," Bryce said. "Throw in some stubbornness and I'd say we've got a classic case of stupidity," Hunt answered. "What the fuck is wrong with you two?" Ithan demanded.
Sarah J. Maas (House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City, #2))
You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us. We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small fraction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation. To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.
Edward R. Murrow
[19:28] MAV: So far, so good. NASA put a lot of thought into the procedures. They work. That’s not to say they’re easy. I spent the last 3 days removing Hull Panel 19 and the front window. Even in Mars-g they’re heavy motherfuckers. [19:29] JOHANSSEN: When we pick you up, I will make wild, passionate love to you. Prepare your body. [19:29] JOHANSSEN: I didn’t type that! That was Martinez! I stepped away from the console for like 10 seconds! [19:29] MAV: I’ve really missed you guys.
Andy Weir (The Martian)
Oh, look, the lights are so pretty,” I said dreamily, having just noticed them. I smiled at the way the lights were dancing overhead, pink and yellow and blue. I felt some pressure on my arm and thought, I should look over and see what’s going on, but then the thought was gone, sliding away like Jell-O off a hot car hood. “Fang?” “Yeah. I’m here.” I struggled to focus on him. “I’m so glad you’re here.” “Yeah, I got that.” “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I peered up at him, trying to see past the too-bright lights. “You’d be fine,” he muttered. “No,” I said, suddenly struck by how unfine I would be. “I would be totally unfine. Totally.” It seemed very urgent that he understand this. Again I felt some tugging on my arm, and I really wondered what that was about. Was Ella’s mom going to start this procedure any time soon? “It’s okay. Just relax.” He sounded stiff and nervous. “Just...relax. Don’t try to talk.” “I don’t want my chip anymore,” I explained groggily, then frowned. “Actually, I never wanted that chip.” “Okay,” said Fang. “We’re taking it out.” “I just want you to hold my hand.” “I am holding your hand.” “Oh. I knew that.” I drifted off for a few minutes, barely aware of anything, but feeling Fang’s hand still in mine. “Do you have a La-Z-Boy somewhere?” I roused myself to ask, every word an effort. “Um, no,” said Ella’s voice, somewhere behind my head. “I think I would like a La-Z-Boy,” I mused, letting my eyes drift shut again. “Fang, don’t go anywhere.” “I won’t. I’m here.” “Okay. I need you here. Don’t leave me.” “I won’t.” “Fang, Fang, Fang,” I murmured, overwhelmed with emotion. “I love you. I love you sooo much.” I tried to hold out my arms to show how much, but I couldn’t move them. “Oh, jeez,” Fang said, sounding strangled.
James Patterson (Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports (Maximum Ride, #3))
Lena.” Alex’s voice is stronger, more forceful now, and it finally stops me. He turns so that we’re face-to-face. At that moment my shoes skim off the sand bottom, and I realize that the water is lapping up to my neck. The tide is coming in fast. “Listen to me. I’m not who—I’m not who you think I am.” I have to fight to stand. All of a sudden the currents tug and pull at me. It’s always seemed this way. The tide goes out a slow drain, comes back in a rush. “What do you mean?” His eyes—shifting gold, amber, an animal’s eyes—search my face, and without knowing why, I’m scared again. “I was never cured,” he says. For a moment I close my eyes and imagine I’ve misheard him, imagine I’ve only confused the shushing of the waves for his voice. But when I open my eyes he’s still standing there, staring at me, looking guilty and something else—sad, maybe?—and I know I heard correctly. He says, “I never had the procedure.” “You mean it didn’t work?” I say. My body is tingling, going numb, and I realize then how cold it is. “You had the procedure and it didn’t work? Like what happened to my mom?” “No, Lena. I—” He looks away, squinting, says under his breath, “I don’t know how to explain.
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
Oh, no, it wasn’t a medical procedure,” I say. “It was an Etsy spell.
Emily Henry (Happy Place)
A Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, once said: ‘Dijiste media verdad. Dirán que mientes dos veces si dices la otra mitad.’” “Translated means…” “You told a half-truth. They’ll say you lie twice when you tell the other half.
Olga Núñez Miret (Teamwork (Escaping Psychiatry, #2))
You see that stones are worn away by time, Rocks rot, and twoers topple, even the shrines And images of the gods grow very tired, Develop crack or wrinkles, their holy wills Unable to extend their fated term, To litigate against the Laws of Nature. And don't we see the monuments of men Collapse, as if to ask us, "Are not we As frail as those whom we commemorate?"? Boulders come plunging down from the mountain heights, Poor weaklings with no power to resist The thrust that says to them, Your time has come! But they would be rooted in steadfastness Had they endured from time beyond all time, As far back as infinity. Look about you! Whatever it is that holds in its embrace All earth, if it projects, as some men say, All things out of itself, and takes them back When they have perished, must itself consist Of mortal elements. The parts must add Up to the sum. Whatever gives away Must lose in the procedure, and gain again Whenever it takes back.
Lucretius (On the Nature of Things)
One of my favorite sayings, which I stole from the venerable copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis, is: Sell results, not procedures. Any time you want to figure out how to get more money for what you sell, ask yourself this question: “How do I make what I give my customer more of a finished result and less of a procedure?
Anonymous
For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instead, the focus is on learning and applying various procedures to solve math problems. That's a bit like explaining soccer by saying it is executing a series of maneuvers to get the ball into the goal. Both accurately describe various key features, but they miss the \what?" and the \why?" of the big picture.
Keith Devlin (Introduction to Mathematical Thinking)
In the Lake Debo region (in Mali, on the Niger), pyramids are also found, and these were dubbed “mounds,” as might be expected. This is the usual procedure in the attempt to disparage African values. In contrast, there is the reverse procedure consisting of describing a clay tumulus—a real mound—in Mesopotamia, as the most perfect temple that the human mind can imagine. It goes without saying that such reconstructions are generally mere wishful thinking.
Cheikh Anta Diop (The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality)
It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.
Kurt Koffka
It would seem this is the gift modernity has bestowed upon our generation: the practice of "dating," an awkward procedure where a man and a woman find themselves talking rot to each other in a darkened room. If it were up to me, I would say modernity can keep it, as I want no part.
Suzanne Rindell (The Other Typist)
The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.
James K. Morrow (The Last Witchfinder)
Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ...of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.” The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.
Marianne Moore
Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose." "So you're saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space—like in dreams?" "Most great poetry is like that. If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem." "But plenty of poems only pretend to do that." "Right. It's a kind of trick, and as long as you know that it isn't hard. As long as you use some symbolic-sounding words, the whole thing looks like a poem of sorts.
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
That’s the problem with breakups, though. It’s not just two people saying good-bye and going their separate ways; it’s the excruciating process of untangling two lives, picking them apart like some sad surgical procedure, trying to detach this thing from that while causing as little lasting damage as possible.
Hazel Hayes (Out of Love)
You don’t look like much, but they say you murdered that other chick.” Treating Murder
Gabrielle Black (Treating Murder (Veronica Lane, M.D., #1))
The writing gets easy once your characters trust that you will not only report what they say but convey what they mean and feel. ~ Michael Kent
Michael Kent (Twice Dead: A Lieutenant Beaudry Novel)
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.
Karl Marx (The Poverty of Philosophy)
They imagined that with a rightly honored commodity they could “purchase” security in a world that seemed devoid of the creator. “Godmaking” amid anxiety is a standard human procedure! But
Walter Brueggemann (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now)
One can imagine many patients being turned off by the words fecal transplant or, as researchers call it in their academic papers, “fecal microbiota transplantation.” The slang used by some doctors (“shit swap”) is no better. But Borody, after years of performing this procedure, believes he has finally come up with a less disturbing name. “Yes,” he says, “we call it a ‘transpoosion.
Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
Monk worked on his remaining Intertect cases at his dining table while I tried to hone my detecting instincts by reading the Murder, She Wrote novel he bought in Mill Valley. I can't say that I learned much about investigative procedure but I discovered that you should stay far away from Cabot Cove. That tiny New England village is deadlier than Beirut, South Central Los Angeles, and the darkest back alley in Juarez combined. Even though every killer eventually gets caught by Jessica Fletcher, I still wouldn't feel safe there. I'm surprised the old biddy walks around town unarmed.
Lee Goldberg (Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop (Mr. Monk, #8))
The sick suffer alone, they undergo procedures and surgeries alone, and in the end, they die alone. Transplant is different. Transplant is all about having someone else join you in your illness. It may be in the form of an organ from a recently deceased donor, a selfless gift given by someone has never met you, or a kidney or liver from a relative, friend or acquaintance. In every case, someone is saying, in effect, “Let me join you in the recovery, your suffering, your fear of the unknown, your desire to become healthy, to get your life back. Let me bear some of your risk with you.
Joshua Mezrich (How Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon)
That’s standard procedure for officer safety. We didn’t know that was Ms. Jefferson’s son. We saw a large, angry Black youth who was visibly upset.” “Really?” Kennedy says. “Was he wearing a hoodie too?
Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things)
This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.
Charles P. Kindleberger (Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics))
Fifth, whatever one thinks about controversial issues like abortion, it is misleading, to say the least, to downplay the seriousness of the procedure on not only a girl’s body but also on her mind and emotions.
Meg Meeker (Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know)
Some say that wearing a mask during the Covid pandemic will not prevent you from getting the virus nor giving it to someone else. If this is true, then why are doctors and nurses required to wear masks during surgical procedures?
James Thomas Kesterson Jr
The life an infertile person seeks comes to her not by accident and not by fate but by hard-fought choices. How to put together the portfolio of photographs. How to answer at the home study. What clinic or doctor or procedure. Donor egg or donor sperm or donor embryo. Open or closed adoption. What country, what boxes to check or uncheck. What questions to ask, and ask again. When to start and when to stop. What to say when her child says, Tell me my story.
Belle Boggs (The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood)
We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. The will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults. There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra-intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction. The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable, and it will not be thinkable for some time -- even though there are now groups and families and persons everywhere in the country who have begun the labor of thinking it. And so we are by no means divided, or readily divisible, into environmental saints and sinners. But there are legitimate distinctions that need to be made. These are distinctions of degree and of consciousness. Some people are less destructive than others, and some are more conscious of their destructiveness than others. For some, their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a "practical" compromise, a necessary "reality," the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies. People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.
Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture)
I had forgotten you were a bird-watcher till you reminded me just now. You went in for it at Oxford, I remember. It isn’t a thing I would care to do myself. Not,” I hastened to add, “that I’ve anything against bird-watching. Must be most interesting, besides keeping you” – I was about to say “out of the public houses” but thought it better to change it to “out in the open air”. “What’s the procedure?” I went on. “I suppose you lurk in a bush till a bird comes along, and then you out with the glasses and watch it.
P.G. Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (Jeeves, #15))
And in the case of fecal transplants, there’s no drug or medical device involved, and thus no pharmaceutical company or device maker with diverticula deep enough to fund the multiple rounds of controlled clinical trials. If anything, drug companies might be inclined to fight the procedure’s approval. Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them. “There’s billions of dollars at stake,” says Khoruts. “I told Katerina, if this works, don’t be surprised to find me at the bottom of the river.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.” “So you’re saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space – like in dreams?” “Most great poetry is like that. If the words can’t create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem.
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
In learning any subject of a technical nature where mathematics plays a role, one is confronted with the task of understanding and storing away in the memory a huge body of facts and ideas, held together by certain relationships which can be “proved” or “shown” to exist between them. It is easy to confuse the proof itself with the relationship which it establishes. Clearly, the important thing to learn and to remember is the relationship, not the proof. In any particular circumstance we can either say “it can be shown that” such and such is true, or we can show it. In almost all cases, the particular proof that is used is concocted, first of all, in such form that it can be written quickly and easily on the chalkboard or on paper, and so that it will be as smooth-looking as possible. Consequently, the proof may look deceptively simple, when in fact, the author might have worked for hours trying different ways of calculating the same thing until he has found the neatest way, so as to be able to show that it can be shown in the shortest amount of time! The thing to be remembered, when seeing a proof, is not the proof itself, but rather that it can be shown that such and such is true. Of course, if the proof involves some mathematical procedures or “tricks” that one has not seen before, attention should be given not to the trick exactly, but to the mathematical idea involved.
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat (Volume 1))
I practiced what I would say if the worst occurred: Oh, yes, that conveyer belt always stops right there. This is the part where I take a sprint across the crematory and slam myself into the box containing your mother and shoot her into the flames. Common procedure, sir; worry not.
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory)
In this context we may say that from a certain perspective resurrection is a standard procedure, which expands the state of consciousness to the level when coming back to life is possible. And that’s precisely why resurrection can be taught, just as any other standard procedure can.
Grigori Grabovoi (The Resurrection of People and Eternal Life From Now On Is Our Reality!)
But the “jobs of the future” do not need scientists who have memorized the periodic table. In fact, business leaders say they are looking for creative, independent problem solvers in every field, not just math and science. Yet in most schools, STEM subjects are taught as a series of memorized procedures and vocabulary words, when they are taught at all. In 2009, only 3% of high school graduates had any credits in an engineering course. (National Science Board, 2012) Technology is increasingly being relegated to using computers for Internet research and test taking.
Sylvia Libow Martinez (Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom)
The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Michel Foucault (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature)
Two lines in “If I Was Your Girlfriend” stand out after talking with people close to Prince. When he’s imagining himself as her girlfriend he sings, “Would u let me wash your hair?” And later as a man he says, “Would u let me give u a bath?” Those desires I’m told are part of his real life. Someone who was intimate with him and knows others who were, too, says Prince was not doing exactly as much screwing as he’d have you believe. I was told by someone who knows that Prince loves to bathe women. And brush their hair. And sometimes he did these things in lieu of intercourse. It was not part of trying to get laid or deepen the sexual experience, but as a worshipful appreciation of femininity. A person who was close to Prince said, “One girl told me that she got frustrated because he’d rather bathe her.” A woman who was in a relationship with Prince years ago told me that when he gave women baths he took total control. “He ran the bath, he put the bubbles in, he took your clothes off, he washed you, he washed your hair, it was a whole procedure and process. He put lotion on you after. He’d give you a robe. I don’t know if it was worshipful or if it was sweet and sensitive.
Touré (I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon)
One of the most popular genital surgeries is labia minora reduction. When a similar procedure is performed on healthy girls in some African countries as a coming-of-age rite to control their sexuality, Westerners denounce it as genital mutilation; in the U.S. of A., it's called cosmetic enhancement. But both procedures are based on misogynist notions of female genitalia as ugly, dirty, and shameful. And though American procedures are generally performed under vastly better conditions (with the benefit of, say, anesthesia and antibiotics), the postsurgical results can be similarly horrific, involving loss of sensation, chronic pain, and infection.
Julia Scheeres
series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all.
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence.” To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
In choosing topics for research and departments to enlist in, a young scientist must beware of following fashion. It is one thing to fall into step with a great concerted movement of thought such as molecular genetics or cellular immunology, but quite another merely to fall in with prevailing fashion for, say, some new histochemical procedure or technical gimmick.
Peter Medawar (Advice To A Young Scientist)
The lyrics, though, are pretty symbolic, " I venture. "From time immemorial, symbolism and poetry have been inseparable. Like a pirate and his rum. " "Do you think Miss Saeki knew what all the lyrics mean?" Oshima looks up, listening to the thunder as if calculating how far away it is. He turns to me and shakes his head. "Not necessarily. Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypass­ ing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose." "So you're saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space-like in dreams?" "Most great poetry is like that. If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer func­ tions as a poem." "But plenty of poems only pretend to do that." "Right. It's a kind of trick, and as long as you know that it isn't hard. As long as you use some symbolic-sounding words, the whole thing looks like a poem of sorts." "In 'Kafka on the Shore' I feel something urgent and serious." "Me too, " Oshima says.
Haruki Murakami
The perfect life, the perfect lie … is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances. It is a very elaborate, extremely simple procedure, arranging this web of self-deceit: contriving to convince yourself that you were prevented from doing what you wanted. Most people don’t want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he’d be lost without it. That’s why children are so convenient: you have children because you’re struggling to get by as an artist—which is actually what being an artist means—or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that your children prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out. So it goes on: things are always forsaken in the name of an obligation to someone else, never as a failing, a falling short of yourself.
Geoff Dyer (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids)
Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise. People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.
Carrie Sun (Private Equity: A Memoir)
Danny jokes he’s glad it was a caesarean, because he doesn’t know how he’d feel about talking to a man who’s seen his wife’s vagina. I want to say that actually I’d have seen it when catheterizing her for the procedure, plus, if he really wants something to get his brain imploding, I’d have also seen its reverse side during the operation. I don’t say this, just in case he wasn’t joking and things get even more awkward.
Adam Kay (This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor)
You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all.
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
Dinah said, “Ivy, you want to take this or should I?” “I’ll do it. You’re busy,” Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot’s seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: “Julia. Shut up. If you say another fucking word I’ll stave your fucking head in and put your corpse out the airlock. Nothing about this is acceptable. Starting with the fact that you are flapping your gums, posing a distraction to Dinah while she is carrying out a difficult mission-critical operation to protect the Cloud Ark. You just attempted to countermand a direct order from Markus, who is in charge of everything here under the PSAPS clause of the Cloud Ark Constitution. You are up here illegally. The Crater Lake Accord specifically barred the sending of national leaders to the Cloud Ark. You have violated that commitment and found a way to be launched up here anyhow, and judging from the looks of it there was no end of dirty dealing along the way. Your vehicle approached the Cloud Ark in a manner incompatible with our safety and security procedures, endangering the lives of everyone up here, and forcing arklets and Izzy itself to expend priceless and irreplaceable fuel to perform evasive maneuvers. We were sent here on an emergency basis, placing ourselves in harm’s way and expending more scarce resources to clean up the mess that you created by your cowardly and dishonorable act. For all of these reasons I am commanding you, by my authority as the commander of this vessel, to remain silent until we have docked safely at Izzy.
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
SPEAKING OF CONTROL “She did not have to struggle to stay on task for hours. She was in a state of flow.” “His ego was depleted after a long day of meetings. So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
For more than twenty years I have offered a very simple yet powerful ritual to people before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery. I suggest they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. Before this meeting, I suggest they find an ordinary stone, a piece of the earth, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and bring it to the meeting with them. The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak, each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or of relationships, or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought. When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say things such as, 'What brought me through was determination,' 'What brought me through was faith,' 'What brought me through was humor.' When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, 'I put determination into this stone for you,' or, 'I put faith into this stone for you.' After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearby and hold in their hand when things get hard. In an environment which is highly technical and sterile, it connects them to the earth and to each other.
Rachel Naomi Remen (Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal)
What was it that ailed me? Was the hand of the Lord turned against me? But why just against me? Why, for that matter, not just as well against a man in South America? When I considered the matter over, it grew more and more incomprehensible to me that I of all others should be selected as an experiment for a Creator's whims. It was, to say the least of it, a peculiar mode of procedure to pass over a whole world of other humans in order to reach me. Why not select just as well Bookseller Pascha, or Hennechen the steam agent?
Knut Hamsun (Hunger)
Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television. It’s only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don’t want to see informed citizens making rational choices. The
Noam Chomsky (Because We Say So (City Lights Open Media))
It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects -which subjects of experience and knowledge - d you then want to 'diminish' when you say: 'I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.
Michel Foucault (Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977)
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.
Karl Marx (The Poverty of Philosophy)
My conclusions, on this point, are as follows: when the Law Commission says committal of judgment debtors is an anomaly that cannot be justified and should be abolished; when it is common cause that there is a general international move away from imprisonment for civil debt, of which the present committal proceedings are an adapted relic; when such imprisonment has been abolished in South Africa, save for its contested form as contempt of court in the magistrate's court; when the clauses concerned have already been interpreted by the Courts as restrictively as possible, without their constitutionally offensive core being eviscerated; when other tried and tested methods exist for recovery of debt from those in a position to pay; when the violation of the fundamental right to personal freedom is manifest, and the procedures used must inevitably possess a summary character if they are to be economically worthwhile to the creditor, then the very institution of civil imprisonment, however it may be described and however well directed its procedures might be, in itself must be regarded as highly questionable and not a compelling claimant for survival.
Albie Sachs
The two men sat facing each other in the smartly furnished office at the bottom end of Harley Street and knew that they had reached the final act of a drama that had been played out many times before. Six weeks ago, they hadn’t even known each other. Now they were united in the most intimate way of all. One had given the news. The other had received it. Neither of them allowed very much emotion to show in their face. It was part of the procedure, a gentlemen’s agreement, that they should do their best to conceal it. ‘May I ask, Dr Benson, how long would you say I have remaining?’ Atticus Pünd asked.
Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders (Susan Ryeland #1))
The question,” Rupert stated, “is, do I rend you limb from limb, physically?  Or do I rend you cell by cell, magically?”  Rupert certainly couldn’t do the latter, and he really didn’t want to do the former; however, the demon had really made him mad.  He deserved to suffer a little fear.  If Rupert had been a human, he’d be dead by now, he was sure. “Limb by limb, if you please.”  The demon begged. “I’ll be forever regenerating with the cell-by-cell thing.  Please...”  The demon almost seemed to whine.  “Please lord, if I have to regenerate cell by cell, my master will really be angry with me.  He doesn’t like his people slacking off, taking up his time to regenerate from their own stupidity, as he’d say.  Just rend me limb from limb, I promise I won’t bother you anymore.  Please?”  Rupert just continued to glare.  He was taken by surprise. The little fellow acted as if it were standard procedure in this circumstance.  He was actually begging for one method over the other.  “Please? Limb by limb?”  the demon begged. Rupert shrugged.  He’d never rent anyone limb from limb before.  He wasn’t sure how it was supposed to be done, but he could use his imagination.  Rupert waded in.  It was all rather messy, he’d decided afterward.
J.L. Langland (Into The Abyss (Demons of Astlan, #1))
The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
What’s the most basic freedom we have?” Witzbold asked. An earnest expression dominated his face. Zeiger extended a hand and fished another dried plum from the bag. He chewed, reflecting. “To end our lives when we want to,” he said. “Even that can be controlled,” Witzbold said. “No, it’s the freedom to feel what we feel. You’re right in this preface. Infants know only what their parents want them to know. They would remain infants for eternity if they couldn’t self-determine. True existence begins when we can make choices. Feel what we must and think what we may. Men stripped of that are nothing but children, as you say. When was the last time you had your own feelings?
Jennifer Hofmann (The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures)
Nuclear posture is the incorporation of some number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles state's overall military structure, the rules and procedures governing how those weapons are deployed, when and under what conditions they might be used, against what targets, and who has the authority to make those decisions. Nuclear posture is best thought of as the operational, rather than the declaratory, nuclear doctrine of a country; while the two can overlap, it is the operational doctrine that generates deterrent power against an opponent. To put it bluntly, states care more about what an adversary can credibly do with its nuclear weapons than what it says about them.
Vipin Narang (Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics))
The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of ‘natural’ explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable ‘natural’ explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie—all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle.
C.S. Lewis (Miracles)
When Marxian socialism came to the United States after the 1848 revolutions, it brought along in its baggage this European suspicion of liberal-democratic procedures. Eventually that was dispelled and socialist organizations began participating in electoral politics. But they continued to think of themselves more as the vanguard of a movement than as voices in a democratic chorus. And their preferred political tactics remained the mass demonstration and the strike -- rather than, say, winning elections for county commissioner. The significance of these groups in American politics peaked during the Great Depression and then faded. But their movement ideal retained its grip on the left, and in the 1960s it captured the imagination of liberals as well. There had been emancipatory movements before, against slavery, for women's rights, for workers' protection. They did not question the legitimacy of the American system; they just wanted it to live up to its principles and respect its procedures. And they worked with parties and through institutions to achieve their ends. But as the 1970s flowed into the 1980s, movement politics began to be seen by many liberals as an alternative rather than a supplement to institutional politics, and by some as being more legitimate. That's when what we now call the social justice warrior was born, a social type with quixotic features whose self-image depends on being unstained by compromise and above trafficking in mere interests.
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
Wolfe nodded. “The letter-writer’s arrangement is even more adroit. Not only is there no risk of contact, there is no possible line of approach. But she must be found, and I have considered two procedures. One would be extremely expensive and might take many months. The other would require the cooperation of men who were close friends or associates of Mr. Valdon. From Mrs. Valdon’s suggestions four names were selected: yours. On her behalf I ask each of you to make a list of the names of all women with whom, to your knowledge, Richard Valdon was in contact during the months of March, April, and May, nineteen-sixty-one. Last year. All women, however brief the contact and regardless of its nature. May I have it soon? Say by tomorrow evening?
Rex Stout (The Mother Hunt (Nero Wolfe, #38))
Balancing the ethical-tactical continuum is the best way to increase our ability because it’s when we can (or cannot) ethically protect everyone and resolve conflict that tactics become vividly clear. The tactical itself, on its own, is devoid of meaning without orientation—a sword-cutting technique is simply that, a procedure to cut with a sword. The technique gains priority and consequence only when used in fulfilling our protector ethic, which is always moral-physical. A Moral-Physical Philosophy Some believe the ethical and tactical are mutually exclusive, even incompatible. The tactical is about survival, they’ll say—“Kill or be killed.” The ethical is for Sunday school or philosophers, who rarely, if ever, get punched in the face. But this is hardly true—I get punched all the time.
James V. Morganelli (The Protector Ethic: Morality, Virtue, and Ethics in the Martial Way)
Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions—only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain—is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states. I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his clinic. He says: “Of course, I’m there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty.” In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being “pro-life.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
The male staff all wore gorgeous colored loin cloths that always seem to be about to fall off they’re wonderful hips. Their upper bodies were tanned sculpted and naked. The female staff wore short shorts and silky flowing tops that almost but didn’t expose their young easy breasts. I noticed we only ever encountered male staff, and the men walking through the lobby were always greeted by the female staff. Very ingenious, as Rebecca said later - if we had ticked Lesbians on the form I wonder what would have happened? -There was a place to tick for Lesbians, I said ? -Sexual Persuasion- it was on all the forms -Really. And, how many options were there? -You’re getting the picture, said Jillian. This was not your basic check in procedure as at say a Best Western. Our Doormen/Security Guards , held out our chairs for us to let us sit at the elegant ornate table. Then they poured us tea, and placed before each of us a small bowl of tropical fruit, cut into bite size pieces. Wonderful! Almost immediately a check in person came and sat opposite us at the desk. Again a wonderful example of Island Male talent. (in my mind anyway) We signed some papers, and were each handed an immense wallet of information passes, electronic keys, electronic ID’s we would wear to allow us to move through the park and its ‘worlds’ and a small flash drive I looked at it as he handed it to me, and given the mindset of the Hotel and the murals and the whole ambiance of the place, I was thinking it might be a very small dildo for, some exotic move I was unaware of. -What’s this? I asked him -Your Hotel and Theme Park Guide I looked at it again, huh, so not a dildo.
Germaine Gibson (Theme Park Erotica)
practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence,
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Finally, the tern 'asceticism' is also susceptible to being misunderstood by those who view Buddhism from the outside. Evola reminds his readers that the original meaning of the term asceticism is "practical exercise," or 'discipline' — one could even say 'learning.' It certainly does not mean, as some are inclined to think, a willingness to mortify the body that derives from the idea of penance, and even leads to the practice of self-flagellation, since it is believed that one must suffer in order to expiate one's sins. Asceticism is rather a school of the will, a pure heroism (that is, it is disinterested) that Evola, a real expert in this subject, compares to the efforts of a mountain climber. To the layman, mountain climbing may be a pointless effort, but to the climber it is a challenge in which the test of courage, perseverance, and hero-ism is its only purpose. In this we recognize an attitude that Brahmanism knew under certain forms of yoga and Tantrism. In the spiritual domain, the procedure is the same. Buddha, as we know, was tempted early in his life by a form of asceticism that was similar to that of a hermit living in the desert. This approach involved prolonged fasts and techniques aimed at breaking the body's resistance. Siddhartha, however, realized himself and achieved the Awakening only when he understood this type of asceticism to be a dead end. Turning away from the indignant protests of his early companions, he stopped mortifying his body, ate to placate his hunger, and returned to the world of human beings. But it was then that his detachment started to develop: the world no longer had a grasp on him, since he had become a 'hero,' or like the ancient Greeks would have said, a 'god.
Jean Varenne (The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts)
Practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect." It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, or--as in the case of Robert Oppenheimer--you can have lots of both.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
It is not out of (false or sincere) modesty that Lacan says “I learn everything from my analysands,” “I borrow my interventions from them.” Rather, this is a procedure, a method that is carefully thought out, and actually recalls Hegel’s warning, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, against the kind of (philosophical) proceeding which concerns itself only with aims and results, with differentiating and passing judgments on things. This kind of activity, says Hegel, instead of getting involved with the thing, is always-already beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and being preoccupied with it, this kind of knowing remains essentially preoccupied with itself. The proximity of “practicing analyst” Lacan and “speculative philosopher” Hegel on these questions of method should be enough to prevent any hasty conclusions drawn in terms of theory versus practice, philosophy versus antiphilosophy, or singular versus universal.
Alenka Zupančič (What IS Sex?)
T. S. Eliot’s words ring true: “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”19 This applies to one group as much as the other. But the attempt to resolve human questions with procedures will never be sufficient. Again it is Benedict XVI who says it best: “Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last forever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom.” Rather, “If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all…. In other words: good structures help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from outside.”20
Julián Carrón (Disarming Beauty: Essays on Faith, Truth, and Freedom)
I follow you. So now you aim to get to a good college. In order to do justice to your talent.’ ‘Well, something like that. My mother and I both thought that maybe Atlas Brookings, being a generous and liberal college…’ ‘Sufficiently generous and liberal to be open to all students of high caliber, even some who haven’t benefited from genetic editing.’ ‘Exactly, sir.’ ‘And no doubt, Rick, you understand, because your mother will have told you, that I currently chair the college’s Founders’ Committee. That’s to say, the body that controls the scholarships.’ ‘Yes, sir. That’s what she told me.’ ‘Now, Rick. I’m hoping your mother hasn’t been implying that the selection procedure at Atlas Brookings is subject to any favoritism.’ ‘Neither my mother nor I would ask you to help me out of favoritism, sir. I’m only asking you to help if you think I’m worth a place at Atlas Brookings.’ ‘That’s well said. Okay, let’s take a look at what you have here.
Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun)
Since I entered the business world, conglomerates have enjoyed several periods of extreme popularity, the silliest of which occurred in the late 1960s. The drill for conglomerate CEOs then was simple: By personality, promotion or dubious accounting — and often by all three — these managers drove a fledgling conglomerate’s stock to, say, 20 times earnings and then issued shares as fast as possible to acquire another business selling at ten-or-so times earnings. They immediately applied “pooling” accounting to the acquisition, which — with not a dime’s worth of change in the underlying businesses — automatically increased per-share earnings, and used the rise as proof of managerial genius. They next explained to investors that this sort of talent justified the maintenance, or even the enhancement, of the acquirer’s p/e multiple. And, finally, they promised to endlessly repeat this procedure and thereby create ever-increasing per-share earnings.
Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders: 1965-2024)
The features of Hume's philosophy which I have mentioned, like many other features of it, would incline me to think that Hume was a mere—brilliant—sophost; and his procedures are certainly sophistical. But I am forced, not to reverse, but to add to this judgement by a peculiarity of Hume's philosophizing: namely that, although he reaches his conclusions—with which he is in love—by sophistical methods, his considerations constantly open up very deep and important problems. It is often the case that in the act of exhibiting the sophistry one finds oneself noticing matters which deserve a lot of exploring: the obvious stands in need of investigation as a result of the points that Hume pretends to have made. In this, he is unlike, say, Butler. It was already well-known that conscience could dictate vile actions; for Butler to have written disregarding this does not open up any new topics for us. But with Hume it is otherwise: hence he is a very profound and great philosopher, in spite of his sophistry.
G.E.M. Anscombe (Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays (St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs))
It is necessary to restrain the bull in us in order to elevate it to the Bull. This means to say that the instinctive desire which shows itself as rage concentrated upon a single thing, and which blinds one to everything else, is to be restrained and thus elevated to the propensity for profound meditation. This entire operation is summarized in Hermeticism by the words "to be silent". The precept "to be silent" is not, as many authors interpret it, solely a rule of prudence, but it is moreover a practical method of transforming this narrowing and blinkering instinct into a propensity towards depth and, correspondingly, an aversion towards all that is superficial in nature. The winged Bull is therefore the result obtained by the procedure of "being silent". This means to say that the Bull is elevated to the level of the Eagle and united with it. A marriage of the impetus towards the heights and the propensity towards depth is effected by this union. The marriage of opposites - this traditional theme of alchemy - is the essence of the practice of the law of the Cross.
Valentin Tomberg (Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism)
In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure. Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille. But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures. The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.” Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance. The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.
Todd McGowan (Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets)
Though just a girl, I had ideas about violence. Violence had a horizon, a scent, a color. I'd seen it in books and newsreels, but I didn't truly know it until I saw the effects of it on Zayde, saw him come to our basement home in the ghetto with a red rag over his face, saw Mama go soundless as she bound his nose with the scrap torn from the hem of her nightgown. Pearl held the lamp during this procedure so that Mama could see, but I was shuddering so much that I couldn't assist her. I should be able to say that I saw violence happen to Mama when a guard came to our door with news about the disappearance, but I kept my eyes closed tight the whole time, sealed them shut while Pearl stared straight ahead, and because my sister saw it all, I felt the images secondhand, felt them burn on the backs of my eyelids - I saw the guard's boot glow and furrow itself in Mama's side as she lay on the floor. Pearl was angry that I was not an active witness, and so she forced me to take it all in, and when I begged her to stop subjecting me to such sights, she informed me that I had no say in the matter, because she would never look away, not ever, no matter how much it hurt me, because in looking away, she said, we would lose ourselves so thoroughly that our loss would require another name.
Affinity Konar (Mischling)
After this interlude we return to the question of the parcel. Yes, says the Postmaster, it has been here – actually here in the office! But it is here no longer. It has been removed to the custody of the Customs. Monsieur B. must realize that parcels are subject to Customs dues. B. says that it is personal wearing apparel. The Postmaster says: ‘No doubt, no doubt; but that is the affair of the Customs.’ ‘We must, then, go to the Customs office?’ ‘That will be the proper procedure,’ agrees the Postmaster. ‘Not that it will be any use going today. Today is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays the Customs are closed.’ ‘Tomorrow, then?’ ‘Yes, tomorrow the Customs will be open.’ ‘Sorry,’ says B. to Max. ‘I suppose it means I shall have to come in again tomorrow to get my parcel.’ The Postmaster says that certainly Monsieur B. will have to come in tomorrow, but that even tomorrow he will not be able to get his parcel. ‘Why not?’ demands B. ‘Because, after the formalities of the Customs have been settled, the parcel must then go through the Post Office.’ ‘You mean, I shall have to come on here?’ ‘Precisely. And that will not be possible tomorrow, for tomorrow the Post Office will be closed,’ says the Postmaster triumphantly. We go into the subject in detail, but officialdom triumphs at every turn. On no day of the week, apparently, are both the Customs and the Post Office open!
Agatha Christie (Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir)
It is in this context, clearly dominated by a classist propaganda, chauvinist and persecutory, that the accusation of anti-Semitism and hidden negationism – despite being completely unfounded – tetanizes the majority of its victims. How should we explain this strange phenomenon? A first reason lies in the brutality of the accusation, very unusual in a society bathed in a polite consensus – at least among well-behaved people. Suddenly, in a procedure reminiscent of the logic of fascism in which insult overshadows argument, we are dealing with a genuine provocation: an accusation so serious and so incongruous that we can well imagine it leaves some people speechless. And then, it’s very difficult to defend yourself against such an accusation: ‘No, I’m not anti-Semitic’ being a double negation (‘I’m not one of those people who don’t like Jews’) with the fragility this implies. How, indeed, can one prove that one is not something? Say that one has Jewish friends? That’s the worst of all. (‘Ah! He’s got his good Jews.’) Remind people, in certain cases, that one is Jewish oneself? We have seen how that is an aggravating factor. Launch a legal action? Lost in advance, as the accusers are clever enough to use terms that shelter them from prosecution for defamation, which has its precise rules. They will never say that you’re anti-Semitic; they’ll even say that ‘of course, you’re not’, letting their argument, their tone, their comparisons and their historic references do the slandering work while they remain protected.
Alain Badiou (Reflections On Anti-Semitism)
Imagine that you are watching a really great magic trick. The celebrated conjuring duo Penn and Teller have a routine in which they simultaneously appear to shoot each other with pistols, and each appears to catch the bullet in his teeth. Elaborate precautions are taken to scratch identifying marks on the bullets before they are put in the guns, the whole procedure is witnessed at close range by volunteers from the audience who have experience of firearms, and apparently all possibilities for trickery are eliminated. Teller’s marked bullet ends up in Penn’s mouth and Penn’s marked bullet ends up in Teller’s. I [Richard Dawkins] am utterly unable to think of any way in which this could be a trick. The Argument from Personal Incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientific brain centres, and almost compels me to say, ‘It must be a miracle. There is no scientific explanation. It’s got to be supernatural.’ But the still small voice of scientific education speaks a different message. Penn and Teller are world-class illusionists. There is a perfectly good explanation. It is just that I am too naïve, or too unobservant, or too unimaginative, to think of it. That is the proper response to a conjuring trick. It is also the proper response to a biological phenomenon that appears to be irreducibly complex. Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
It is clear that 'inquiry', as conceived by Dewey, is part of the general process of attempting to make the world more organic. 'Unified wholes' are to be the outcome of inquiries. Dewey's love of what is organic is due partly to biology, partly to the lingering influence of Hegel. Unless on the basis of an unconscious Hegelian metaphysic, I do not see why inquiry should be expected to result in 'unified wholes'. If I am given a pack of cards in disorder, and asked to inquire into their sequence, I shall, if I follow Dewey's prescription, first arrange them in order, and then say that this was the order resulting from inquiry. There will be, it is true, an 'objective transformation of objective subject-matter' while I am arranging the cards, but the definition allows for this. If, at the end, I am told: 'We wanted to know the sequence of the cards when they were given to you, not after you had re-arranged them,' I shall, if I am a disciple of Dewey, reply: 'Your ideas are altogether too static. I am a dynamic person, and when I inquire into any subject-matter I first alter it in such a way as to make the inquiry easy.' The notion that such a procedure is legitimate can only be justified by a Hegelian distinction of appearance and reality: the appearance may be confused and fragmentary, but the reality is always orderly and organic. Therefore when I arrange the cards I am only revealing their true eternal nature. But this part of the doctrine is never made explicit. The metaphysic of organism underlies Dewey's theories, but I do not know how far he is aware of this fact.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Is Joanna Gaines here? We have a warrant here for her arrest,” the officer said. It was the tickets. I knew it. And I panicked. I picked up my son and I hid in the closet. I literally didn’t know what to do. I’d never even had a speeding ticket, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, I’m about to go to prison, and my child won’t be able to eat. What is this kid gonna do? I heard Chip say, “She’s not here.” Thankfully, Drake didn’t make a peep, and the officer believed him. He said, “Well, just let her know we’re looking for her,” and they left. Jo’s the most conservative girl in the world. She had never even been late for school. I mean, this girl was straitlaced. So now we realize there’s a citywide warrant out for her arrest, and we’re like, “Oh, crap.” In her defense, Jo had wanted to pay those tickets off all along, and I was the one saying, “No way. I’m not paying these tickets.” So we decided to try to make it right. We called the judge, and the court clerk told us, “Okay, you have an appointment at three in the afternoon to discuss the tickets. See you then.” We wanted to ask the judge if he could remove a few of them for us. “The fines for our dogs “running at large” on our front porch just seemed a bit excessive. We arrived at the courthouse, and Chip was carrying Drake in his car seat. I couldn’t carry it because I was still recovering from Drake’s delivery. We got inside and spoke to a clerk. They looked at the circumstances and decided to switch all the tickets into Chip’s name. Those dogs were basically mine, and it didn’t make sense to have the tickets in her name. But as soon as they did that, this police officer walked over and said, “Hey, do you mind emptying out all of your pockets?” I got up and cooperated. “Absolutely. Yep,” I said. I figured it was just procedure before we went in to see the judge. Then he said, “Yeah, you mind taking off your belt?” I thought, That’s a little weird. Then he said, “Do you mind turning around and putting your hands behind your back?” They weren’t going to let us talk to the judge at all. The whole thing was just a sting to get us to come down there and be arrested. They arrested Chip on the spot. And I’m sitting there saying, “I can’t carry this baby in his car seat. What am I supposed to do?” I started bawling. “You can’t take him!” I cried. But they did. They took him right outside and put him in the back of a police car. Now I feel like the biggest loser in the world. I’m in the back of a police car as my crying wife comes out holding our week-old baby. I’m walking out, limping, and waving to him as they drive away. And I can’t even wave because my hands are cuffed behind my back. So here I am awkwardly trying to make a waving motion with my shoulder and squinching my face just to try to make Jo feel better. It was just the most comical thing, honestly. A total joke. To take a man to jail because his dogs liked to walk around a neighborhood, half of which he owns? But it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I was flooded with hormones and just could not stop crying. They told me they were taking my husband to the county jail. Luckily we had a buddy who was an attorney, so I called him. I was clueless. “I’ve never dated a guy that’s been in trouble, and now I’ve got a husband that’s in jail.
Joanna Gaines (The Magnolia Story)
Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
A major source of conflict is that men sometimes infer sexual interest on the part of a woman when it does not exist. A series of experiments has documented this phenomenon (Abbey, 1982; Lindgren, George, & Shoda, 2007). In one study, 98 male and 102 female college students viewed a 10-minute videotape of a conversation in which a female student visits a male professor’s office to ask for more time to complete a term paper. The actors in the film were a female drama student and a professor in the theater department. Neither the student nor the professor acted flirtatious or overtly sexual, although both were instructed to behave in a friendly manner. People who witnessed the tape then rated the likely intentions of the woman using a seven-point scale. Women watching the interaction were more likely to say that she was trying to be friendly, with an average rating of 6.45, and not sexy (2.00) or seductive (1.89). Men, also perceiving friendliness (6.09), were significantly more likely than women to infer seductive (3.38) and sexual intentions (3.84). A speed-dating laboratory procedure had men rate women’s sexual interest in them a er a brief interaction and compared those ratings to women’s self-reported sexual interest in each of the men (Perilloux et al., 2012). Again, men exhibited a sexual misperception bias, perceiving women as significantly more interested in them than women actually were. Men high in self-perceived attractiveness and female-evaluated mate value are especially vulnerable to the sexual over-perception bias (Kohl & Robertson, 2014; Perilloux et al., 2012). And men who pursue a short-term mating strategy are also more prone to the sexual over-perception bias (Perilloux et al., 2012), likely because this bias facilitates more frequent attempts to initiate sexual overtures.
David M. Buss (Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind)
No-knock entries are dangerous for everyone involved—cops, suspects, bystanders. The raids usually occur before dawn; the residents are usually asleep, and then disoriented by the sudden intrusion. There is no warning, and sleepy residents may not always understand that the men breaking down their door are police. At the same time, police procedures allow terribly little room for error. Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces sergeant and SWAT trainer, says that he teaches cops to “Look at hands. If there’s a weapon in their hands during a dynamic entry, it does not matter what that weapon is doing. If there’s a weapon in their hands, that person dies. It’s automatic.” On September 13, 2000, the DEA, FBI, and local police conducted a series of raids throughout Modesto, California. By the end of the day, they had shot and killed an eleven-year-old boy, Alberto Sepulveda, as he was lying facedown on the floor with his arms outstretched, as ordered by police. In January 2011, police in Farmington, Massachusetts similarly shot Eurie Stamp, a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather, as he lay motionless on the floor according to police instructions. In the course of a May 2014 raid in Cornelia, Georgia, a flash-bang grenade landed in the crib of a nineteen-month-old infant. The explosion blew a hole in the face and chest of Bounkham Phonesavanh (“Baby Bou Bou”), covering his body with third degree burns, and exposing part of his ribcage. No guns or drugs were found in the house, and no arrests were made. Sometimes these raids go wrong before they even begin. Walter and Rose Martin, a perfectly innocent couple, both in their eighties, had their home raided by New York Police more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. It turned out that their address had been entered as the default in the police database.
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
Until recently, three unspoken principles have guided the arena of genetic diagnosis and intervention. First, diagnostic tests have largely been restricted to gene variants that are singularly powerful determinants of illness—i.e., highly penetrant mutations, where the likelihood of developing the disease is close to 100 percent (Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease). Second, the diseases caused by these mutations have generally involved extraordinary suffering or fundamental incompatibilities with “normal” life. Third, justifiable interventions—the decision to abort a child with Down syndrome, say, or intervene surgically on a woman with a BRCA1 mutation—have been defined through social and medical consensus, and all interventions have been governed by complete freedom of choice. The three sides of the triangle can be envisioned as moral lines that most cultures have been unwilling to transgress. The abortion of an embryo carrying a gene with, say, only a ten percent chance of developing cancer in the future violates the injunction against intervening on low-penetrance mutations. Similarly, a state-mandated medical procedure on a genetically ill person without the subject’s consent (or parental consent in the case of a fetus) crosses the boundaries of freedom and noncoercion. Yet it can hardly escape our attention that these parameters are inherently susceptible to the logic of self-reinforcement. We determine the definition of “extraordinary suffering.” We demarcate the boundaries of “normalcy” versus “abnormalcy.” We make the medical choices to intervene. We determine the nature of “justifiable interventions.” Humans endowed with certain genomes are responsible for defining the criteria to define, intervene on, or even eliminate other humans endowed with other genomes. “Choice,” in short, seems like an illusion devised by genes to propagate the selection of similar genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics, and to bring about a complete revolution after the example set by geometers and investigators of nature. This critique is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself; but nevertheless it marks out the whole plan of this science, both with regard to its limits and with regard to its inner organization. For it is peculiar to pure speculative reason that it is able, indeed bound, to measure its own powers according to the different ways in which it chooses its objects for thought, and to enumerate exhaustively the different ways of choosing its problems, thus tracing a complete outline of a system of metaphysics. This is due to the fact that, with regard to the first point, nothing can be attributed to objects in *a priori* knowledge, except what the thinking subject takes from within itself; while, with regard to the second point, pure reason, as far as its principles of knowledge are concerned, forms a separate and independent unity, in which, as in an organized body, every member exists for the sake of all the others, and all the others exist for the sake of the one, so that no principle can be safely applied in *one* relation unless it has been carefully examined in *all* its relations to the whole use of pure reason. Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage, an advantage which cannot be shared by any other rational science which has to deal with objects (for *logic* deals only with the form of thought in general), that if by means of this critique it has been set upon the secure course of a science, it can exhaustively grasp the entire field of knowledge pertaining to it, and can thus finish its work and leave it to posterity as a capital that can never be added to, because it has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of their use, as determined by these principles themselves. And this completeness becomes indeed an obligation if metaphysics is to be a fundamental science, of which we must be able to say, *nil actum reputants, si quid superesset agendum* [to think that nothing was done for as long as something remained to be done]." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 21-22
Immanuel Kant
Women are inherently crooked? Certainly some Muslim clerics think so—or at least, they do not believe in legal equality for women. Bangladeshi Islamic cleric Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini read the same Koran that Tony Blair found so progressive and yet complained about attempts in his native country to establish equal property rights for women. The problem? That would be “directly against Islam and the holy Koran.”7 And where do Muslims get such ideas? They stem from the overall inferior status of women promulgated in the Koran, which specifically refutes the notion that women have as much basic human dignity as men. To the contrary, Allah says men are superior. When giving regulations for divorce, Allah stipulates that women “have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness.” Similar, but not identical, for “men are a degree above them” (2:228). Far from mandating equality, the Koran portrays women as essentially possessions of men. The Koran likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:223). And in a tradition Muhammad details the qualities of a good wife, including that “she obeys when instructed” and “the husband is pleased to look at her.”8 The Koran decrees women’s subordination to men in numerous other verses:            •    It declares that a woman’s legal testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282).            •    It allows men to marry up to four wives, and also to have sex with slave girls: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3).            •    It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11).            •    It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4).
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
At this point, the cautious reader might wish to read over the whole argument again, as presented above, just to make sure that I have not indulged in any 'sleight of hand'! Admittedly there is an air of the conjuring trick about the argument, but it is perfectly legitimate, and it only gains in strength the more minutely it is examined. We have found a computation Ck(k) that we know does not stop; yet the given computational procedure A is not powerful enough to ascertain that facet. This is the Godel(-Turing) theorem in the form that I require. It applies to any computational procedure A whatever for ascertaining that computations do not stop, so long as we know it to be sound. We deduce that no knowably sound set of computational rules (such as A) can ever suffice for ascertaining that computations do not stop, since there are some non-stopping computations (such as Ck(k)) that must elude these rules. Moreover, since from the knowledge of A and of its soundness, we can actually construct a computation Ck(k) that we can see does not ever stop, we deduce that A cannot be a formalization of the procedures available to mathematicians for ascertaining that computations do not stop, no matter what A is. Hence: (G) Human mathematicians are not using a knowably sound algorithm in order to ascertain mathematical truth. It seems to me that this conclusion is inescapable. However, many people have tried to argue against it-bringing in objections like those summarized in the queries Q1-Q20 of 2.6 and 2.10 below-and certainly many would argue against the stronger deduction that there must be something fundamentally non-computational in our thought processes. The reader may indeed wonder what on earth mathematical reasoning like this, concerning the abstract nature of computations, can have to say about the workings of the human mind. What, after all, does any of this have to do with the issue of conscious awareness? The answer is that the argument indeed says something very significant about the mental quality of understanding-in relation to the general issue of computation-and, as was argued in 1.12, the quality of understanding is something dependent upon conscious awareness. It is true that, for the most part, the foregoing reasoning has been presented as just a piece of mathematics, but there is the essential point that the algorithm A enters the argument at two quite different levels. At the one level, it is being treated as just some algorithm that has certain properties, but at the other, we attempt to regard A as being actually 'the algorithm that we ourselves use' in coming to believe that a computation will not stop. The argument is not simply about computations. It is also about how we use our conscious understanding in order to infer the validity of some mathematical claim-here the non-stopping character of Ck(k). It is the interplay between the two different levels at which the algorithm A is being considered-as a putative instance of conscious activity and as a computation itself-that allows us to arrive at a conclusion expressing a fundamental conflict between such conscious activity and mere computation.
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
The “Tall Tree” Fairness Test We can imagine the advantages and disadvantages that shape our lives as similar to the natural environment that shapes a tree as it grows. A tree growing on an open, level field grows straight and tall, toward the sun; a tree that grows on a hillside will also grow toward the sun—which means it will grow at an angle. The steeper the hill, the sharper the angle of the tree, so if we transplant that tree to the level field, it’s going to be a totally different shape from a tree native to that field. Both are adapted to the environment where they grew. We can infer the shape of the environment where a tree grew by looking at the shape of the tree. White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn’t made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we’re planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled? It’s because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that’s fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn’t stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside. 19 One kind of adversity: How many white parents do you know who explicitly teach their children to keep their hands in sight at all times and always say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” if they are stopped by the police? That’s just standard operating procedure for a lot of African American parents. Black parents in America grow their kids differently, because the landscape their kids are growing in requires it. The stark difference between how people of color are treated by police and how white people are treated results in white people thinking black people are ridiculous for being afraid of the police. We can’t see the ocean, so when black people tell us, “We do this to avoid falling into the ocean,” we don’t understand. But just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. How can we tell? By looking at the shape of the tree. Trees that grow at an angle grew on the side of a hill. People who are afraid of the police grew up in a world where the police are a threat. 20 Just because the road looks flat doesn’t mean it is. Just because you can’t see the ocean doesn’t mean it’s not there. You can infer the landscape by looking at the shapes of the people who grew in those environments. Instead of wondering why they aren’t thriving on the level playing field, imagine how the field can be changed to allow everyone to thrive.
Emily Nagoski (Burnout: The secret to solving the stress cycle)
In order for A to apply to computations generally, we shall need a way of coding all the different computations C(n) so that A can use this coding for its action. All the possible different computations C can in fact be listed, say as C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5,..., and we can refer to Cq as the qth computation. When such a computation is applied to a particular number n, we shall write C0(n), C1(n), C2(n), C3(n), C4(n), C5(n),.... We can take this ordering as being given, say, as some kind of numerical ordering of computer programs. (To be explicit, we could, if desired, take this ordering as being provided by the Turing-machine numbering given in ENM, so that then the computation Cq(n) is the action of the qth Turing machine Tq acting on n.) One technical thing that is important here is that this listing is computable, i.e. there is a single computation Cx that gives us Cq when it is presented with q, or, more precisely, the computation Cx acts on the pair of numbers q, n (i.e. q followed by n) to give Cq(n). The procedure A can now be thought of as a particular computation that, when presented with the pair of numbers q,n, tries to ascertain that the computation Cq(n) will never ultimately halt. Thus, when the computation A terminates, we shall have a demonstration that Cq(n) does not halt. Although, as stated earlier, we are shortly going to try to imagine that A might be a formalization of all the procedures that are available to human mathematicians for validly deciding that computations never will halt, it is not at all necessary for us to think of A in this way just now. A is just any sound set of computational rules for ascertaining that some computations Cq(n) do not ever halt. Being dependent upon the two numbers q and n, the computation that A performs can be written A(q,n), and we have: (H) If A(q,n) stops, then Cq(n) does not stop. Now let us consider the particular statements (H) for which q is put equal to n. This may seem an odd thing to do, but it is perfectly legitimate. (This is the first step in the powerful 'diagonal slash', a procedure discovered by the highly original and influential nineteenth-century Danish/Russian/German mathematician Georg Cantor, central to the arguments of both Godel and Turing.) With q equal to n, we now have: (I) If A(n,n) stops, then Cn(n) does not stop. We now notice that A(n,n) depends upon just one number n, not two, so it must be one of the computations C0,C1,C2,C3,...(as applied to n), since this was supposed to be a listing of all the computations that can be performed on a single natural number n. Let us suppose that it is in fact Ck, so we have: (J) A(n,n) = Ck(n) Now examine the particular value n=k. (This is the second part of Cantor's diagonal slash!) We have, from (J), (K) A(k,k) = Ck(k) and, from (I), with n=k: (L) If A(k,k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop. Substituting (K) in (L), we find: (M) If Ck(k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop. From this, we must deduce that the computation Ck(k) does not in fact stop. (For if it did then it does not, according to (M)! But A(k,k) cannot stop either, since by (K), it is the same as Ck(k). Thus, our procedure A is incapable of ascertaining that this particular computation Ck(k) does not stop even though it does not. Moreover, if we know that A is sound, then we know that Ck(k) does not stop. Thus, we know something that A is unable to ascertain. It follows that A cannot encapsulate our understanding.
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
Although there are certainly a number Hair Loss regarding treatments offering great results, experts say that normal thinning hair treatment can easily yield some of the best rewards for anybody concerned with the fitness of their head of hair. Most people choose to handle their hair loss along with medications or even surgical treatment, for example Minoxidil or even head of hair hair transplant. Nevertheless many individuals fail to realize that treatment as well as surgical procedure are costly and may have several dangerous unwanted effects and also risks. The particular safest and a lot cost efficient form of thinning hair treatment therapy is natural hair loss remedy, which includes healthful going on a diet, herbal solutions, exercise as well as good hair care strategies. Natural thinning hair therapy is just about the "Lost Art" associated with locks restore and is frequently ignored as a type of treatment among the extremely expensive options. A simple main within normal hair loss treatment methods are that the identical food items which are great for your health, are good for your hair. Although hair loss may be caused by many other factors, not enough correct diet will cause thinning hair in most people. Foods which are loaded with protein, lower in carbohydrates, and have decreased excess fat articles can help in maintaining healthful hair as well as preventing hair loss. For instance, efa's, seen in spinach, walnuts, soy products, seafood, sardines, sunflower seed products and also canola acrylic, are important eating essentials valuable in maintaining hair wholesome. The omega-3 and also rr Half a dozen efas contain anti-inflammatory properties that are valuable in maintaining healthier hair. Insufficient amounts of these types of efa's may lead to more rapidly hair loss. A deficiency in nutritional B6 and also vitamin B12 can also result in excessive hair thinning. Food items containing B vitamins, like liver organ, poultry, seafood and soybean are important to healthier hair growth and normal thinning hair treatment. Both vitamin B6 and also vitamin B12 are simply within protein rich foods, which are needed to preserve natural hair growth. Vitamin b are incredibly essential to your diet plan to avoid extreme hair thinning. Certain nutritional vitamins as well as supplements are often essential to recover protein amounts which in turn, are helpful in stopping thinning hair. Growing b vitamin consumption in your diet is an effective method to avoid or perhaps treat hair damage naturally. Alongside the thought of eating healthily regarding vitamins, nutrients and also vitamins and minerals are also the utilization of herbal treatments which are good at preventing hair thinning as a organic thinning hair therapy. One of the herbal remedies producing healthcare head lines will be Saw Palmetto. Although most studies regarding Saw palmetto extract happen to be for your management of prostatic disease, more modern numerous studies have been carried out about its effectiveness for hair thinning. The actual plant has been seen as to operate in eliminating benign prostatic disease by lowering degrees of Dihydrotestosterone, the industry known cause of androgenic alopecia, the medical phrase regarding man or woman routine hair loss. While there isn't any clinical trials supporting this herb's usefulness being a normal hair thinning treatment, there is certainly some dependable investigation proving that it could decrease androgen exercise within
Normal Thinning hair Therapy The particular Dropped Art associated with Head of hair Repair
• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
During our early years of medical school, my classmates and I were given a course in physical diagnosis. Usually, we practiced on one another. Each of us would percuss a classmate’s chest or listen to his heart with a stethoscope. But some procedures were considered too personal to practice on a classmate. For some of these, we were assigned a “model patient”—someone from the community who was “compensated” in exchange for undergoing an examination. This was how I performed my first rectal exam. A large group of us were led into a room where our model patient was bent over an examining table with his pants around his ankles. One by one, we approached him nervously from behind, inserted a gloved, lubricated finger into his rectum, and felt around for the prostate. “Thank you,” we all said politely to the model patient as we removed our index fingers from his anus. The model patient stared straight ahead, saying nothing. What made the experience oddly disturbing was not just the forced, pseudo normality of the instruction or the fact that the exam could have been done more privately, but the instrumentality of the encounter: a pretend patient bending over naked for anonymous strangers in exchange for money. The fact that the model patient had been paid did not make his work seem any less degrading. (Tipping him would have made it even worse.)
Carl Elliott (White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine)
What we propose here, and oppose to the search for the essence, is not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effective fusion with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and even reprehend our language. If coincidence is lost, this is no accident; if Being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of Being, and no disclosure will make us comprehend it. A lost immediate, arduous to restore, will, if we do restore it, bear within itself the sediment of the critical procedures through which we will have found it anew; it will therefore not be the immediate. If it is to be the immediate, if it is to retain no trace of the operations through which we approach it, if it is Being itself, this means that there is no route from us to it and that it is inaccessible by principle...The truth of the matter is that the experience of a coincidence can be, as Bergson often says, only a "partial coincidence." But what is a coincidence that is only partial? It is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remembers an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future, that emerges from Being or that will incorporate itself into Being, that "is of it" but is not it, and therefore is not a coincidence, a real fusion, as of two positive terms or two elements of an alloyage, but an overlaying, as of a hollow and a relief which remain distinct. Coming after the world, after nature, after life, after thought, and finding them constituted before it, philosophy indeed questions this antecedent being and questions itself concerning its own relationship with it. It is a return upon itself and upon all things but not a return to an immediate—which recedes in the measure that philosophy wishes to approach it and fuse into it. The immediate is at the horizon and must be thought as such; it is only by remaining at a distance that it remains itself. There is an experience of the visible thing as pre-existing my vision, but this experience is not a fusion, a coincidence: because my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched, because, therefore, in this sense they see and touch the visible, the tangible, from within, because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity or even retardation...When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
In this effort, those who like James Henry Thornwell defended the legitimacy of slavery in the Bible had the easiest task. The procedure, which by 1860 had been repeated countless times, was uncomplicated. First, open the Scriptures and read, at say, Leviticus 25:45, or, even better, at 1 Corinthians 7:20-21. Second, decide for yourself what these passages mean. Don't wait for a bishop or a king or a president or a meddling Yankee to tell you what the passage means, but decide for yourself. Third, if anyone tries to convince you that you are not interpreting those passages in the natural, commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words, look hard at what such a one believes with respect to other biblical doctrines. If you find in what he or she says about such doctrines the least hint of unorthodoxy, as inevitably you will, then you may rest assured that you are being asked to give up not only the plain meaning of scripture, but also the entire trust in the Bible that made the country into such a great Christian civilization.
Mark A. Noll
The creation of new souls is a fascinating procedure, one that Judy was able to explain in graphic detail. She showed Val an image of a light being shattered into many fragments, with a solid part remaining intact at the core. This very dense core of energy embodies old souls, and those fragments exploding to the outside represent newer souls. We are all part of the same original spirit and the spirit fragments spread outward with the newest souls on the outer fringes. Judy explained further, “When this shattering takes place, part of our soul heals and stays in spirit and another part moves on, so we go into different areas. The new souls are the less dense parts of that spirit energy.” This means there is a part of every soul in each new one created, as we are all growing, all evolving, at all times. At this stage, as my head was spinning with thoughts and images of all these fragments, M came to my rescue, saying that this explains the oneness of all life. The original energy that fragmented, creating the first souls, is what most people refer to as “God” (also the Creator, the Divine, the Source, Spirit). Each fragment then becomes its own spirit entity, before eventually fragmenting again, and so on. M also explained that new souls come from only the more advanced spirits; I found it comforting to know that spirits in the dark side are not given this capability. It also explains, for me, why so many gifted children are being born in recent years—their deep soul wisdom and advanced intelligence are sorely needed in the future to help us in these turbulent times.
Barry Eaton (No Goodbyes: Life-Changing Insights from the Other Side)
The truth is God gives empowering grace to the one who goes to Him for it and then goes back to Him for it repeatedly. He gives grace to those who know how needy they are for Him and who draw on Jesus to live like Jesus. Bottom line; say no to do-it-yourself medical procedures. And say a bigger, more emphatic no to do-it-yourself religion! As James would say, “He giveth more grace.
Shellie Rushing Tomlinson (Devotions for the Hungry Heart: Chasing Jesus Six Days from Sunday)
stress on the back muscles and decreases the pain. Add 2 cups of Epsom salt in a bucket filled with warm water. Mix them well. Take a bath with this water. You can carry this procedure twice a day for maximum relief. Consume more alkaline foods: This category of foods is not only essential for a healthy and balanced diet, but will also prevent inflammation
Boukezzoula Mohamed Amine (Coccyx Pain Relief : Say Goodbye To Your Suffering: Coccydynia : Quick Relief For Tail Bone Pain)
No matter how many procedures or work you get done, it'll never be itself again. It will go on working for a while until something else arises, then it's back to square one. You hate it because you know and fear that anything could go wrong, but a body is like a car. You want to scream because the pain is unbearable. You need this car. You need this body. But a body is like a car, so you will soon have to say goodbye to the laughter and smiles that came with the memories. A body is like a car. Someday will be the final goodbye, but you wish that it was not today.
Alexis Kirksey
The Laundry may have a bureaucracy surfeit and a craze for ISO-9000 certification, but GCHQ is even worse, with some bizarre spatchcock version of BS5720 quality assurance applied to all their procedures in an attempt to ensure that the Home Office minister can account for all available paper clips in near real-time if challenged in the House by Her Majesty’s loyal opposition. On the other hand, they’ve got a bigger budget than us and all they have to worry about is having to read other people’s email, instead of having their souls sucked out by tentacular horrors from beyond the universe. “Oh, and you really ought to wear a tie when you’re representing us in public,” Phil says apologetically at the end of his spiel. “And get a haircut,” Jane adds with a smile. Bastards. The
Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1))
In response, someone (often a board member) says, “It’s time to grow up. This place needs some professional management.” The company begins to hire MBAs and seasoned executives from blue-chip companies. Processes, procedures, checklists, and all the rest begin to sprout up like weeds. What was once an egalitarian environment gets replaced with a hierarchy. Chains of command appear for the first time. Reporting relationships become clear, and an executive class with special perks begins to appear. “We” and “they” segmentations appear—just like in a real company. The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit. Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms
Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't)
When some of the post-Soviet societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process. We talked about whether they had a free press, for example, or free and fair elections. But noting that they did not, as Magyar has said, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesn’t tell us much about what the elephant is. Now the same thing was happening in the United States; we were using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe. Magyar spent about a decade devising a new model, and a new language, to describe what was happening in his country. He coined the term “mafia state,” and described it as a specific, clan-like system in which one man distributes money and power to all other members. He then developed the concept of autocratic transformation, which proceeds in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. It occurred to me that these were words that American culture could now borrow, in an appropriate symbolic reversal of 1989: these terms appear to describe our reality better than any words in the standard American political lexicon. Magyar had analyzed the signs and circumstances of this process in post-Communist countries and proposed a detailed taxonomy. But how it might happen in the United States was uncharted territory.
Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy)
I’ll look for a place near Disney,” Bits says. “Less chance of snipers.” “Good call, House of Mouse has its own mercenaries.” “They do not.” Now Bristol’s a mix of scandalized and delighted. “They do. I interviewed once but ultimately figured it wasn’t for me.” “You did not,” she says. I grin at her.
Jennifer R. Donohue (Run With the Hunted 3: Standard Operating Procedure)
My vision of God is dependent upon the condition of my character. My character determines whether or not truth can even be revealed to me. Before I can say, “I saw the Lord,” there must be something in my character that conforms to the likeness of God. Until I am born again and really begin to see the kingdom of God, I only see from the perspective of my own biases. What I need is God’s surgical procedure—His use of external circumstances to bring about internal purification.
Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.
Geena Rocero (Horse Barbie)
the taxi driver asks if you’re “from around here,” lie and say yes. Sometimes they drive farther (driving up the price) for tourists.
Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
Want to watch a movie with a girl? Ask her what her favorite movie is and say you haven’t seen it. She’ll usually say, “We should watch it.
Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
Get caught doing something embarrassing in public? Just say you lost a bet.
Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern [89] natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the [90] seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.
Martin Heidegger
Modern natural science experiences the emerging of seeds as a chemical process that is interpolated in terms of the grinding gears of the mechanistically viewed interaction between seeds, the condition of the soil, and thermal radiation. In this situation, the modern mind sees only mechanistic cause- and-effect relationships within chemical procedures that have particular effects following upon them. Modern natural science—chemistry no less than physics, biology no less than physics and chemistry—are and remain, so long as they exist, ‘mechanistic.’ Additionally, ‘dynamics’ is a mechanics of ‘power.’ How else could modern natural science ‘verify’ itself in ‘technology’ (as one says)? The technical efficaciousness and applicability of modern natural science is not, however, the subsequent proof of the ‘truth’ of science: rather, the practical technology of modern natural science is itself only possible because modern natural science as a whole, in its metaphysical essence, is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about. The oft-quoted saying of Goethe’s—namely, that the fruitful alone is the true—is already nihilism. Indeed, when the time comes when we no longer merely fiddle around with artworks and literature in terms of their value for education or intellectual history, we should perhaps examine our so-called ‘classics’ more closely. Moreover, Goethe’s view of nature is in its essence no different from Newton’s; the former depends along with the latter on the ground of modern (and especially Leibnizian) metaphysics, which one finds present in every object and every process available to us living today. The fact that we, however, when considering a seed, still see how something closed emerges and, as emerging, comes forth, may seem insubstantial, outdated, and half-poetic compared to the perspective of the objective determination and explanation belonging to the modern understanding of the germination process. The agricultural chemist, but also the modern physicist, have, as the saying goes, ‘nothing to do’ with φύσις. Indeed, it would be a fool’s errand even to try to persuade them that they could have ‘something to do’ with the Greek experience of φύσις. Now, the Greek essence of φύσις is in no way a generalization of what those today would consider the naïve experience of the emerging of seeds and flowers and the emergence of the sun. Rather, to the contrary, the original experience of emerging and of coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the seed and the flower are first grasped in their emerging, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming.
Martin Heidegger
As far as abortion is concerned, natural abortion or so-called miscarriage will disappear with knowledge, and the woman’s sacred right to say whether she will bear a child or not will become hers alone, a recognized legal procedure. After all, it is her own personal decision. State and church have nothing to do with it. (Modern Madonna, 1973)
Henry G. Bieler
Flight authorities across the world had understood the potential of commercial passenger air traffic, but they also realized flying had to become safer before most people would dare to try it. In 1944 they all met in Chicago to agree on common rules and signed a contract with a very important Annex 13: a common form for incident reports, which they agreed to share, so they could all learn from each other’s mistakes. Since then, every crash or incident involving a commercial passenger airplane has been investigated and reported; risk factors have been systematically identified; and improved safety procedures have been adopted, worldwide. Wow! I’d say the Chicago Convention is one of humanity’s most impressive collaborations ever. It’s amazing how well people can work together when they share the same fears.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
In general we may say that the deliquescence of instruction in any art proceeds in this manner. A master invents a gadget, or procedure to perform a particular function, or a limited set of functions. Pupils adopt the gadget. Most of them use it less skilfully than the master. The next genius may improve it, or he may cast it aside for something more suited to his own aims. Then comes the paste-headed pedagogue or theorist and proclaims the gadget a law, or rule. Then a bureaucracy is endowed, and the pin-headed secretariat attacks every new genius and every form of inventiveness for not obeying the law, and for perceiving something the secretariat does not. The great savants ignore, quite often, the idiocies of the ruck of the teaching profession. [...] the ignorant of one generation set out to make laws, and gullible children next try to obey them.
Ezra Pound (ABC of Reading)
Well . . . it wouldn’t be correct procedure,” says Jonjo. “The right thing to do so rarely is,
Richard Osman (The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4))
Well, there is a bothersome ethical problem with a proper trial involving a control group, and blind testing. If something looks effective – say it seems to be slowing the growth of tumours – then everyone wants to abandon the trial and give the thing to the control group as well. It seems wicked to withhold it just because of a scientific quibble.’ ‘So the trial is suspended incomplete?’ ‘And then nobody knows exactly where we are. A lot of medical procedure is like that too. Never properly verified. But people love certainty – so dramatic, so newsworthy. The qualified truth, full of ifs and buts and as far as we know so far, is so relatively boring.
Jill Paton Walsh (The Bad Quarto (Imogen Quy, #4))
TechNICIAN MER—MERRrrrrrrrill,” the Mall says. “Thank you for visiting Me! It is STROngly rec—” “Abort,” Rich gets out, clutching at his head. “-COMMENDED THAT YOU UNDERGO DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES PRIOR TO RE-ENTRANCE TO THE—” “Decline procedure!” “MICHIGAN FLEET. YOU ARE ADVISED THAT—” “Decline procedure, effective immediately, authorization: I’m a fucking tech, I’ll do it myself!” “...Promise?” the Mall asks.
Hannah Birchwood (After the Storm)
There are always regulations, Harry. But just having them is not always enough. Repetition, routine—these are the cracks in any security system. We used to leave the cockpit doors on commercial airlines unlocked. Now we don’t. It takes an event of life-altering consequences to change procedures and strengthen precautions. Do you understand what I am saying?
Michael Connelly (The Overlook (Harry Bosch, #13; Harry Bosch Universe, #18))
These tend to be in the areas of basic values like integrity, creating mutually beneficial relationships with customers and employees, and providing honest value. What I am saying is don’t make assumptions about what will work tomorrow based on what worked yesterday, especially in the area of processes, procedures, strategies, and operations.
Joe Calloway (Becoming a Category of One: How Extraordinary Companies Transcend Commodity and Defy Comparison)
There is nothing wrong, let me say at once, in thinking of the law in these three categories – moral, ceremonial and judicial. The trouble is – and what a trouble it is! – from Aquinas, through Calvin and so to covenant theologians, almost everybody nowadays accepts it as received wisdom that the law existed in these three distinct and stated parts. Yet these parts are neither ‘distinct’ nor ‘stated’ in Scripture. Nor is there any need to deduce the threefold division – it served no useful purpose except to uphold the pre-determined system of covenant theology. Nevertheless, covenant theologians (and almost everybody else), having assumed ‘the threefold division of the law’, then proceed to jettison two of the three parts, leaving the so-called moral law (or nine or nine and a half),[53], as the binding, perfect rule of life for believers. What an utterly unscriptural procedure! For a start, it is impossible to be consistent with the threefold division. More than that, Scripture will not allow such a neat segregation of the law. Scripture never talks in terms of the threefold division. Above all, to use the clever technique to get round Scripture, making it teach the direct opposite of what it does teach... words fail! For these reasons, the jargon of the threefold division of the law should be dropped. As I say, it serves no useful purpose. On the contrary, it grievously and utterly confounds scriptural teaching. The law in question is the law, the law of Moses, the law of the first or old covenant. The law, full stop.
David H.J. Gay (Exalting Christ: Thomas Collier on the New Covenant)
Unlock Wellness with Qi Coil PEMF Therapy: The Key to Holistic Healing In a world where stress and modern living take a toll on our well-being, the quest for natural and effective healing methods has led many to explore alternative therapies. One such groundbreaking solution is PEMF therapy, and at the forefront of this holistic revolution is "Qi Coil." Discover the transformative power of Qi Coil PEMF Therapy and unlock the door to a healthier, more balanced life. Qi Coil PEMF Therapy: A Glimpse into Revolutionary Healing At the heart of the Qi Coil experience is the innovative use of Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) technology. This non-invasive therapy harnesses the power of electromagnetic fields to stimulate the body's natural healing processes at a cellular level. By optimizing the body's energy flow, Qi Coil PEMF Therapy promotes overall wellness, vitality, and mental clarity. How Does Qi Coil PEMF Therapy Work? Qi Coil devices emit specific frequencies that resonate with the body's cells, enhancing cellular function and promoting balance. This targeted approach can alleviate a range of issues, including chronic pain, inflammation, and stress. The gentle pulsations emitted by Qi Coil devices mimic the Earth's natural magnetic field, helping to restore the body's natural equilibrium. Benefits of Choosing Qi Coil PEMF Therapy Holistic Healing: Qi Coil PEMF Therapy addresses the root causes of various health concerns, promoting holistic healing from within. Non-Invasive: Say goodbye to invasive procedures and embrace a non-invasive solution that supports your body's innate ability to heal. Versatility: Whether you're seeking relief from pain, better sleep, or enhanced mental clarity, Qi Coil PEMF Therapy offers a versatile solution for various health goals. Why Choose Qi Coil? Qi Coil stands out in the world of PEMF therapy with its commitment to quality, innovation, and customer satisfaction. Our devices are meticulously crafted to deliver precise frequencies and optimal results. Join the countless individuals who have already experienced the life-changing benefits of Qi Coil PEMF Therapy. Embark on a journey towards improved well-being and unlock the full potential of your health with Qi Coil PEMF Therapy. Invest in yourself, invest in holistic healing.
Qi Coil Life store
Man’s propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is “in order,” “all right,” “as it should be.” Needless to say, there is no empirical method by which this faith can be tested. To assert it is itself an act of faith. But it is possible to proceed from the faith that is rooted in experience to the act of faith that transcends the empirical sphere, a procedure that could be called the argument from ordering. In this fundamental sense, every ordering gesture is a signal of transcendence.
Peter L. Berger (A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural)
But Stanovich sees it differently. In his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, he coined the term “dysrationalia”—the inability to think and behave rationally despite having high intelligence. Research in cognitive psychology suggests there are two principal causes of dysrationalia. The first is a processing problem. The second is a content problem. Stanovich believes we process poorly. When solving a problem, he says, people have several different cognitive mechanisms to choose from. At one end of the spectrum are mechanisms with great computational power, but they are slow and require a great deal of concentration. At the opposite end of the spectrum are mechanisms that have low computational power, require very little concentration, and make quick action possible. “Humans are cognitive misers,” Stanovich writes, “because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate.”9 In a word, humans are lazy thinkers. They take the easy way out when solving problems and as a result, their solutions are often illogical. The second cause of dysrationalia is the lack of adequate content. Psychologists who study decision making refer to content deficiency as a “mindware gap.” First articulated by David Perkins, a Harvard cognitive scientist, mindware refers to the rules, strategies, procedures, and knowledge people have at their mental disposal to help solve a problem. “Just as kitchenware consists in tools for working in the kitchen, and software consists in tools for working with your computer, mindware consists in the tools for the mind,” explains Perkins. “A piece of mindware is anything a person can learn that extends the person’s general powers to think critically and creatively.
Robert G. Hagstrom (Investing: The Last Liberal Art (Columbia Business School Publishing))
M. Romains had taken many journeys in his country’s interest and at his own expense. He had talked with the statesmen of fourteen European lands. Three years ago he had traveled to Berlin and delivered a lecture under government auspices. Brownshirted leaders had been summoned from all over the land to hear him, and one of the top-flight Nazis had said to him: “You know, no private individual has ever been received like this in Berlin.” The philosopher-novelist had also been welcomed by the King of the Belgians, who had discussed frankly that country’s attitude to the gravely threatened war. As M. Romains told about these matters, you couldn’t doubt that he was patriotically in earnest, but also you couldn’t help feeling that he was intensely impressed by his own importance. His plan was the one known as le couple France-Allemagne, and it meant reconcilation with Germany, by the simple method of giving the Nazis whatever they demanded. For example, he had had the idea that the Allies should have got out of the Saar without the formality of a plebiscite. Lanny happened to know that Briand had been trying to work out some compromise on this question as far back as ten years ago; but apparently M. Romains didn’t know that, and certainly it wasn’t up to Lanny to correct him on his facts. The philosopher-novelist seemed to have the idea that the Saar settlement had been a matter between France and Germany, and that the plebiscite had taken place under French military control, whereas the fact was it had been a League matter, and French troops had been withdrawn nine years before the plebiscite was held. Among the members of that attentive audience was Kurt Meissner, who had met the Frenchman many years ago in Emily’s drawing-room. Evidently he had put his opportunity to good use, for it was just as if M. Romains had sat in a seminar conducted by the Wehrmacht’s agent, had absorbed the entire doctrine, and was now giving an oral dissertation to demonstrate what he had learned and get his degree. His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter. The Reds kept faith with nobody, their country was a colossus with feet of clay, their army a broken reed upon which France persisted in trying to lean. The republic had to choose between Stalin and Hitler; between an illusory military alliance and a secure and enduring peace. The words burned Lanny’s tongue: “M. Romains, have you ever read Mein Kampf?” Of course, Lanny couldn’t say them; but he wondered, how would this somewhat self-conscious idol of the bourgeois world have replied? Lanny recalled the Max Beerbohm cartoon in which a drawing-room fop is asked if he has read a certain book, and replies: “I do not read books; I write them.
Upton Sinclair (The Lanny Budd Novels Volume Two: Wide Is the Gate, Presidential Agent, and Dragon Harvest)
Global governance is commonly defined as the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems (those that affect more than one state or region). It encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges. This definition makes it clear that any global effort on any global issue or concern is bound to be toothless without the cooperation of national governments and their ability to act and legislate to support their aims. Nation states make global governance possible (one leads the other), which is why the UN says that “effective global governance can only be achieved with effective international cooperation”.
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organized and categorized in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve it. MIT’s Earl Miller adds, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.
Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
This is the equivalent of saying that any impulse of thought which is repeatedly passed on to the subconscious mind is, finally, accepted and acted upon by the subconscious mind, which proceeds to translate that impulse into its physical equivalent, by the most practical procedure available.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
The next break came from statute law, namely from the Equal Science Act. This says that “no scientific theory, hypothesis, principle, law definition, program, procedure or statement may be taught in any California school while in conflict with any other theory etc arising from any religious teaching, unless both theories etc are given equal emphasis as equally valid”. The idea was to give Genesis equal time with evolution as a creation theory, but it soon got out of hand, with Ptolemaic Anabaptists insisting on equal time with the Copernican theory, and finally with the Christian Flat Earth Assembly (Swiss Synod), whose representatives brought a suit against a California teacher for mentioning satellites. These are no satellites orbiting a flat earth, they pointed out, and so anyone mentioning satellites should also express doubt about their existence. A group of astronomers filed a countersuit, claiming that if satellites were unreal, their livelihood was in jeopardy. Moreover, satellite communications could not work and could not therefore be licensed by the government. ‘The state legislature had to meet quickly and draft an amendment to the California Comsat Act of 1998. In effect, the amendment hedged on the question of the reality of satellites by considering them as “sentient devices”. Thus if satellites believed in their own existence, they had a right to be real. Of course this opened up the whole question of freedom of religious belief for robots
John Sladek (Tik-Tok)
If you hear someone at the water cooler say, “black people are always late,” you can definitely say, “Hey, that’s racist” but you can also add, “and it contributes to false beliefs about black workers that keeps them from even being interviewed for jobs, while white workers can be late or on time, but will always be judged individually with no risk of damaging job prospects for other white people seeking employment.” That also makes it less likely that someone will brush you off saying “Hey, it’s not that big of a deal, don’t be so sensitive.” Tying racism to its systemic causes and effects will help others see the important difference between systemic racism, and anti-white bigotry. In addition, the more practice you have at tying individual racism to the system that gives it power, the more you will be able to see all the ways in which you can make a difference. Yes, you can demand that the teacher shouting racial slurs at Hispanic kids should be fired, but you can also ask what that school’s suspension rate for Hispanic kids is, ask how many teachers of color they have on staff, and ask that their policies be reviewed and reformed. Yes, you can definitely report your racist coworker to HR, but you can also ask your company management what processes they have in place to minimize racial bias in their hiring process, you can ask for more diversity in management and cultural sensitivity training for staff, and you can ask what procedures they have in place to handle allegations of racial discrimination. When we look at racism as a system, it becomes much
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
Hello everybody. I'd like to talk a bit about my book Deep Inside a Psychopath's Mind. Well, for those that would like to read the book and would like to know about the story and about what could be found In The Depths of Psychopathic characters, let me tell you that this book contains everything (Or almst everything) relating to gruesome behaviour! Any kind of tortures, from physical torture to psychological torture, I wrote about canibalism, bloody scenes, sex scenes, and in many chapters of the book there are all kinds of words (Vocabulary) related to gruesome procedures. With this, what I mean is that this book is intend for adults only, and better said, for persons that do not have any problem reading about matters related to adults Thus, if any of the potential readers have any religious, cultural or perhaps special phylosophycal believes, I sincerely won't recommend this book to you. I want to explain all the above as clearly as possible: When I thought about to write the book, I though I should go where perhaps other writers have not gone! And in order to achieve that particular task, I wrote everything as clearly as possible, not mincing any word, not concealing any act, and indeed, what I wrote is waht I heard many persons (Psychopaths saying about Psychopathic matters) The last thing: Although this book could be violent and also very scaring, and perhpas shocking, there is a reason for all that to happen! And only if you read the book untill the last page/line, would be able to understand the whole story, it means that if you stop in the middle of the book, you will never know why those crazy acts were taking place.
Just-Thony (Deep Inside a Psychopath's Mind)
When men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it.” This is the equivalent of saying that any impulse of thought which is repeatedly passed on to the subconscious mind is, finally, accepted and acted upon by the subconscious mind, which proceeds to translate that impulse into its physical equivalent, by the most practical procedure available.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure; as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: Can you feel this? Can you say these words? Can you repeat this sentence? They’re constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back off so as not to damage it. Therapists delve into a mind rather than a brain, and we can see from the subtlest gesture or expression if we’ve hit a nerve. But unlike neurosurgeons, we gravitate toward the sensitive area, pressing delicately on it, even if it makes the patient feel uncomfortable.
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
The more an outcome appears to be the result of your own choice and the more readily you can imagine having done something different, the more painful your regret is likely to be. So, whenever possible, do as little as possible. Instead of making judgments one at a time, you should follow policies and procedures that put your investing decisions on autopilot. Think of it as cruise control for your portfolio. In 1995, I got a speeding ticket driving my in-laws’ car—and was so mortified that I swore I would never get another. Ever since, whenever I get on a highway, I check the speed limit and set my cruise control—eliminating all worries that I will get careless or emotional and end up speeding. “The more you can automate your investing,” says psychologist Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University, “the easier it should be to control your emotions.
Jason Zweig (Your Money and Your Brain)
Rather than follow a step-by-step procedure like an assembly line, the cell employs a dynamic and nearly simultaneous procedure. Amino acids are lined up in a one-dimensional sequence that spontaneously folds itself into a functioning protein without further instruction. “It is as if we could design any machine,” says Howard Pattee, “so that it could be assembled simply by hooking the parts together into a chain, and then have the chain spontaneously form itself into a functioning mechanism.
Dennis P. Waters (Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity (Resources for Ecological Psychology Series))
The Lord is not a divine vending machine," says a friend, who cautions against taking a procedural approach to listening. I just try to pay attention to God, especially when I am praying. I have always struggled to quiet myself and listen for his word. I have learned to reserve moments of silence during my prayer times to let God have an opportunity to say something. Better pray-ers than I recommend that at the very least we take five minutes
Bert Ghezzi (Adventures in Daily Prayer: Experiencing the Power of God's Love)
The new world-conception.—The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away—it maintains itself in both.— It lives on itself: its excrements are its food. We need not worry for a moment about the hypothesis of a created world. The concept "create" is today completely indefinable, unrealizable; merely a word, a rudimentary survival from the ages of superstition; one can explain nothing with a mere word. The last attempt to conceive a world that had a beginning has lately been made several times with the aid of logical procedures—generally, as one may divine, with an ulterior theological motive. Lately one has sought several times to find a contradiction in the concept "temporal infinity of the world in the past" (regressus in infinitum): one has even found it, although at the cost of confusing the head with the tail. Nothing can prevent me from reckoning backward from this moment and saying "I shall never reach the end"; just as I can reckon forward from the same moment into the infinite. Only if I made the mistake—I shall guard against it—of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of a finite progressus up to this present, only if I suppose that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a matter of indifference, would I take the head—this moment—for the tail: I shall leave that to you, my dear Herr Dühring!—
Friedrich Nietzsche
A chronic disturbance in which at least twelve of the following are present: 1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals (regardless of how much one has actually accomplished). 2. Difficulty getting organized. 3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started. 4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow-through. 5. A tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark. 6. A frequent search for high stimulation. 7. An intolerance of boredom. 8. Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or a conversation, often coupled with an ability to hyperfocus at times. 9. Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent. 10. Trouble in going through established channels, following “proper” procedure. 11. Impatient; low tolerance of frustration. 12. Impulsive, either verbally or in action, as in impulsive spending of money, changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans, and the like; hot-tempered. 13. A tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; a tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with inattention to or disregard for actual dangers. 14. A sense of insecurity. 15. Mood swings, mood lability, especially when disengaged from a person or a project. 16. Physical or cognitive restlessness. 17. A tendency toward addictive behavior. 18. Chronic problems with self-esteem. 19. Inaccurate self-observation. 20. Family history of ADD or manic-depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood. B. Childhood history of ADD. (It may not have been formally diagnosed, but in reviewing the history, one sees that the signs and symptoms were there.) C. Situation not explained by other medical or psychiatric condition.
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
The Story of the Dictator and the Idiot. Once upon a time two species along the same homo genus existed. Two types of human kind. One was dominant and the other was submissive. One superior, one inferior. One law enforcing, one law abiding. One authoritarian and one obedient. The Dictator and the Idiot. Fundamentally there was no difference between these two. Both had a low IQ. Both neurotic. Both animalistic in nature. But the one became self-ordained to punish the other, tell them what to do, who to be, how to act, and what he can and can not have. This was the Dictator. The other, the Idiot, believed it all and kept living under the rule of the Dictator, believing everything they had to say. The Dictator occasionally made up rules and procedures for the Idiot to follow, in order for the Idiot not to die, be punished, be locked in a time-out, receive 100 lashes, be sent elsewhere or otherwise face different variations of punishments as imposed by the Dictator. Groups of Idiots were born and soon the Dictator saw an opportunity to create rules regarding the ways in which they can and can not have sex, how often, with whom and where, in order to control the Idiot once more. The Idiots obeyed. The Idiots then sold goods and soon the Dictator made a rule that a portion of their sales must go to him. He made up a word too in the process to call this collection system "tax". Groups of Dictators were also born and eventually evolved throughout history to write further rules, indoctrination, engage in the slave trade, human trafficking, rape, drug trades, the savagery of war, establishment of brothels and the repulsive behaviour displayed by half the population today. At some point, the Dictator creates the self-epithet of "Master" and labels the Idiot "Servant" but nothing much changes. A thousand other bynames came to fruition but none as pure and descriptive. "King, Emperor, Pastor, President, Minister," the list goes on. The Idiot evolves to become a silenced, subdued, indoctrinated servant. To allow punishment upon himself against his will, and to listen to the biased opinion of the Dictator as though it were a universal law. The Idiot follows unquestioningly and uncritically. Listening and doing without much thought. The Dictator evolves to write further religious scriptures in various forms on various continents. He writes laws and federal punishments. The Idiot then abides. The Dictator sentences the idiot to a life in jail for self defence. The Idiot abides. The Dictator takes money from the idiot and calls it Tax. The Idiot abides. The Dictator takes land from the Idiot without payment and gives it to another. The Idiot abides. The Dictator forces the Idiot to pay maintenance to his lazy wife. The Idiot abides. This speaks not of the character of the Dictator, but of the Idiot that carries on in his moronic ways. Stumbling over his own subordinate, defeated mind. The Dictator and the Idiot. An ongoing Sattire, a defeated people.
Anje Kruger
You try to crank up your brain. You ask questions to get back to what is basic. You start with: “What’s hurting?” and push on to: “What’s wrong?” and “Why?” You might have an educational on: “What is a meeting?” “How is it different from a get-together?” “What about parliamentary procedure?” “How does it help?” “What is binding about a meeting?” “Why do we have majority rule?” We might meet on: “How does this happen?” “Who does it?” “What are the duties of officers?” We held an educational on: “What makes a leader?” We ended up saying that it has nothing to do with oratory, clothes, education. Rather, it is one who works for the people. Therefore, even a farm worker can be a leader.9
Gabriel Thompson (America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century)
For Penina Mezei petrify motive in folk literature stems from ancient, mythical layers of culture that has undergone multiple transformations lost the original meaning. Therefore, the origin of this motif in the narrative folklore can be interpreted depending on the assumptions that you are the primary elements of faith in Petrify preserved , lost or replaced elements that blur the idea of integrity , authenticity and functionality of the old ones . Motif Petrify in different genres varies by type of actor’s individuality, time and space, properties and actions of its outcome, the relationship of the narrator and singers from the text. The particularity of Petrify in particular genres testifies about different possibilities and intentions of using the same folk beliefs about transforming, says Penina Mezei. In moralized ballads Petrify is temporary or eternal punishment for naughty usually ungrateful children. In the oral tradition, demonic beings are permanently Petrifying humans and animals. Petrify in fairy tales is temporary, since the victims, after entering into the forbidden demonic time and space or breaches of prescribed behavior in it, frees the hero who overcomes the demonic creature, emphasizes Mezei. Faith in the power of magical evocation of death petrifaction exists in curses in which the slanderer or ungrateful traitor wants to convert into stone. In search of the magical meaning of fatal events in fairy tales, however, it should be borne in mind that they concealed before, but they reveal the origin of the ritual. The work of stone - bedrock Penina Mezei pointed to the belief that binds the soul stone dead or alive beings. Penina speaks of stone medial position between earth and sky, earth and the underworld. Temporary or permanent attachment of the soul to stone represents a state between life and death will be punished its powers cannot be changed. Rescue petrified can only bring someone else whose power has not yet subjugated the demonic forces. While the various traditions demons Petrifying humans and animals, as long as in fairy tales, mostly babe, demon- old woman. Traditions brought by Penina Mezei , which describe Petrify people or animals suggest specific place events , while in fairy tales , of course , no luck specific place names . Still Penina spotted chthonic qualities babe, and Mezei’s with plenty of examples of comparative method confirmed that they were witches. Some elements of procedures for the protection of the witch could be found in oral stories and poems. Fairy tales keep track of violations few taboos - the hero , despite the ban on the entry of demonic place , comes in the woods , on top of a hill , in a demonic time - at night , and does not respect the behaviors that would protect him from demons . Interpreting the motives Petrify as punishment for the offense in the demon time and space depends on the choice of interpretive method is applied. In the book of fairy tales Penina Mezei writes: Petrify occurs as a result of unsuccessful contact with supernatural beings Petrify is presented as a metaphor for death (Penina Mezei West Bank Fairytales: 150). Psychoanalytic interpretation sees in the form of witches character, and the petrification of erotic seizure of power. Female demon seized fertilizing power of the masculine principle. By interpreting the archetypal witch would chthonic anima, anabaptized a devastating part unindividualized man. Ritual access to the motive of converting living beings into stone figure narrated narrative transfigured magical procedures some male initiation ceremonies in which the hero enters into a community of dedicated, or tracker sacrificial rites. Compelling witches to release a previously petrified could be interpreted as the initiation mark the conquest of certain healing powers and to encourage life force, highlights the Penina.
Penina Mezei
Our team of specialists is well trained, certified and highly skilled to fix your auto body repair and remove any car dent you may have. With over 30 years of experience providing car collision repair, car detailing, used car inspections, or any car body repair services necessary, we guarantee our workmanship will make your car look good as new as quickly as possible. Another procedure which we are skilled at is paintless dent removal. It is a cost effective way to repair minor dents and dings in which the car paint or metal have not been stretched. The reason it is so cost effective is because there is no need for filling or painting the car. It takes an experienced hand to do paintless dent repair, because in the wrong hands it can create more dents and scratches to the car. We have built a reputation and trust with our clients in Irvine, Mission Viejo, Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Lake Forest, Laguna Niguel, Rancho Santa Margarita, Coto de Caza and countless Orange County families and car fleets. For this reason, we have earned their repeat business and referrals of clients, friends and families. As a result, we reward our clients with incentives to say thank you for their continued support. So don’t drive around in a damaged car. Let Mission Viejo Auto Collision do what we do best and restore your car to its mint condition in no time. Contact us at (949) 951-7503 for your next auto body repair in Orange County.
Mission Viejo Auto Collision
There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution.
Herbert Read (Essays in Literary Criticism)
I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door peole are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).
Anonymous
keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that IT is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently. People come to their decisions in their own way. People who believe the decision is up to the woman are typically called “pro-choice.” “Choice” echoes what is called “moral agency,” “conscience,” “informed will,” or “personal autonomy”—spiritually or religiously. I favor the term “informed will” because it captures the idea that we learn and decide: First, inform the will. Then exercise conscience. In Reform Judaism, for instance, an individual demonstrates “informed will” in approaching and deciding about traditional dietary rules—in a fluid process of study of traditional teaching, consideration of the personal significance of that teaching, arriving at a conclusion, and taking action. Unitarian Universalists tell me that the search for truth and meaning leads to the exercise of conscience. We witness moral agency when a member of a faith community interprets faith teachings in light of historical religious understandings and personal conscience. I know that some religious people don’t do
Rabbi Dennis S. Ross (All Politics Is Religious: Speaking Faith to the Media, Policy Makers and Community (Walking Together, Finding the Way))
Jessie’s eyes widened and her head shot up. “And you’re only coming for advice now, after all of this time?” she asked pointedly. “I don’t need your judgement, Jessie,” Toni countered angrily. In an instant Jessie regretted her tone. Where was her so called professional manner? The scratching of the ballpoint pen against yellow paper was the only sound in the office as Jessie transcribed the gist of their discussion in shorthand. A small, dark part of Jessie still hated Toni for abandoning her to the mercy of those bullies ten years ago, and it revelled in seeing her in similar straits now. But she hated that part of herself for holding on to an empty grudge for so long. As her pen filled the page with notes, she cleared her throat for Toni’s attention. “I’m very sorry to hear that you’ve suffered this kind of treatment, Toni. You really do have my sympathies. Who did you take your concerns to at your place of work?” “I spoke to the owner, Mark Baldwin. He basically tried to shut me down by taking her side.” “Did you put your complaint in writing?” “No, I didn’t see the point after my conversation with him. So what happens now? Are you going to call him?” Jessie shook her head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. I’ll give you an outline of the procedure, should you wish to proceed.” Jessie rested the pad on the desk. “So far, you have only made an informal complaint, so your first step is to write a grievance letter to your employer about the issues you have encountered.” She restlessly played with the pen between her fingers as she continued. “They will investigate and then invite you to a meeting to state your case. You can have someone accompany you at this meeting. Your workplace will then inform you of the outcome and if you aren’t happy, you have the right to appeal their decision. It is only after this that you can consider a tribunal and it would be at that point we would get involved.” “Okay, so I just write the letter to start with? I can’t see it doing any good though,
Jade Winters (Say Something)
industrial corridors and smart cities. It has to create large cities where 35 to 40 per cent of GDP comes from manufacturing. Land lawsThis government appears to be fairly determined to drive manufacturing, and there's a lot of energy and vibrancy. But there's also an unfinished agenda of the government. For large-scale manufacturing to take off, there are several other things that need to be done. There are certain legacies of the past which need to be corrected. For example, we have one of the worst labour regimes. We need to set that right. An EXIM Bank study says that only Pakistan has worse labour laws than us. In the past six months, certain labour reforms have been carried out. The expectations are so high that we need big-ticket reforms. The last government had messed up badly on land laws. When I talk about land acquisition laws, I am not talking about not giving a higher price to the farmer but the present act is anti-farmer because it is full of procedures and processes which never allow farmer to monetize the land value. It will work against his interest. Everything is at a standstill. The government needs to quickly reverse this whole process. Also, the government needs to roll out the goods and services tax (GST) and resolve problems plaguing the energy sector. In
Anonymous
Here, unfortunately, is where Christians have succumbed to the fairy-tale syndrome of our society. It is a particular problem for young, single women. Many a young woman feels that if God wants her to be married, He will drop a marriage partner out of heaven on a parachute or will bring some Prince Charming riding up to her doorstep on a great white horse. One excruciating problem faced by single women—more so in past generations than today—is caused by the unwritten rule of our society that allows men the freedom actively to pursue a marriage partner while women are considered loose if they actively pursue a prospective husband. No biblical rule says that a woman eager to be married should be passive. There is nothing that prohibits her from actively seeking a suitable mate. On numerous occasions, I’ve had the task of counseling single women who insisted at the beginning of the interview that they had no desire to be married but simply wanted to work out the dimensions of the celibacy they believed God had imposed on them. After a few questions and answers, the scenario usually repeats itself: the young woman begins to weep and blurts out, “But I really want to get married.” When I suggest that there are wise steps that she can take to find a husband, her eyes light up in astonishment as if I had just given her permission to do the forbidden. I have broken a taboo. Wisdom requires that the search be done with discretion and determination. Those seeking a life partner need to do certain obvious things, such as going where other single people congregate. They need to be involved in activities that will bring them in close communication with other single Christians. In the Old Testament, Jacob made an arduous journey to his homeland to find a suitable marriage partner. He did not wait for God to deliver him a life partner. He went where the opportunity presented itself to find a marriage partner. But the fact that he was a man does not imply that such a procedure is limited to males. Women in our society have exactly the same freedom to pursue a mate by diligent search. What Do I Want in a Marriage Partner? A myth has arisen within the Christian community that marriage is to be a union between two people committed to the principle of selfless love. Selfless love is viewed as being crucial for the success of a marriage. This myth is based on the valid concept that selfishness is often at the root of disharmony and disintegration in marriage relationships. The biblical concept of love says no to acts of selfishness within marital and other human relationships. However, the remedy for selfishness is nowhere to be found in selflessness. The
R.C. Sproul (Can I Know God's Will? (Crucial Questions, #4))
[...] These observations will allow us to understand more precisely in what sense one can say, as we did at the beginning, that the limits of the indefinite can never be reached through any analytical procedure, or, in other words, that the indefinite, while not absolutely and in every way inexhaustible, is at least analytically inexhaustible. In this regard, we must naturally consider those procedures analytical which ,in order to reconstitute a whole, consist in taking its elements distinctly and successively; such is the procedure for the formation of an arithmetical sum, and it is precisely in this regard that it differs essentially from integration. This is particularly interesting from our point of view, for one can see in it, as a very clear example, the true relationship between analysis and synthesis: contrary to current opinion, accordng to which analysis is as it were a preparation for synthesis, or again something leading to it, so much so that one must always begin with analysis, even when one does not intend to stop there, the truth is that one can never actually arrive at synthesis through analysis. All synthesis, in the true sense of the word, is something immediate, so to speak, something that is not preceded by any analysis and is entirely indfependent of it, just as integration is an operation carried out in a single stroke, by no means presupposing the consideration of elements comparable to those of an arithmetical sum; and as this arithmetical sum can yield no means of attaining and exhausting the indefinite, this latter must, in every domain, be one of those things that by their very nature resist analysis and can be known only through synthesis.[3] [3]Here, and in what follows, it should be understood that we take the terms 'analysis' and 'synthesis' in their true and original sense, and one must indeed take care to distinguish this sense from the completely different and quite improper sense in which one currently speaks of 'mathematical analysis', according to which integration itself, despite its essentially synthetic character, is regarded as playing a part in what one calls 'infinitesimal analysis'; it is for this reason, moreorever, that we prefer to avoid using this last expression, availing ourselves only of those of 'the infinitesimal calculus' and 'the infinitesimal method', which lead to no such equivocation.
René Guénon (The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus)
Your alcoholics may include some of your brightest stars. The problem is to identify them, protected as they always are by their secretaries and their colleagues. Invite the alcoholic’s wife to join you in a surprise confrontation with her husband. Start by telling him that all present are devoted to him. Then say how worried you are about his drinking. His wife and his children are about to leave him, and you are about to fire him – unless he does what you ask. A reservation has been made for him to enter a treatment center that very day. Most alcoholics agree to go. It takes a week for the center to dry them out, and another four weeks to rehabilitate them. On returning home, they must go to daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for at least a year. This procedure works in about 60 per cent of cases. I have seen it salvage some valuable people of both sexes. If you would like further advice on the subject, consult the nearest chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Written
David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)
All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. Habitualization further implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort. This is true of non-social as well as of social activity. Even the solitary individual on the proverbial desert island habitualizes his activity. When he wakes up in the morning and resumes his attempts to construct a canoe out of matchsticks, he may mumble to himself, “There I go again,” as he starts on step one of an operating procedure consisting of, say, ten steps. In other words, even solitary man has at least the company of his operating procedures. Habitualized actions, of course, retain their meaningful character for the individual although the meanings involved become embedded as routines in his general stock of knowledge, taken for granted by him and at hand for his projects into the future.17 Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed. While in theory there may be a hundred ways to go about the project of building a canoe out of matchsticks, habitualization narrows these down to one. This frees the individual from the burden of “all those decisions,” providing a psychological relief that has its basis in man’s undirected instinctual structure. Habitualization provides the direction and the specialization of activity that is lacking in man’s biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives.18 And by providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions. In other words, the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.19In terms of the meanings bestowed by man upon his activity, habitualization makes it unnecessary for each situation to be defined anew, step by step.20 A large variety of situations may be subsumed under its predefinitions. The activity to be undertaken in these situations can then be anticipated. Even alternatives of conduct can be assigned standard weights. These
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
records in any form I request under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act within thirty days and for a reasonable handling and processing fee. If this material is not quickly forthcoming, I will file a complaint with the federal Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, which prosecutes HIPPA violations. Sincerely, 3. TO CHALLENGE OUTRAGEOUS CHARGES/BILLING ERRORS Dear Sirs or Madam: I’m writing to protest what I regard as excessive charges for my operation/hospitalization/procedure at your medical facility. The operation/hospitalization/procedure was billed to my insurer/me at $__________,__________. This total included several itemized charges that were well above norms for our nation and our region, such as a $__________,__________ charge for __________ and a $__________,__________ charge for __________. The Healthcare Bluebook says a “fair price” is $__________,__________ and $__________,__________. Likewise, my bill includes entries for treatments I simply did not receive, such as $__________ for __________ and $__________ for __________. Before sending in any payment, I’m requesting that your billing and coding department review my chart to revise the charges, or explain to me the size and the nature of such entries. I have been a loyal customer of your hospital for many years and have been happy with my excellent medical care. But if these billing issues are not resolved, I feel compelled to report them to the state attorney general/consumer protection agency, to investigate fraudulent or abusive billing practices. Sincerely,
Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26
Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?)
Live in amazement We all have seen God’s goodness in some way. God opened a door, gave you a promotion, protected you on the freeway, and caused you to meet someone who has been a blessing. It was His hand of favor. Don’t let it become ordinary. We should live in amazing at what God has done. When I look at my children I think, “God, you’re amazing.” When I see Victoria, I think, “God, you’ve been good to me.” Driving up to my house, I think, “Lord, thank you for your favor.” Don’t let your miracles become so common that they don’t excite you anymore. I read about this famous surgeon who continued to go to work every day even into his late eighties. He loved medicine. His staff tried to get him to retire and take it easy, but he wouldn’t do it. He had invented a certain procedure that he had performed over ten thousand times. It seemed so routine and so ordinary. He’d done it again and again. The surgeon was asked in an interview if he ever grew tired of performing his procedure and if it ever got old. He said, “No, because I act like every operation is my very first one.” He was saying, “I don’t take for granted what God has allowed me to do. I don’t let it become so ordinary that I lose the awe.” What has God done for you? Do you have healthy children? Do you have people to love? Do you have a place to work? Do you realize your gifts and talents come from God? Do you recognize what seemed like a lucky break was God directing your steps? There are miracles all around us. Don’t take them for granted. Don’t lose the amazement of God’s works. Fan your flames. Stir up your gifts. Sometimes we hold back, thinking we’ll get excited when the next big thing comes along. Only then will we allow that spring back in our step. But I’ve learned if you aren’t happy where you are, you won’t get where you want to be. You need to sow a seed. Maybe nothing exciting is going on; perhaps you’re facing big challenges. You could easily grow discouraged and give up on your dreams. But when you go to work with a smile, give it your best, offer kindness to others, you are sowing a seed. God will take that seed and grow it to bring something exciting into your life. The scripture tells us God will take us from glory to glory and from victory to victory. You may be in between victories right now, but keep your passion and hold on to your enthusiasm. The good news is another victory is on its way, another level of glory and another level of God’s favor.
Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
A decade earlier, her seventy-four-year-old father, Jack Block, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with symptoms from what proved to be a mass growing in the spinal cord of his neck. She flew out to see him. The neurosurgeon said that the procedure to remove the mass carried a 20 percent chance of leaving him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. But without it he had a 100 percent chance of becoming quadriplegic. The evening before surgery, father and daughter chatted about friends and family, trying to keep their minds off what was to come, and then she left for the night. Halfway across the Bay Bridge, she recalled, “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what he really wants.’” He’d made her his health care proxy, but they had talked about such situations only superficially. So she turned the car around. Going back in “was really uncomfortable,” she said. It made no difference that she was an expert in end-of-life discussions. “I just felt awful having the conversation with my dad.” But she went through her list. She told him, “‘ I need to understand how much you’re willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.’ We had this quite agonizing conversation where he said—and this totally shocked me—‘ Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive. I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if I have a shot at that.’” “I would never have expected him to say that,
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
There are two major types of memory and learning,” he says. “One type is Deductive Learning that comes from memory: You learn that Denver is the capital of Colorado by repeating this again and again. The second type is called Procedural Learning and it comes from repetitive actions and practice, like shooting a basketball over and over until you become good at it. One of the problems with video games is that you’re learning to kill repetitively in simulated situations. You get better at it and you get more desensitized to the process.
Stephen Singular (The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth)
It is not an overstatement if one characterizes this revision of the false metaphysical classification of beings as the contemporary gigantomachy that reaches deeply into ingrained human self-relations. Very many view this revision suspiciously as an expropriation of the self and condemn it as technological devilry. The uncanniness of the process is not to be denied, precisely because it impresses by means of its results. The humanistically minded observer cannot withdraw his fascination because everything that happens on the technological front leads to consequences for human self-understanding. In the progress of technological evolution the citadel of subjectivity, that is to say, the thinking and experiencing ego, is impinged on, and to be sure not only by symbolic deconstructions that were, incidentally, anticipated in various ways in regional high cultures—one might think here of the mystical and yogic systems, of negative theology and Romantic irony—but also by material modifications, for instance, the alteration of mental states with the help of psychotropic substances (a procedure that for millennia has been common in drug cultures, and for decades in Western psychiatry). In addition, a time is foreseeable when the contents of ideas and experience will be induced by means of nootropic substances.
Peter Sloterdijk (Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger)
It is frequently quite easy for people to recognize that they can move from a dull dialogue to a much more varied and colorful one by expressing feelings that they are aware of. Sometimes, however, we are not aware of the feelings that are there to be expressed. A director can then be helpful by asking: “Do you remember the last time that prayer was exciting or interesting for you? What were you talking about?” And then: “What happened to that topic?” Often after pondering such questions, we recognize that prayer went dull when a difficult topic came up between God and us, and we chose not to pursue it. The prayer will remain dull until we come back to that topic. When we do, the change from dullness to new interest is often dramatic. This characteristic of the dialogue with God in prayer can keep prayer firmly linked to the dialogue with God in life outside prayer. If a man is troubled by the way his wife and he are interacting, for example, and yet does not permit himself even to advert to the trouble in prayer, he may well find that his prayer is boring. The prayer, in other words, lets him know that he is not being himself with God. Attention to the quality of the dialogue with God helps us discern where we may be blinding ourselves to the light in our lives. Thus, one of the major criteria for the authenticity of our prayer and our lives is: “Is the dialogue working?” In other words, “Do I have something to say to God that means something to me? Is God somehow communicating to me something that seems to mean something to God?” If these questions cannot be answered affirmatively, the person would do well to ask God what has gone wrong. “Is there something you want to say to me that I don’t want to hear? Or is there something I don’t want to tell you?” By paying attention to the quality of the dialogue the person can learn to become more and more deeply transparent with God. The procedure could not be simpler. When we are expressing attitudes that are real and deep within us and relevant to our lives, prayer will be alive and engaging. When we are not, prayer will go dead. The director who has become accustomed to the fact that very often difficulties in prayer are due to the suppression of important attitudes and feelings does not quickly encourage directees to accept at face value statements like: “I had no time for prayer,” or “I prayed only on the run.” The director tends to ask what was happening the last time the prayer was alive.   M
William A. Barry (The Practice of Spiritual Direction)
The crucial point here and in Centrism in general is that inherent existence is simply an incoherent notion altogether that does not withstand analysis. What is called emptiness is just the result of pointing out this fact. In other words, whether one conventionally speaks of "the thesis of emptiness" or says, "I have no thesis," both expressions just announce and highlight the Centrist procedure of demonstrating that all things lack inherent existence-that there are no reference points. Needless to say, such a "thesis of emptiness" is nothing to hold on to either.
Karl Brunnhölzl (The Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madhyamaka in the Kagyu Tradition (Nitartha Institute Series))
Instead of only looking for which prescription or procedure can address a physical problem, as a patient you might ask yourself, “What is my body trying to say to me through this experience? What is it in my emotional world that might be contributing to this disease in my physical world? What is there that I can address in my energetic or emotional body to support the intervention my doctor is implementing in my physical body?
Habib Sadeghi (The Clarity Cleanse: 12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing)
MAKING THE CALL Suppose you had a successful social encounter at a party. Last night went fine. But now you sit by the phone, the person’s phone number in hand, afraid to make that call you know you want to make. Maybe the person doesn’t really want you to call. (Then why did she give you her phone number?) Maybe she’s changed her mind. (There’s only one way to find out!) If you have a problem following up, you need to internalize this self-coaching advice: Dread, then do. If you feel anxious, use relaxation techniques to ready yourself to make the call. Then make it. No matter what, you will feel relieved and even proud of yourself once you’ve done it. Appropriate follow-up is crucial; otherwise, all the groundwork you’ve laid in your initial conversation will go to waste. When you call someone on the phone, remember all the skills you’ve practiced so far. And be sure to call when you say you are going to call. Imagine how you’d feel if someone whose company you’d enjoyed promised to call you on Tuesday and the call didn’t come until Friday, if at all. And finally, remember to ask about things the person told you in previous conversation. This is your chance to broaden your new friendship, so make plans and follow through on them soon. (Remember: friendship first. It’s okay, especially at this stage, for a woman to initiate a social engagement with a man, whether it leads to romance or not). If you would like to follow up with someone in your company or outside it who could become a valuable part of your career network, the procedure is much the same. Stay in touch in whatever ways are appropriate for your workplace. A clipping of a work-related article with a simple note—“Bill: Thought this would interest you,” and your name—lets the person know you appreciated his knowledge and insight. If you like, you could follow up on an outside contact with a brief note saying you enjoyed meeting the person, and then call later, perhaps with an invitation for a business lunch or a lecture. Developing contacts inside your workplace and beyond could help you build job opportunities. And feeling connected to the business community in which you work can be fulfilling too. People may soon want to begin networking with you!
Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
[Federal prisons] are dreadful institutions whose procedures are designed to dehumanize the people they contain. And when you look at our rates of incarceration - roughly seven times higher than those of our peer nations, higher even then the Soviet Union under Stalin - you can't help but feel there is something wrong with a society that feels the need to lock so many of its citizens in cages.
Brad Parks (Say Nothing)
The procedure works along the same principles as a probiotic, but rather than adding just one strain of bacteria, or even 17, it adds all of them. It's an ecosystem transplant-an attempt to fix a faltering community by completely replacing it, like returfing a lawn that's overrun by dandelions. Khoruts showed this process at work by collecting stool samples from Rebecca before and after her transplant. Beforehand, her gut was a mess. The C-diff infection had completely restructured her microbiome, creating a community that "looked like something that doesn't exist in nature-a different galaxy", says Khoruts. Afterwards, her microbiome was indistinguishable from her husband's. His microbes had stormed into her dysbiotic gut and reset it. It was almost as if Khoruts had done an organ transplant, throwing out his patient's diseased and damaged gut microbiome and replacing it with the donor's shiny new one. This makes the microbiome the only organ that can be replaced without surgery.
Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
The members of the Sanhedrin who met to try Jesus violated ethical standards held not only by Pharisees but even by many Gentile moralists of the period. Trials were supposed to be conducted during daylight, in the normal meeting hall (in this case that was near the temple), not in the leading judge’s home. Whereas Pharisees opposed hasty executions after deliberations, the Sadducees were known for harsh and often quick punishments. The most obvious breach of ethics, of course, is the presence of false and mutually contradictory witnesses. Clearly some members of the Sanhedrin present acted with legal integrity, cross-examining the witnesses, but by Pharisaic standards, the case should have been thrown out once the witnesses contradicted one another (Mk 14:59). The high priest’s plan may have been simply to have a preliminary hearing to formulate a charge to bring to Pilate (cf. Mt 27:1; Mk 15:1; Lk 22:66; 23:1), the expected procedure before accusing someone before the governor. The actions of the Sanhedrin fit what we know of the period. The Roman government usually depended on local elites to charge troublemakers. Local elites were often corrupt, and all our other sources from the period (Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Pharisaic memories) agree that the aristocratic priesthood that controlled Jerusalem abused its power against others. A generation later, the chief priests arrested a Jewish prophet for announcing judgment against the temple; they handed him over to a Roman governor, who had him beaten until (Josephus says) his bones showed (Josephus, Wars 6.300–305). Their treatment of Jesus fits their usual behavior toward those who challenged their authority. ◆
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
All these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair – or his – out of desperation” (James 1977, p. 44). “The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of [Hegel’s] procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.
Richard J. Bernstein (The Pragmatic Turn)
same project along the same trajectory. It is the rise of governance by algorithm, a further, apparent distancing of the human from the political. I say apparent because, of course, the human is never fully out of the picture, we just create more elaborate technical illusions to mask the irreducibly human element. We buy into these illusions, in part, because of the initial trajectory set for the liberal democratic order, that of machine-like objectivity, rationality, and efficiency. It is on this ideal that Western society staked its hopes for peace and prosperity. At every turn, when the human element, in its complexity and messiness, broke through the facade, we doubled-down on the ideal rather than question the premises. Initially, at least the idea was that the “machine” would facilitate the deliberation of citizens by establishing rules and procedures to govern their engagement. When it became apparent that this would no longer work, we explicitly turned to technique as the common frame by which we would proceed. Now that technique has failed because again the human manifested itself, we overtly turn to machines
L.M. Sacasas (Do Artifacts Have Ethics?: Technology, Politics, and the Moral Life)
Contemporary demonologist Jean Bodin argued that, in crisis conditions such as these, standards of evidence must be lowered. Witchcraft was so serious, and so hard to detect using normal methods of proof, that society could not afford to adhere too much to “legal tidiness and normal procedures.” Public rumor could be considered “almost infallible”: if everyone in a village said that a particular woman was a witch, that was sufficient to justify putting her to the torture. Medieval techniques were revived specifically for such cases, including “swimming” suspects to see if they floated, and searing them with red-hot irons. The numbers of convicted witches kept rising as standards of evidence went down, and the increase amounted to further proof that the crisis was real and that further adjustment of the law was necessary. As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. It was all accepted with hardly a murmur, except by a few writers such as Montaigne, who pointed out that torture was useless for getting at the truth since people will say anything to stop the pain—and that, besides, it was “putting a very high price on one’s conjectures” to have someone roasted alive on their account.
Sarah Bakewell (How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer)
The Krishnas' resolution was brilliant. They switched to a fund-raising tactic that made it unnecessary for target persons to have positive feelings toward the fund-raisers. They began to employ a donation-request procedure that engaged the rule for reciprocation, which, as demonstrated by the Regan study, is strong enough to overcome the factor of dislike for the requester. The new strategy still involves the solicitation of contributions in public places with much pedestrian traffic (airports are a favorite), but now, before a donation is requested, the target person is given a "gift"—a book (usually the Bhagavad Gita), the Back to Godhead magazine of the Society, or, in the most cost-effective version, a flower. The unsuspecting passerby who suddenly finds a flower pressed into his hands or pinned to his jacket is under no circumstances allowed to give it back, even if he asserts that he does not want it. "No, it is our gift to you," says the solicitor, refusing to accept it. Only after the Krishna member has thus brought the force of the reciprocation rule to bear on the situation is the target asked to provide a contribution to the Society. This benefactor-before-beggar strategy has been wildly successful for the Hare Krishna Society, producing large-scale economic gains and funding the ownership of temples, businesses, houses, and property
Anonymous
When there is great doubt,” says a Zen aphorism that Kusan Sunim kept repeating, “then there is great awakening.” This is the key. The depth of any understanding is intimately correlated with the depth of one’s confusion. Great awakening resonates at the same “pitch” as great doubt. So rather than negate such doubt by replacing it with belief, which is the standard religious procedure, Zen encourages you to cultivate that doubt until it “coagulates” into a vivid mass of perplexity.
Stephen Batchelor (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist)
Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?
William Bridges (Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change)
But I cannot believe that you, or anyone else, would be asked to slaughter your fellow human beings, whatever race or religion they are, for no strategic purpose at all. For God’s sake, man, we’re Germans. We’re the most cultured, scientifically advanced people on earth. We believe in laws, in order, in correct procedures. So whatever you’re ordered to do, there will be a reason for it. You must simply trust that the reason is good. And if any of your men come to you and say, ‘I can’t do this, I don’t believe it’s right,’ just tell them what I have told you. It is not our business to think. It is our business to obey.
David Thomas (Ostland)
Marc Goodman is a cyber crime specialist with an impressive résumé. He has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, Interpol, NATO, and the State Department. He is the chief cyber criminologist at the Cybercrime Research Institute, founder of the Future Crime Institute, and now head of the policy, law, and ethics track at SU. When breaking down this threat, Goodman sees four main categories of concern. The first issue is personal. “In many nations,” he says, “humanity is fully dependent on the Internet. Attacks against banks could destroy all records. Someone’s life savings could vanish in an instant. Hacking into hospitals could cost hundreds of lives if blood types were changed. And there are already 60,000 implantable medical devices connected to the Internet. As the integration of biology and information technology proceeds, pacemakers, cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, and so on, will all become the target of cyber attacks.” Equally alarming are threats against physical infrastructures that are now hooked up to the net and vulnerable to hackers (as was recently demonstrated with Iran’s Stuxnet incident), among them bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, and energy pipelines. We are heavily dependent on these systems, but Goodman feels that the technology being employed to manage them is no longer up to date, and the entire network is riddled with security threats. Robots are the next issue. In the not-too-distant future, these machines will be both commonplace and connected to the Internet. They will have superior strength and speed and may even be armed (as is the case with today’s military robots). But their Internet connection makes them vulnerable to attack, and very few security procedures have been implemented to prevent such incidents. Goodman’s last area of concern is that technology is constantly coming between us and reality. “We believe what the computer tells us,” says Goodman. “We read our email through computer screens; we speak to friends and family on Facebook; doctors administer medicines based upon what a computer tells them the medical lab results are; traffic tickets are issued based upon what cameras tell us a license plate says; we pay for items at stores based upon a total provided by a computer; we elect governments as a result of electronic voting systems. But the problem with all this intermediated life is that it can be spoofed. It’s really easy to falsify what is seen on our computer screens. The more we disconnect from the physical and drive toward the digital, the more we lose the ability to tell the real from the fake. Ultimately, bad actors (whether criminals, terrorists, or rogue governments) will have the ability to exploit this trust.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
The most striking and obvious thing about an administrative organization is its formal system of rules and objectives. Here tasks, powers, and procedures are set out according to some officially approved pattern. This pattern purports to say how the work of the organization is to be carried on, whether it be producing steel, winning votes, teaching children, or saving souls. The organization thus designed is a technical instrument for mobilizing human energies and directing them toward set aims. We allocate tasks, delegate authority, channel communication, and find some way of co-ordinating all that has been divided up and parceled out. All this is conceived as an exercise in engineering; it is governed by the related ideals of rationality and discipline.
Philip Selznick (Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation)
Fallout avoid a DUI Lawyer The brutal truth is that this effect swallowing and is surprisingly stiff back. Problems and opportunities caused by drunk drivers are frightening. There is a reasonable demand and good heavy penalties only in the hope of avoiding a criminal. The reality is, sad to say, people that many of us are caught up in their original crimes and facing a big change in everyday life and dangerous consequences. Across the country, low crime rate and reduce contains a number from the understanding of the consequences of the ever more stringent. Privileges rear suspension imprisonment, fines, ignition programs and more are binding on all the possibilities and potential impact. Ideal to this procedure, which is full of dangers and pitfalls, in the sense of finding a positive DUI lawyers to get form? Unfortunately, it may be impossible, and many so-called authorities, the practical experience of the senses, a goat for certain customers. An important aspect is the number of measurements to choose high quality coming DUI lawyers. Breakfast is my way to someone who has experience to fulfill. This means that someone who had the food study drunken 50 penalties. He wanted to try, if someone who works mainly candidates with DUI Lawyers. This special mention of the many methods that come from expected with this film with less destructive. On your own, because you to maintain a professional DUI law towards pace, the situation in other readouts. It seems contradictory, but even if someone switches deftly defended many conditions, but also a person who to stay away from the demonstration says. The demo is the last thing should be, especially if they are responsible for themselves. As an alternative to the other, determine the direction of an attorney who is familiar with the specifics of the work and to help to suspend the license and, hopefully, to inform the prosecution of more than a very low price or misplaced. Sometimes the profits to avoid the interest rate and the term of the hard disk, especially for lawyer’s first area infringer years drunk help of the beautiful region. Other cases are in different directions, which can be implemented, which may contribute to an excellent result. The only way to get the opportunity of a personal imaginary profession rather than receiving. Inevitably, any DUI lawyer to explain myself properly to you from serious sanctions targeting drunken price almost never consumed and protect commitment. Can these days of increased restrictions reduce patrols and even a person consumes also be a number. Whatever complaints taxis, sleeping on the couch or taking a walk on the estate has raised overnight in prisons and the ability to deal with this part of the transaction. Even at a time when the only work in the easiest possible development is still very worrying turning point in history and let yourself.
Steve White
practical intelligence.” To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
Does Fee’s solution to 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 then constitute evidence of a liberal tendency to reject the authority of the Bible? It should trouble evangelicals that Fee says these verses are not part of the Bible and therefore “certainly not binding for Christians.” It seems to me that Fee’s recommendation that we should remove some hard verses from the Bible rather than seeking to understand them in a way that does not contradict other verses establishes a dangerous precedent. When the verses that he throws out of the Bible are missing from no manuscript, and also happen to be the very verses that show Paul’s insistence on male governance of the church meetings “in all the churches of the saints” (v. 33), then it seems to me to be another example of a pattern in many egalitarian writings, a pattern of using sophisticated scholarly procedures in order to evade the requirement of submitting to the authority of the Word of God. Fee’s rejection of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 as not belonging to the Bible seems to me another step on the path toward liberalism.
Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently.
Dennis S. Ross (All Politics Is Religious: Speaking Faith to the Media, Policy Makers and Community (Walking Together, Finding the Way))
Several recent books would have us believe that all we have to do is follow certain steps and God will give us whatever we ask. The authors say, in effect, "Follow this procedure or use these specific words and know for certain that God will give in to your requests." That's not prayer; that's magic. That's not faith but superstition. These are gimmicks intended to manipulate the sovereign God.
R.C. Sproul (Does Prayer Change Things? (Crucial Questions, #3))
The procedure followed in this egalitarian claim troubles me more than most of the other claims that I consider in this book. When no explanations or disclaimers are made alerting readers to the uniform lack of support from scholarly specialists for such an interpretation, this wild speculation (or so it seems to me, after reading these other articles) is taken as truth by unsuspecting readers. Cindy Jacobs, for example, simply trusts Kroeger’s interpretation of this fresco as truthful, and counts it as evidence for women’s participation in high positions of governing authority in the early church.6 Thousands of readers of Jacobs’s book will also take it as true, thinking that since it has a footnote to a journal on church history, there must be scholarly support for the idea. And so something that is a figment of Catherine Kroeger’s imagination, something that no scholar in the field has ever advocated, is widely accepted as fact. The requirements of truthfulness should hold us to higher standards than this. Kroeger’s article therefore uses apparently untruthful claims based on obscure material outside the Bible in order to turn people away from being obedient to the Bible in what it says about restricting the office of pastor and elder to men. And turning people away from obeying the Bible is another step on the path toward liberalism.
Wayne Grudem (Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism?)
No. 1, when you ask who’s interested in this, the usual answer is, terminally ill people with excruciating pain. False. Factually not true. It tends to be a preoccupation of people who are depressed or hopeless for other reasons. No surprise, actually, if you look at what leads to suicide: hopelessness and depression. You have to look at euthanasia or assisted suicide as more like suicide than like a good death. Second, this notion that there’s no slippery slope, as advocates have long claimed? Totally wrong. Look at Belgium and the Netherlands: First, it’s accepted for adults who are competent and give consent. Then, it’s “We’re going to extend it to neonates with genetic defects, and adolescents.” Any time we do anything in medicine, it’s the same way: We develop an intervention for a narrow group of people, and once it’s well accepted, it gets expanded. I think it’s false to say, “We can hold the line here.” It doesn’t work that way. Third, people say this is a quick, reliable, painless intervention. No medical intervention in history is quick, reliable, painless and has no flaws. In the Netherlands, there’s about a 17 to 20 percent rate of problems, something screwing up. Initially, when the Oregon people published — “We have no problems. Every case went flawlessly!” — you knew the data was wrong. It had to be wrong. Either you’re not getting every case, so the denominator was wrong, or people are lying. There’s nobody who does a procedure, not even blood draws, and it’s perfect every time. So this idea that this is quick, reliable and painless is nonsense. And the last and most important point is: You want to legalize these interventions to improve end-of-life care in this country? That’s your motivation and this is your method? PS: I don’t think people argue that–— ZE: [interrupting] Oh, people do argue that! That is the justification for these procedures: It’s going to improve end-of-life care and give people control. The problem is, even in countries that have legalized it for a long time, at best 3 percent of people die this way in the Netherlands and Belgium. At best, 10 percent express interest in it. That is not a way to improve end-of-life care. You don’t focus lots of attention and effort on 3 percent. It’s the 97 percent, if you want to improve care. The typical response is, we can do both. Hmmm. Every system I’ve ever seen has a bandwidth problem: You can only do so much. We ought to focus our attention on the vast, vast majority, 97 percent of people, for whom this is not the right intervention and get that right — and we are far from that. I don’t think legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are the way to go. It’s a big, big distraction.
Paula Span (Ezekiel Emanuel: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single))
If your toothpaste says it repairs teeth, make sure it contains “NovaMin” as an active ingredient. It’s the only ingredient that actually does repair teeth.
Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
When ObamaCare was being passed, Senator Chuck Grassley--a towering giant in this body; a strong, principled conservative--introduced a commonsense provision to ObamaCare that said: If you are going to force ObamaCare on the American people, if you are going to create these health insurance exchanges and you are going to force millions of people into these exchanges, then Congress should not operate by better rules than the American people. So he introduced a simple amendment designed to treat Members of Congress just like the American people so that we didn't have this two-class system.   It has been reported--I was not serving in this body at the time--that amendment was voted on and accepted because Democratic Senators believed the bill would go to conference and in the conference committee they could strip it out and it would magically disappear. But then, because of the procedural games it took to pass it, they didn't have the opportunity to do that, and suddenly, horror of all horrors, this bill saying Congress should be bound by the same rules as the American people became the law of the land.   So what happened? Majority leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senators had a closed-door meeting with the President here in the Capitol where they said, according to public news reports: Let us out of ObamaCare. We don't want to be in these exchanges.   One would assume they are reading the same news reports the rest of us are reading--that ObamaCare is a train wreck, that it is not working--and the last thing Members of Congress wanted to do was to have their health care jeopardized. And the President directed his administration to exempt Members of Congress and their staff, ignoring the language of the statute, disregarding the language of the statute and saying: You guys are friends of the administration. We are taking care of you.   I
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
The simplest type of computational loop occurs when the system, at some stage, arrives back in exactly the same state as it had been in on a previous occasion. With no additional input it would then simply repeat the same computation endlessly. It would not be hard to devise a system that, in principle (though perhaps very inefficiently), would guarantee to get out of loops of this kind whenever they occur (by, say, keeping a list of all the states that it had been in previously, and checking at each stage to see whether that state has occurred before). However, there are many more sophisticated types of 'looping' that are possible. basically, the loop problem is the one that the whole discussion of Chapter 2 (particularly 2.1-2.6) was all about; for a computation that loops is simply one that does not stop. An assertion that some computation actually loops is precisely what we mean by a Pi-1 sentence (cf. 2.10, response to Q10). Now, as part of the discussion of 2.5, we saw that there is no entirely algorithmic way of deciding whether a computation will fail to stop-i.e. whether it will loop. Moreover, we conclude from the discussion above that the procedures that are available to human mathematicians for ascertaining that certain computations do loop-i.e. for ascertaining the truth of Pi1-sentences-lie outside algorithmic action. Thus we conclude that indeed some kind of 'non-computational intelligence' is needed if we wish to incorporate all humanly possible ways of ascertaining for certain that some computation is indeed looping. It might have been thought that loops could be avoided by having some mechanism that gauges how long a computation has been going on for, and it 'jumps out' if it judges that the computation has indeed been at it for too long and it has no chance of stopping. But this will not do, if we assume that the mechanism whereby it makes such decisions is something computational, for then there must be the cases where the mechanism will fail, either by erroneously coming to the conclusion that some computation is looping when indeed it is not, or else by not coming to any conclusion at all (so that the entire mechanism itself is looping). One way of understanding this comes from the fact that the entire system is something computational, so it will be subject to the loop problem itself, and one cannot be sure that the system as a whole, if it does not come to erroneous conclusions, will not itself loop.
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
I was sound asleep at the Oregon beach cabin one night when there was a knock at the door. A woman who said she was from the Red Cross stood on the front porch. I was foggy-headed. At first, I could not get through my brain what she was saying. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she said. “But you need to call home immediately.” Terror struck me. My mind raced. Where was Steve? Bindi lay asleep in the bedroom. I asked the woman from the Red Cross to stay on the porch while I went across the street to the pay phone. The international calling procedure seemed immensely complicated that morning, and terribly slow. I tried to keep my fingers steady as I dialed. The sun had not yet risen. I was in my robe. It was February of 2000, and I remember thinking, It’s always the coldest just before the sun comes up. I heard Steve’s voice on the other end of the phone and experienced an immediate flood of relief. He’s alive. But something was terribly wrong. Steve was incoherent. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Not long before, we had lost our favorite crocodile to old age, and I thought that something had happened to one of our animals. But the tone of Steve’s voice was different. He was sobbing, but finally managed to choke out the words. His mother had been killed in a car accident. I felt the blood drain from my face. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He tried to explain, but he couldn’t really talk. The next thing I knew, the line went dead. It took a few frantic calls to find out what had happened. In the process of moving to their new home on our property, Lyn had left Rosedale to make one last trip with a few remaining family possessions. She was driving with the family malamute, Aylic, in the passenger seat beside her, and Sharon, their bird-eating spider, in a glass terrarium tank in the back of the truck. Lyn left the Rosedale house early, about three o’clock in the morning. As she approached Ironbark Station, her Ute left the road traveling sixty miles an hour. The truck hit a tree and she died instantly. Aylic was killed as well, and the tank holding the bird-eating spider was smashed to pieces. Early in the morning, at the precise moment when the crash happened, Steve was working on the backhoe at the zoo. He suddenly felt as if he had been hit by something that knocked him over, and he fell violently off the machine, hitting the ground so hard that his sunglasses came off. He told me later that he knew something terrible had happened. Steve got in his Ute and started driving. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew where he had to go. It was still early. With uncanny precision, he drove toward where the accident occurred. His mobile phone rang. It was Frank. When his brother-in-law told him what had happened and where, Steve realized he was already headed there.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybody’s time to think about it. So what do we do? In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by: (1)  making it still harder; (2)  redefining what we mean by ‘solving’ it, so that it becomes something we can do; (3)  inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
E.T. Jaynes
Shaking his head at his own skittishness, he let out a sigh and dropped down beside his little girl. Immediately, she scrambled over to him as fast as her hands and knees could take her and climbed happily up into his lap. He picked her up. Her very presence was a balm to his nerves, a reassurance that purity and innocence still shone in a world that had, of late, seemed dominated by wickedness and evil. But it soon became obvious that Charlotte wanted more than just a cuddle. Eventually, she began to get restless, and Gareth had learned enough about her to recognize immediately what she wanted. "Hungry, Charlie-girl?" Raising himself to his knees, he picked up the bowl he'd excitedly prepared a few minutes ago and sat down, anticipation lighting up his face. Charlotte was beginning to eat solid food now, which delighted him beyond words because that meant he could have a hand in feeding her. Still, Juliet had looked dubious when she'd left him with the baby an hour before. Mash up her food carefully, she had instructed him, explaining the procedure with as much care as if she'd been advising an overeager two-year-old, going on and on while he'd stood there and nodded and nodded and nodded. Make sure there are no lumps in it, and don't make her eat it all if she doesn't want it. He realized his first mistake as he dug the spoon into the bowl and eagerly began to feed the baby. "Hmmm … perhaps I should have mashed up the peas or even the carrots, instead of these red beets left over from supper last night," he mused, aloud. Indeed, it soon became difficult to know who was faring worse in this new venture — his daughter, now smeared from head to toe in red beet pulp, or her papa, who had it all over his fingers and in his lap. Charlotte looked up at him and smiled through the mess. Gareth guffawed. Ah, hell. They were both laughing and having fun. They were half-way through the bowl when a loud hammering at the door nearly caused Gareth to jump out of his skin. Lucien. Scooping up the baby and holding her easily in one arm, he went to open it — and found Perry and the rest of the Den of Debauchery standing just outside. "Bloody hell!"  Perry's jaw nearly hit the floor. "What on earth have you done to her?!" Gareth looked at Charlotte and fully comprehended just what a mess the two of them had made. Huge red blotches stained the delicate skin of the baby's face. Her hands were bright red, her dress was ruined, and bits of crimson pulp clung to her chin. Oh, hell, he thought wildly, Juliet's going to kill me! He grabbed up a napkin from the table and began scrubbing at Charlotte's face, to no avail. "Damnation!" he cried, much to Perry's amusement and the guffaws of the others. "Playing papa to the hilt, are you, Gareth?" "So much for your days of debauchery!" "I say, next thing you know, he'll be changing napkins — ha, ha, ha!" "Sod off," Gareth said, realizing how much he had not missed their immaturity.
Danelle Harmon (The Wild One (The de Montforte Brothers, #1))
You dragged her in here without letting her change or say goodbye to her family?” The two officers looked as sheepish as six foot six males could. “Standard operating procedure,” one of them mumbled defiantly. “Allowing the subject out of your sight, even for an instant, more than doubles the flight risk.” “She’s not a subject, you fuckin’ idiot,” growled the dark warrior, his amber eyes flashing. “She’s my bride. I don’t give a good goddamn what your SOP is, if I find you’ve hurt her in any way, you’ll both answer to me.” “I’m so sorry,” the blond Kindred said awkwardly as the dark one raked the officers over the coals. “None of this was handled very well.” He put a hand tentatively on Sophia’s shoulder and she flinched away from him. “Don’t touch me!” she flared, shooting him a deadly glare from narrowed green eyes. The blond Kindred’s ice blue eyes widened, then narrowed as well. “Forgive me. I wasn’t aware you’d take a gesture of comfort as a threat.” The double set of fangs in his upper teeth seemed to sharpen alarmingly. “Okay, everybody take it down a notch.” Kat raised her voice to be heard over the babble. She looked at Liv. “First the good news. It’s only for thirty days.” “Only thirty days?” Sophia cried, still clinging to her. “That’s a long time to be abused and molested, Kat!” “Nobody’s getting abused or molested,” the dark warrior growled. “Oh really? So you have no interest in having sex with my sister?” Sophia demanded of him. Liv felt her cheeks heat. “Sophie, please.” The warrior’s eyes flashed. “Hell yes, I’m interested and I’m not gonna deny it. She’s mine—I need to claim her. Bond with her. Can’t do that without sex.” Liv felt her face get even hotter. Oh my God, is he for real? The thought of being pressed up against that huge, masculine, muscular body was doing strange things to her, things she didn’t want to admit even to herself. And no one had ever said they wanted to bond with her before. “Baird, you’re only making things worse,” the blond Kindred muttered, tugging at the other one’s muscular arm. Baird—is
Evangeline Anderson (Claimed (Brides of the Kindred, #1))
It is necessary to restrain the bull in us in order to elevate it to the Bull. This means to say that the instinctive desire which shows itself as rage concentrated upon a single thing, and which blinds one to everything else, is to be restrained and thus elevated to the propensity for profound meditation. This entire operation is summarized in Hermeticism by the words "to be silent". The precept "to be silent" is not, as many authors interpret it, solely a rule of prudence, but it is moreover a practical method of transforming this narrowing and blinkering instinct into a propensity towards depth and, correspondingly, an aversion towards all that is superficial in nature. The winged Bull is therefore the result obtained by the procedure of "being silent.: This means to say that the Bull is elevated to the level of the Eagle and united with it. A marriage of the impetus towards the heights and the propensity towards depth is effected by this union. The marriage of opposites - this traditional them of alchemy - is the essence of the practice of the law of the Cross.
Valentin Tomberg (Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism)
For a solopreneur, a written policy might be just on the computer, or on a website. Maybe it's just between you, your partner and God right now, but somewhere you need a written policy that says what you will and will not do so it can ground and guide you in the emotional moment. For a larger business it becomes part of your operating procedures or company handbook. Having parameters around the giving protects the assets and future growth ability of the business. It's not just willy-nilly whenever somebody pulls your heartstrings. You actually have a pattern and a policy that can wisely guide the decision so those heartstrings aren't just taking over emotionally. Emotional giving will ruin the business profits, and your ability to grow and reach more and more people. Here’s are two example giving policies: ​​We will give one class away for every ten classes sold. ​​For every twenty coaching packages sold, we’ll give a partial scholarship to someone who applies and qualifies.
Katie Hornor (The Flamingo Advantage: How to Leverage Unique, Stay Relevant and Change the World)
Voilà,” he said as he completed the procedure. Ulf smiled. He was pleased that he had a vet who said voilà. It was not necessarily what one expected from somebody whose profession was so physical, so matter-of-fact. Chefs might say voilà as they extracted some elaborate creation from the oven; an artist might say voilà as he put the final touch of paint to the canvas; a couturier might utter the word as he revealed a new outfit—but not a vet; nor, for that matter, a dentist, nor, a fortiori, a fireman, as he played the final jet of water over the dying embers of a fire.
Alexander McCall Smith (The Man with the Silver Saab (Detective Varg, #3))
From this we might infer that minimizing our pain and suffering when it comes to sorting is all about minimizing the number of things we have to sort. It’s true: one of the best preventives against the computational difficulty of sock sorting is just doing your laundry more often. Doing laundry three times as frequently, say, could reduce your sorting overhead by a factor of nine. Indeed, if Hillis’s roommate stuck with his peculiar procedure but went thirteen days between washes instead of fourteen, that alone would save him twenty-eight pulls from the hamper.
Brian Christian (Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Foucault: the obsession with an ever more precise genealogy, the ever more scientific elision of an effect in the present by the exhaustion of a preliminary objectivity. It is like a system of thought that has begun to spin on its axis when confronted with an obstacle it will never get over - it will never jump over its shadow, the procedures that engender it, its retrospective sequential logic. This is the way you become an absolute reference, by connecting up with an inflexible heredity of knowledge, with an authority which necessarily seeks to ground itself further and further back in time. An austere line this, which allows itself neither anticipation nor even a breakthrough into the present, which allows itself no mental infringement of the law of its species, Which is that you have to be sure of what you are asserting. This is illusory because no thinking can be sure of itself, nor conscious of its own mechanisms. It must take the risk of what it does not say, rather than simply being so careful about what it says. Even if there is a great objective modesty in Foucault's prudence, his tragedy lies in his never having managed to cross this defensive line, of having walled himself up in his own discriminations, always demanding another power. Foucault put all his strategic efforts into constructing that demand, all his energy, which was increasingly uncertain of its own state, and increasingly confused by the exaggeration of his reputation. He died of that infinite regression, disappeared, leaving us no hope, but leaving little for himself either, on the ambiguous fringes of the very Highest Scholarship.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It’s not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent. Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator. “Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them,” he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status quo.
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
Helen obligingly presented us with a copy of the new form of marriage service, with all the vulgar bits left out--which was asking for trouble. Peter very funny about it--said he knew all about the "procreation of children," in theory though not in practice, but that the "increase of mankind" by any other method sounded too advanced for him, and that, if he ever did indulge in such dangerous amusements, he would, with his wife's permission, stick to the old-fashioned procedure. He also said that, as for the "gift of continence," he wouldn't have it as a gift, and had no objection to admitting as much. At this point, Helen got up and left the house, leaving P. and Harriet to wrangle over the word "obey." P. said he would consider it a breach of manners to give orders to his wife, but H. said, Oh, no--he'd give orders fast enough if the place was on fire or a tree falling down and he wanted her to stand clear. P. said, in that case they ought both to say "obey," but it would be too much jam for the reporters. Left them to fight it out. When I came back, found Peter had consented to be obeyed on condition he might "endow" and not "share" his worldly goods. Shocking victory of sentiment over principle.
Dorothy L. Sayers (Busman's Honeymoon)