“
And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your
and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.
”
”
Sarah Kane (Crave)
“
You Can't Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn't. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you'll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream.
”
”
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
“
The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.
”
”
Mark Fisher (Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures)
“
While we may continue to use the words
smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may
persist for certain purposes, the monopoly
of those who believe in a single general
intelligence has come to an end. Brain
scientists and geneticists are documenting
the incredible differentiation of human capacities, computer programmers are creating systems that are intelligent in different ways, and educators are freshly acknowledging that their students have distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
”
”
Howard Gardner (Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century)
“
he didn’t exactly have the “programmer” look to him, if you know what I mean. He’d be the programmer’s boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.
”
”
John Scalzi (The Life of the Mind (The End of All Things, #1))
“
In the end, managing your finances well is a lot like developing a strong personal productivity system: You keep track of everything without making it your full-time job; you set goals; you break them down into small bite-size tasks; you save yourself time by automating manual work; and you spend your time and brainpower focusing on the big picture. That’s what I try to do with my time and money.
”
”
Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No guilt, no excuses - just a 6-week programme that works)
“
Launch is just another point in software’s life. Not the end-all and be-all.
”
”
Ka Wai Cheung (The Developer's Code: What Real Programmers Do)
“
Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.
”
”
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
“
If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)
”
”
Palagummi Sainath (Everybody loves a good drought)
“
Yes, I’m the crazy rock’n’roller who bit the head off a bat and pissed on the Alamo, but I also have a son who likes to mess around with the settings on my telly, so when I make myself a nice pot of tea, put my feet up, and try to watch a programme on the History Channel, I can’t get the f**king thing to work. That kind of stuff blew people’s minds. I think they had this idea in their heads that when I wasn’t being arrested for public intoxication, I went to a cave and hung upside down, drinking snakes’ blood. But I’m like Coco the Clown, me: at the end of the day, I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (I Am Ozzy)
“
I’d learned over time that engineers preferred a straightforward question with a quantifiable answer. Open-ended designing, on the other hand, was the realm of programmers.
”
”
B.V. Larson (The Dead Sun (Star Force, #9))
“
Let us not deceive ourselves. We are in the midst of a great world change, and it is natural that simple souls, poor wandering spirits, see no way out of the chaos, seek relief in suicide, or think the world is coming to an end and join in the race after the golden calf and rush blindly into the whirlpool.
”
”
Gottfried Feder (Programme of the N. S. D. A. P.)
“
Don’t Get Frustrated The final technique isn’t so much a technique, but a maxim: Don’t get frustrated. When you are frustrated, you won’t think as clearly, you won’t work as efficiently, and everything will take longer and seem harder. Even worse, frustration tends to feed on itself, so that what begins as mild irritation ends as outright anger.
”
”
V. Anton Spraul (Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving)
“
It's an odd fact of life that you don't really remember the good times all that well. I have only mental snapshots of birthday parties, skiing, beach holidays, my wedding. The bad times too are just impressions. I can see myself standing at the end of some bed while someone I love is dying, or on the way home from a girlfriend's after I've been dumped, but again, they're just pictures. For full Technicolor, script plus subtitles plus commemorative programme in the memory, though, nothing beats embarrassment. You tend to remember the lines pretty well once you've woken screaming them at midnight a few times.
”
”
Mark Barrowcliffe (The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons And Growing Up Strange)
“
At the end of the day, bitcoin is programmable money. When you have programmable money, the possibilities are truly endless. We can take many of the basic concepts of the current system that depend on legal contracts, and we can convert these into algorithmic contracts, into mathematical transactions that can be enforced on the bitcoin network. As I’ve said, there is no third party, there is no counterparty. If I choose to send value from one part of the network to another, it is peer-to-peer with no one in between. If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more. Bitcoin is the internet of money. Currency is only the first application. If you grasp that, you can look beyond the price, you can look beyond the volatility, you can look beyond the fad. At its core, bitcoin is a revolutionary technology that will change the world forever. Join
”
”
Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money)
“
Also, the technologically high-risk Apollo aerospace programme is considered a classic success story of megaproject planning and implementation. The cost overrun on this US$21 billion project was only 5 per cent. Few know, however, that the original budget estimate included US$8 billion of contingencies.18 By allowing for risk with foresight, the programme avoided ending up in the type of large cost overrun that destabilises many major projects during implementation. The Apollo approach, with its realistic view of risks, costs and contingencies, should be adopted in more major projects.
”
”
Bent Flyvbjerg (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition)
“
When you spend your childhood around someone who thinks it’s a miracle you’re still alive at the end of another year, it’s hard not to wonder what dangers are out there waiting to kill you. And the influences you have around you as a kid are like the programmers that write the software you run off when you’re older.
”
”
Dean Cole (Chasing Ghosts (The Quentin Strange Mysteries, #1))
“
I did not wait to hear the end of my father's story, for I had been with him myself after mass when we had met M. Legrandin; instead, I went downstairs to the kitchen to ask about the menu for our dinner, which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
“
Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
”
”
Garry Kasparov (Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins)
“
I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing - by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged background so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have never been able to decide whether that is deeply impressive or just appalling - whether this is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines. All I know is that it exists more here than anywhere else.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)
“
Not that I expected him to know; he didn’t exactly have the “programmer” look to him, if you know what I mean. He’d be the programmer’s boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.
”
”
John Scalzi (The Life of the Mind (The End of All Things, #1))
“
There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.
”
”
Carol Broad (Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices)
“
When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry,
”
”
Charles Stross (Halting State (Halting State, #1))
“
All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from hymns still washed about in my father's mind) as slums were transformed into garden cities, and the belching smoke of hateful furnaces into the cool elegance of electric power. As for the ferocious ravings of my namesake, Carlyle, about the pettifogging nature of modern industrial man's pursuits and expectations -- all that would be corrected as he was induced to spend ever more of his increasing leisure in cultural and craft activities; in the enjoyment of music, literature and art.
It was pefectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come.
”
”
Malcolm Muggeridge (Chronicles of Wasted Time)
“
The ‘expert’ on the programme observed that the vast majority of baby spiders end up as prey for other species, and she then went on to say: ‘Perhaps this is the real purpose of their existence, as only a few need to survive in order for the species to be preserved’!
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Even when the income disparity is very much greater, people are sticky. Micronesians mostly stay where they were born, even though they are free to live and work in the US without a visa, where the average income is twenty times higher. Niger, next to Nigeria, is not depopulated even though it is six times poorer and there are no border controls between the countries. People like to stay in the communities they were born in, where everything is familiar and easy, and many require a substantial push to migrate – even to another location in the same nation, and even when it would be obviously beneficial. One study in Bangladesh found that a programme that offered subsidies to help rural people migrate to the city for work during the lean season didn’t work, even when workers could make substantially more money through seasonal migration.22 One problem is the lack of affordable housing and other facilities in cities, meaning people end up living illegally in cramped, unregulated spaces or in tents.
”
”
Gaia Vince (Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World)
“
Modernism was based on a kind of arrogance ... and led designers to believe that if they thought of something cool, it must be considered universally cool. That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the ground to the exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp or the use of white space as syntax in Python. Or the mandatory use of objects in many languages, including Java. All of these are ways of taking freedom away from the end user "for their own good". They're just versions of Orwell's Newspeak, in which it's impossible to think bad thoughts. We escaped from the fashion police in the 1970s, but many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police.
”
”
Larry Wall
“
Do you realize,' Dr. Ramzi says, smiling broadly, 'when you speak of a political programme, that your programme now is the same that Mahmoud Sami Al-Baroudi's government tried to establish more than a hundred years ago?'
'Is that right?' Isabel says.
'Yes. Yes, for sure,' Dr. Ramzi says. 'Listen: the ending of foreign influence, the payment of the Egyptian debt -' he counts them off on his fingers - 'an elected parliament, a national industry, equality of all men before the law, reform of education, and allowing a free press to reflect all shades of opinion. Those were the seven points of their programme. These young people -' the wave of his hand takes in the group - 'they still ask for this.' He shrugs.
”
”
Ahdaf Soueif (The Map of Love)
“
THE STATUS OF WARRIOR IS NOT THE END RESULT OF HAVING UNDERGONE A PARTICULAR TRAINING PROGRAMME, BUT IS RATHER A SILENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF SELF WHICH COMES FROM KNOWING THAT ONE HAS BECOME IMPECCABLE IN TRAVELLING THE WARRIOR’S PATH. TO BE A WARRIOR IS NOT A GOAL IN ITSELF, BUT IS INSTEAD AN ETERNAL QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE AND FREEDOM STRETCHING INTO INFINITY.
”
”
Théun Mares
“
The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme.
From the opening words a narrative voice begins to create
its own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice,
finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world.
So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends,
talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness,
variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice.
”
”
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
“
As a child you were read or watched fairy stories. The prince always married the princess and the wicked witch died and everyone lived happily ever after (except the witch, of course, but she got what she deserved). In other words, good always wins in the end. But that was a fairy story and you have been brainwashed into believing that it really does happen this way. It doesn’t. In fact we might do our children a favour by changing the ending to let the witch kill off the princess and marry the prince.
”
”
Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness)
“
The programme of the previous year was repeated in 1860. Returning from Rome to Florence at the beginning of June, the Brownings in July went to Siena to avoid the extreme heat of the summer at Florence, staying as before at the Villa Alberti. Their visit to Siena was, however, rather shorter than the previous one, lasting only till September. There is no doubt that Mrs. Browning, during all this time, was losing ground in point of health; and she now received another severe blow in the news of the serious illness of her sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook). The anxiety lasted for several months, and ended with the death of Mrs. Cook in the following winter.
”
”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
“
She had been maimed by an illness that was so far out of fashion it might have been a wartime recipe for pink blancmange made from cornflour when everyone these days ate real chocolate mouse and tiramisu. TB was Spam fritters and two-bar electric fires and mangles and string bags and French knitting and a Bakelite phone in a freezing hall and loose tea and margarine and the black of the newspaper coming off on your fingers and milk in glass bottles and books from Boots Lending library with a hole in the spine where they put the ticker, and doilies and antimacassars and the wireless tuned to the Light Programme. It was outside lavatories and condensation and slum dwellings and no supermarkets. It was tuberculosis, which had died with the end of people drinking nerve tonics and Horlicks.
”
”
Linda Grant (The Dark Circle)
“
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
”
”
Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
“
Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the scepticism of the clerks, it is--even when ironized, even when denied--an essential element in the arts, a permanent feature of a permanent literature of crisis. If it becomes myth, if its past is forgotten, we sink quickly into myth, into stereotype. We have to employ our knowledge of the fictive. With it we can explain what is essential and eccentric about early modernism, and purge the trivial and stereotyped from the arts of our own time. Great men deceived themselves by neglecting to do this; other men, later, have a programme against doing it. The critics should know their duty.
Part of this duty, certainly, will be to abandon ways of speaking which on the one hand obscure the true nature of our fictions--by confusing them with myths, by rendering spatial what is essentially temporal--and on the other obscure our sense of reality by suggesting that fictions represent some kind of surrender or false consolation. The critical issue, given the perpetual assumption of crisis, is no less than the justification of ideas of order. They have to be justified in terms of what survives, and also in terms of what we can accept as valid in a world different from that out of which they come, resembling the earlier world only in that there is biological and cultural continuity of some kind. Our order, our form, is necessary; our skepticism as to fictions requires that it shall not be spurious. It is an issue central to the understanding of modern literary fiction, and I hope in my next talk to approach it more directly.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A
”
”
Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
“
Hamilton provided the blueprint for US economic policy until the end of the Second World War. His infant industry programme created the condition for a rapid industrial development. He also set up the government bond market and promoted the development of the banking system (once again, against opposition from Thomas Jefferson and his followers.) It is no hyperbole for the New-York Historical Society to have called him 'The Man Who Made Modern America' in a recent exhibition. Had the US rejected Hamilton's vision and accepted that of his archrival, Thomas Jefferson, for whom the ideal society was an agrarian economy made up of self-governing yeoman farmers (although this slave-owner had to sweep the slaves who supported this lifestyle under the carpet), it would never have been able to propel itself from being a minor agrarian power rebelling against its powerful colonial master to the world's greatest super power.
”
”
Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism)
“
So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are
both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had
essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists
think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the
pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a
language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro
says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only
once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the
information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into
hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,
but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the
newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and
that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself
accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent
part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it."
"Yes. This was his interpretation."
"Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers,
what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language
and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing
the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?"
"Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language
and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave
him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the
functioning of the brain and of the body."
"Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs
in English?"
"Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are
better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine
had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of
the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may
have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and
transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an
extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand
years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language
called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to
understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the
language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word.
In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote
Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like
a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a
light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second
Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom
Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and
all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine
Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem,
meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
It is very impressive, to notice that whatsoever you make a person believe about you, that person will rush to represent within his role, as if he or she was mentally programmed to play the drama being offered. People are so trapped within their mind, that they end up always acting inside a theatre, in which their part has been foreseen long before they entered the roles they represent. Likewise, they become easily predictable, programmable, influenceable, manipulated, played like a string puppet. And these puppets become funnier, when mentioning mental programming, fearing mental programing and attacking mental programming, while not realizing that they are doing it, using the words, and gestures, and even phrases, that they were programmed to do, by those who program them. The one with a poor conscience is always a poor actor within his own life. He perfectly represents it, without any awareness. If he had any, he would probably not do it. But what else could he do? As prisoners in a cell with an open door, they ask when presented with freedom: “What shall I do if all I know is this?” And so, they remain inside of it, waiting for someone to tell them an answer they cannot ever understand before they see it for themselves.
”
”
Robin Sacredfire
“
Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies. The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators would stop copying themselves, and start making material useful to the ASI that controlled them—programmable matter. The waste heat produced by the process would burn up the biosphere, so those of us some 6.9 billion humans who were not killed outright by the nano assemblers would burn to death or asphyxiate. Every other living thing on earth would share our fate. Through it all, the ASI would bear no ill will toward humans nor love. It wouldn’t feel nostalgia as our molecules were painfully repurposed. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Or would the roar of millions and millions of nano factories running at full bore drown out our voices?
”
”
James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
“
The development of the economic programme which consists in the destruction of these monopolies and the substitution for them of the freest competition led its authors to a perception of the fact that all their thought rested upon a very fundamental principle, the freedom of the individual, his right of sovereignty over himself, his products, and his affairs, and of rebellion against the dictation of external authority. Just as the idea of taking capital away from individuals and giving it to the government started Marx in a path which ends in making the government everything and the individual nothing, so the idea of taking capital away from government-protected monopolies and putting it within easy reach of all individuals started Warren and Proudhon in a path which ends in making the individual everything and the government nothing. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State. This was the logical conclusion to which Warren and Proudhon were forced, and it became the fundamental article of their political philosophy. It is the doctrine which Proudhon named An-archism, a word derived from the Greek, and meaning, not necessarily absence of order, as is generally supposed, but absence of rule. The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that "the best government is that which governs least," and that that which governs least is no government at all.
”
”
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: (plus selected letters))
“
For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter. Sartre denies this for the world, and specifically denies, in the passage just referred to, that without potentiality there is no change. He reverts to the Megaric view of the matter, which Aristotle took such trouble to correct. But this is not our affair. The fact is that even if you believe in a Megaric world there is no such thing as a Megaric novel; not even Paterson. Change without potentiality in a novel is impossible, quite simply; though it is the hopeless aim of the cut-out writers, and the card-shuffle writers. A novel which really implemented this policy would properly be a chaos. No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls 'a completed action.' This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause.
Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the world has not. In the same way it can be said that whereas there may be, in the world, no such thing as character, since a man is what he does and chooses freely what he does--and in so far as he claims that his acts are determined by psychological or other predisposition he is a fraud, lâche, or salaud--in the novel there can be no just representation of this, for if the man were entirely free he might simply walk out of the story, and if he had no character we should not recognize him. This is true in spite of the claims of the doctrinaire nouveau roman school to have abolished character. And Sartre himself has a powerful commitment to it, though he could not accept the Aristotelian position that it is through character that plot is actualized. In short, novels have characters, even if the world has not.
What about time? It is, effectively, a human creation, according to Sartre, and he likes novels because they concern themselves only with human time, a faring forward irreversibly into a virgin future from ecstasy to ecstasy, in his word, from kairos to kairos in mine. The future is a fluid medium in which I try to actualize my potency, though the end is unattainable; the present is simply the pour-soi., 'human consciousness in its flight out of the past into the future.' The past is bundled into the en-soi, and has no relevance. 'What I was is not the foundation of what I am, any more than what I am is the foundation of what I shall be.' Now this is not novel-time. The faring forward is all right, and fits the old desire to know what happens next; but the denial of all causal relation between disparate kairoi, which is after all basic to Sartre's treatment of time, makes form impossible, and it would never occur to us that a book written to such a recipe, a set of discontinuous epiphanies, should be called a novel. Perhaps we could not even read it thus: the making of a novel is partly the achievement of readers as well as writers, and readers would constantly attempt to supply the very connections that the writer's programme suppresses. In all these ways, then, the novel falsifies the philosophy.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.
”
”
Anonymous
“
I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.
”
”
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
“
Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants)
“
Govt to help dropouts study further’ 98 words Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani Saturday said the government will roll out a programme by this year-end wherein school dropouts, who were forced to take up a job or those who opt to exit education due to financial worries, will be facilitated back into studies up to PhD level. “When it comes to specialisation (in education), women, tribal children, children from Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Castes are not economically empowered to possibly study further and many of them drop out because they need to go and get themselves a job...I left education because I didn’t have money,” Irani said.
”
”
Anonymous
“
I am habituated of ending a sentence with a semi colon or rather I would say I am fascinated by it.
”
”
Kokila Ishwar
“
The Federal Reserve indicated that it was heading towards ending its bond-buying programme with a final $15 billion purchase in October. But it remained vague about the precise timing of an interest-rate increase, saying it would retain the near-zero rate for a “considerable time”, a phrase that markets expect to be excluded from the Fed’s statement when it decides to move firmly towards a rise.
”
”
Anonymous
“
There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this, of course. When the writer and media critic Philip Sandifer writes that "David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who's development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show," he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. Or as Sandifer so clearly puts it, "I don't actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. Except maybe David Whitaker." From Drummond and Cauty's perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who-knows-what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore's model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. For Moore, and other artists such as David Lynch who use similar models, the role of the artist is like that of a fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present their catch to an audience. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen - anything really, such is the path of chaos. "It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn't fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it," Cauty has said. "It was like an out of control lorry, you know, you're just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching." This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. One of the most important aspects of magical practice is the will. Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in the world brought about by the exercise of the will, hence his maxim 'Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law.' The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who-knows-whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace. For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was “totally mad." All this only applies if you're prepared to accept the notion of magic, of course.
”
”
J.M.R. Higgs (KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money)
“
Pericles’ speech is not only a programme. It is also a defence, and perhaps even an attack. It reads, as I have already hinted, like a direct attack on Plato. I do not doubt that it was directed, not only against the arrested tribalism of Sparta, but also against the totalitarian ring or ‘link’ at home; against the movement for the paternal state, the Athenian ‘Society of the Friends of Laconia’ (as Th. Gomperz called them in 190232). The speech is the earliest33 and at the same time perhaps the strongest statement ever made in opposition to this kind of movement. Its importance was felt by Plato, who caricatured Pericles’ oration half a century later in the passages of the Republic34 in which he attacks democracy, as well as in that undisguised parody, the dialogue called Menexenus or the Funeral Oration35. But the Friends of Laconia whom Pericles attacked retaliated long before Plato. Only five or six years after Pericles’ oration, a pamphlet on the Constitution of Athens36 was published by an unknown author (possibly Critias), now usually called the ‘Old Oligarch’. This ingenious pamphlet, the oldest extant treatise on political theory, is, at the same time, perhaps the oldest monument of the desertion of mankind by its intellectual leaders. It is a ruthless attack upon Athens, written no doubt by one of her best brains. Its central idea, an idea which became an article of faith with Thucydides and Plato, is the close connection between naval imperialism and democracy. And it tries to show that there can be no compromise in a conflict between two worlds37, the worlds of democracy and of oligarchy; that only the use of ruthless violence, of total measures, including the intervention of allies from outside (the Spartans), can put an end to the unholy rule of freedom. This remarkable pamphlet was to become the first of a practically infinite sequence of works on political philosophy which were to repeat more or less, openly or covertly, the same theme down to our own day. Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom. It became the more necessary for them to assert their superiority by fighting against equality as they were (using Socratic language) misanthropists and misologists—incapable of that simple and ordinary generosity which inspires faith in men, and faith in human reason and freedom. Harsh as this judgement may sound, it is just, I fear, if it is applied to those intellectual leaders of the revolt against freedom who came after the Great Generation, and especially after Socrates. We can now try to see them against the background of our historical interpretation.
”
”
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
“
Faced with the primary instinct that a genetic programme pushes to reproductive need, humans have managed to divert from that to make themselves beings of pleasure. In the end, there lies the difference. Man is the only mammal that has sex for pleasure.
”
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Emmanuel Bodin (Under the summer sun)
“
The aim of the next nine sections will be to present careful arguments to show that none of the loopholes (a), (b), and (c) can provide a plausible way to evade the contradiction of the robot. Accordingly, it, and we also, are driven to the unpalatable (d), if we are still insistent that mathematical understanding can be reduced to computation. I am sure that those concerned with artificial intelligence would find (d) to be as unpalatable as I find it to be. It provides perhaps a conceivable standpoint-essentially the A/D suggestion, referred to at the end of 1.3, whereby divine intervention is required for the implanting of an unknowable algorithm into each of our computer brains (by 'the best programmer in the business'). In any case, the conclusion 'unknowable'-for the very mechanisms that are ultimately responsible for our intelligence-would not be a very happy conclusion for those hoping actually to construct a genuinely artificially intelligent robot! It would not be a particularly happy conclusion, either, for those of us who hope to understand, in principle and in a scientific way, how human intelligence has actually arisen, in accordance with comprehensible scientific laws, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and natural selection-irrespective of any desire to reproduce such intelligence in a robot device. In my own opinion, such a pessimistic conclusion is not warranted, for the very reason that 'scientific comprehensibility' is a very different thing from 'computability'. The conclusion should be not that the underlying laws are incomprehensible, but that they are non-computable.
”
”
Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
“
User-friendly back-end UI, flexible architecture, and simplified checkout process are some of the outstanding features of this new edition of Magento, Magento 2.x, which are grabbing the attention of store owners.
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”
Ranosys
“
For example, one programmer argued vociferously for the inclusion of a question to female users: "How expensive is your perfume?" The answer would factor into the algorithm by increasing a female user's "femininity" variable if she purchased expensive perfume. Generally speaking, the higher the "femininity" variable, the better the male dates the woman would end up with. DateEx users quickly realized that fact, and the word spread through online forums: start buying more expensive perfume (or lying about it, which would still create the expectation among the general population that perfume was important). The programmer who came up with that question now works for L'Oreal. But,
”
”
Michael DiBaggio (Imagining Liberty: Volume 1)
“
The greatest signifying quality of the network is its lack of single, solid intent. Nobody set out to create the network, or its greatest built exemplar, the internet. Over time, system upon system, culture upon culture, were linked together, through public programmes and private investments; through personal relationships and technological protocols; in steel, glass and electrons; through physical space; and in the space of the mind.
”
”
James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)
“
Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them.
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Nicholas Carr (Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations)
“
The basic point of all the scientific ideas we threw at you is that there is a lot of disagreement about how the flow of time works and how or whether one thing causes another. If you take home one idea out of all of these, make it that the everyday feeling that the future has no effect on the present is not necessarily true. As a result of the current uncertainty about time and causality in philosophical and scientific circles, it is not at all unreasonable to talk in a serious way about the possibility of genuine precognition. We also hope that our brief mention of spirituality has opened your mind to the idea that there may be a spiritual perspective as well. Both Theresa and Julia treasure the spiritual aspects of precognition, because premonitions can act as reminders that there may be an eternal part of us that exists outside of time and space. There may well be a scientific explanation for this eternal part, and if one is found, science and spirituality will become happy partners. Much of Part 2 will be devoted to the spiritual and wellbeing components of becoming a Positive Precog, and we will continue to marry those elements with scientific research as we go. 1 Here, physics buffs might chime in with some concerns about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Okay, physics rock stars! As you know, the Second Law states that in a closed system, disorder is very unlikely to decrease – and as such, you may believe this means that there is an “arrow of time” that is set by the Second Law, and this arrow goes in only the forward direction. As a result, you might also think that any talk of a future event influencing the past is bogus. We would ask you to consider four ideas. 2 Here we are not specifically talking about closed timelike curves, but causal loops in general. 3 For those concerned that the idea of messages from the future suggests such a message would be travelling faster than the speed of light, a few thoughts: 1) “message” here is used colloquially to mean “information” – essentially a correlation between present and future events that can’t be explained by deduction or induction but is not necessarily a signal; 2) recently it has been suggested that superluminal signalling is not actually prohibited by special relativity (Weinstein, S, “Superluminal signaling and relativity”, Synthese, 148(2), 2006: 381–99); and 3) the no-signalling theorem(s) may actually be logically circular (Kennedy, J B, “On the empirical foundations of the quantum no-signalling proofs”, Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 1995: 543–60.) 4 Note that in the movie Minority Report, the future was considered set in stone, which was part of the problem of the Pre-Crime Programme. However, at the end of the movie it becomes clear that the future envisioned did not occur, suggesting the idea that futures unfold probabilistically rather than definitely.
”
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Theresa Cheung (The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life)
“
August 1, 1838, the British Parliament ended the apprenticeship programme, which had become an enormous administrative burden, and granted full emancipation to more than 300,000 slaves in Jamaica.
”
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Olive Collins (The Tide Between Us: An Irish-Caribbean Story of Slavery & Emancipation (The O'Neill Trilogy Book 1))
“
Mais il faut le voir à table comme il la regarde quand elle brille, ses yeux d'animal subjugué. D'où vient-elle donc cette créature ?
Pr les mots dans sa bouche, ces idées qui lui passent par la cervelle, son insatisfaction tout le temps, son intraitable enthousiasme, ce désir d'aller voir ailleurs, de marquer les distances, cet élan qui frise l'injure parfois? Ou va-t-elle chercher tout ça ?
Alors, quand leur fille a besoin de sous pour un voyage de classe ou acheter des livres, Mireille et Jean ne rechignent pas. Ils raquent. Ils font ce qu'il faut. C'est leur terrible métier de parents, donner à cette gamine les moyens de son évasion.
On a si peu de raison de se réjouir dans ces endroits qui n’ont ni la mère ni la Tour Eiffel, ou dieu est mort comme partout où la soirée s’achèvent à 20 heures en semaine et dans les talus le week-end
Car elle et Jeannot savent qu'ils ne peuvent plus grand-chose pour elle. Ils font comme si, mais ils ne sont plus en mesure de faire des choix à sa place. Ils en sont réduits ça, faire confiance, croiser les doigts, espérer quils l'ont élevée comme il faut et que ça suffira.
L'adolescence est un assassinat prémédité de longue date et le cadavre de leur famille telle qu'elle fut git déjà sur le bord du chemin. Il faut désormais réinventer des rôles, admettre des distances nouvelles, composer avec les monstruosités et les ruades. Le corps est encore chaud. Il tressaille. Mais ce qui existait, l'enfance et ses tendresses évidentes, le règne indiscuté des adultes et la gamine pile au centre, le cocon et la ouate, les vacances à La Grande-Motte et les dimanches entre soi, tout cela vient de crever. On n'y reviendra plus.
Et puis il aimait bien aller à l'hôtel, dont elle réglait toujours la note. Il appréciait la simplicité des surfaces, le souci ergonome partout, la distance minime entre le lit et la douche, l'extrême propreté des serviettes de bain, le sol neutre et le téléviseur suspendu, les gobelets sous plastique, le cliquetis précis de l'huisserie quand la porte se refermait lourdement sur eux, le code wifi précisé sur un petit carton à côté de la bouilloire, tout ce confort limité mais invariable. À ses yeux, ces chambres interchangeables n'avaient rien d'anonyme. Il y retrouvait au contraire un territoire ami,
elle se disait ouais, les mecs de son espèce n'ont pas de répit, soumis au travail, paumés dans leurs familles recomposées, sans même assez de thune pour se faire plaisir, devenus les cons du monde entier, avec leur goût du foot, des grosses bagnoles et des gros culs. Après des siècles de règne relatif, ces pauvres types semblaient bien gênés aux entournures tout à coup dans ce monde qu'ils avaient jadis cru taillé à leur mesure.
Leur nombre ne faisait rien à l'affaire. Ils se sentaient acculés, passés de mode, foncièrement inadéquats, insultés par l'époque. Des hommes élevés comme des hommes, basiques et fêlés, une survivance au fond.
Toute la journée il dirigeait 20 personnes, gérait des centaines de milliers d'euros, alors quand il fallait rentrer à la maison et demander cent fois à Mouche de ranger ses chaussettes, il se sentait un peu sous employé. Effectivement.
Ils burent un pinot noir d'Alsace qui les dérida et, dans la chaleur temporaire d'une veille d'enterrement, se retrouvèrent.
- T'aurais pu venir plus tôt, dit Gérard, après avoir mis les assiettes dans le lave-vaisselle.
Julien, qui avait un peu trop bu, se contenta d'un mouvement vague, sa tête dodelinant d'une épaule à l'autre.
C'était une concession bien suffisante et le père ne poussa pas plus loin son avantage.
Pour motiver son petit frère, Julien a l'idée d'un entraînement spécial, qui débute par un lavage de cerveau en règle. Au programme, Rocky, Les Chariots de feu, Karaté Kid, et La Castagne, tout y passe. À chaque fois, c'est plus ou moins la même chose : des acteurs torse nu et des séquences d'entraînement qui transforment de parfaits losers en machines à gagner.
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Nicolas Mathieu (Connemara)
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Welfare programmes as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anaesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems. They splinter the oppressed into groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves.
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Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
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Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.
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Richard Overy (Why The Allies Won)
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What kinds of Work will You do in Freelancing?
What kind of work will you do in Freelancing? And to understand the type of work in freelancing, You need to have a clear idea of what freelancing is. There is no specific type of freelancing, it can be of many types, such as -
Freelance Photography, Freelance Journalism, Freelance Writer, Freelance Data Entry, Freelance Logo Designer, Freelance Graphics Designer etc. There's no end to the amount of work you can do with freelancing.
The most interesting thing is that you are everything in this process. There is no one to twirl over your head, you are the boss here. Even here there is no obligation to work from 9-5.
Today I discuss some freelancing tasks that are popular in the freelancing sector or are done by many freelancers. For example:
Data Entry: It wouldn't be too much of a mistake to say that data entry is the easiest job. Rather, it can be said without a doubt that data entry is more difficult than any other job. Data entry work basically means typing. This work is usually provided as a PDF file and is described as a 'Word type work'.
Any employee can take a data entry job as a part-time job for extra income at the end of his work.
Graphics Design: One of the most popular jobs in the freelancing world is graphic design. The main reasons for the popularity of this work are its attractiveness and simplicity. Everything we see online is contributed by graphics.
For example, Cover pages, Newspaper, Book cover pages, advertisements and Photographs, Editing or changing the background of a picture or photo, Creating banners for advertising, Creating visiting cards, Business cards or leaflets, Designed for webpages known as (PhD), T-shirt designing, Logo designing, Making cartoons and many more.
Web Design and Development: 'Web design' or 'Site design' are used interchangeably. The most important job of freelancing is web design. From the simplest to the most difficult aspects of this work, almost all types of work are done by freelancers.
There are many other themes like WordPress, Elementor, Joomla, and DV that can be used to create entire sites. Sometimes coding is required to create some sites. If the web designer has coding experience or skills then there is no problem, and if not then the site creation should be done by programmers.
Programming: Programming means writing some signals, codes, or symbols into a specific system. And its job is to give different types of commands or orders to the computer.
If you give some command to the computer in Bengali or English, the computer will not understand it. For that want binary code or number. Just as any book is written in English, Hindi, Japanese Bengali, etc. every program is written in some particular programming language like C++, Java, etc.
The written form of the program is called source code. A person who writes source code is called a programmer, coder, or developer. While writing the program, the programmer has to follow the syntax or grammar of that particular programming language.
Other work: Apart from the above jobs, there are various other types of jobs that are in high demand in the freelancing sector or market. The tasks are:
Writing,
Article or blog post writing
SEO Marketing,
Digital marketing,
Photo, Audio, Video Editing,
Admin jobs,
Software development,
Translation,
Affiliate marketing,
IT and Networking etc.
Please Visit Our Blogging Website to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.
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Bhairab IT Zone
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To get to the top of motor racing, to drive a Formula 1 car in one of the leading teams, you have to have certain qualities in the right proportion. One of them has always been much admired, and is now more important than ever: consistency. What matters is not a single outstanding move but your performance across the full duration of a race, a racing season, and indeed your career...Clearly consistency is not simply a natural talent within a driver, but the outcome of a long and tough physical programme which will allow us to give our best at all times and reach the end of a race - even the toughest - as fresh as we were to start.
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Ayrton Senna (Ayrton Senna's Principles of Race Driving)
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One can escape a rational requirement if one fails to meet its conditions in some way. One is then allowed to beg off, and the permissible grounds depend on the general principle from which the particular application of the requirement follows. That principle may in turn apply in virtue of a still more general principle plus further conditions, and if those conditions are not met, escape is again possible. But at some point the retreat must come to an end: one must reach a requirement (it need not be conditional, for it may have been the original one) from which it is not possible to escape by begging off. It is natural to suppose that principles of this sort must underlie ethics, if it exists. It is also natural to assume that the enterprise of justification should focus on these basic requirments, thus yielding an ethical system with cast iron motivational backing. But such a programme appears doomed from the start. For if we justify a requirement, it is in terms of a principle from which that requirement follows, perhaps with the aid of further conditions. But that principle must itself represent a requirement, or else what it is adduced to justify will not be one. Therefore any requirement which we set out to justify will not be ultimate. Something beyond justification is required. 3. I assume that a normative requirement on action must have correspondingly strict motivational backing. If ethics is to contain
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Thomas Nagel (The Possibility of Altruism)
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Professional programming is usually not like running hard for a few kilometers, where the goal can be seen at the end of a paved road. Most software projects are more like a long orienteering marathon. In the dark. With only a sketchy map as guidance. If you just set off in one direction, running as fast as you can, you might impress some, but you are not likely to succeed. You need to keep a sustainable pace and you need to adjust the course when you learn more about where you are and where you are heading.
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Kevlin Henney (97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts)
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the EZ crisis should not be thought of as a sovereign debt crisis. The nations that ended up with bailouts were not those with the highest debt-to-GDP ratios. Belgium and Italy sailed into the crisis with public debts of about 100% of GDP and yet did not end up with IMF programmes, while Ireland and Spain, with ratios of just 40%, (admittedly kept artificially low by large tax revenues associated with the real estate bubble) needed bailouts. The key was foreign borrowing. Many of the nations that ran current account deficits – and thus were relying of foreign lending – suffered; none of those running current account surpluses were hit.
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Richard Baldwin (The Eurozone Crisis: A Consensus View of the Causes and a Few Possible Solutions)
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I do not blame programmers for hard-to-use software, and I'm very sorry to have given any programmer a contrary impression. With few exceptions, the programmers I know are diligent and conscientious in their desire to please end users and are unceasing in their efforts to improve their programs' quality. Just like users, programmers are simply another victim of a flawed process that leaves them too little time, too many conflicting orders, and utterly insufficient guidance.
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Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity)
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Establishment of development programme:- after doing the above steps it is the duty of human resource department to provide the development opportunities in the organization by establishing different development programmes. 5) Planning development programmes for individuals: - based on the information available the development programmes are planned. 6) Evaluation of executive development:- it is necessary to have a systematic evaluation of executive development to check the changes that are required to be make the development programme more successful. Concept of career development and stages of career development A career is a sequence of positions held by a person during the course of his working life. It is the different jobs a person holds during his life time. Career planning is not an event or not an end itself it is the process of development of human resources. Stages of career development Development of career of an individual undergoes through a number of stages these stages are; 1) Exploration:- it is the pre employment stage. It ends for most of individuals in their mid twenties when they make transition from college to work. It is the period when a number of expectations are made about one’s career. 2) Establishment:- this stage takes 10 years
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Shruti. (Human Resource Management)
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if you're using an exponential algorithm O(2n), you might want to make a cup of coffee—your routine should finish in about 10263 years. Let us know how the universe ends.
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Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
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learners receiving intensive ESL instruction for five hours every day for five months of one school year (in Grade 5 or 6) were compared to learners at the end of secondary school who had received the same total amount of instruction spread over 7–8 years of schooling. On a number of measures, the students who received the intensive instruction performed as well as or better than those whose instruction was delivered in what has been called a ‘drip feed’ approach (Lightbown and Spada 1994). In subsequent research, comparisons were made between groups of Grade 5 and 6 students who participated in intensive English language instruction during a single school year, but with the time distributed differently: some students received five hours of English a day for five months; others received the same total number of hours, doing two and a half hours of English each day for 10 months. The researchers found that both groups benefited from the overall increase in hours of instruction with some additional advantages for learners receiving the more intensive instruction (Collins et al. 1999; Collins and White 2011). The advantages were evident not only in superior language abilities but also in attitudes toward the language and satisfaction with language learning experiences. Similar findings have been reported for different models of intensive and core French programmes (Netten and Germain 2004; Lapkin, Hart, and Harley 1998).
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Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
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Sitting apart. Sitting apart is a very effective consequence for impulsive misbehaviour that still remains even after you have been doing lots of Descriptive Praise, think-throughs, rewards for being sensible and action replays. Sitting apart is similar in some ways to a time-out, but instead of banishing your son to another room, which children often find very upsetting, it takes place in the room where you are. Your son needs to sit exactly where and how you tell him to, with no misbehaving and no crying or even talking, for the number of minutes of his age. If he gets up, put him back and step away so that he sees that it is his job to stay in the sitting apart place, not your job to hold him there. Then start the timer from zero again. A sitting apart is a learning experience because you are on hand to Descriptively Praise and Reflectively Listen. Other than that, don’t talk to him. His natural desire to interact with you will help him to control himself to get to the end of the sitting apart.
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Noel Janis-Norton (Calmer, Easier, Happier Boys: The revolutionary programme that transforms family life)
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I’m not a heroic hacker with magic code. I was a brain in a box. But I am a programmer. Or was. And I knew the system. I knew the software. And I had a plan. And a little bit of time before anyone was going to bother me again. So I got to work.
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John Scalzi (The End of All Things (Old Man's War, #6))
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vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.
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Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
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Well, software doesn't quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.
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Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
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The true turning point came when I was about fourteen years old. I bought a copy of PC Plus magazine which included a cover CD featuring a full version of Borland C++ Builder. I installed it and carefully followed the "hello world" tutorial which was helpfully included in the magazine. This was it. A new world opened up before me. The restrictions imposed upon my imagination by the material world were gone. My creativity unshackled, the cathedrals in my mind would be made manifest! To what lofty end should I put this new-found tool? It was obvious. The Fuck Generator. As simple as it was elegant, the Fuck Generator (fgen.exe) was a command-line program, and my first advance beyond "hello world." Upon starting, it would prompt the user for a number. With this number n, it would then print out the string "fuck," n times. Finally the user was given the option to repeat the exercise, or quit. Perhaps a little limited in use, I nevertheless was hooked on the power that I had tasted. It is a particular joy that any programmer will know well, to see the machine do your bidding, no matter how simple a task that may be. It works, and it works because you understand how to make it work.
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Anonymous
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Reducing whingeing, complaining, pestering and arguing First, let’s remember that it rarely helps to reason with an immature child. Often he does not quite understand our adult reasons, or possibly he does understand but does not really care. So don’t bother trying to reason with your son when he is being unreasonable. A much more useful strategy is to look at him as he is whingeing or arguing, but bite your tongue and say nothing. This takes self-control! Wait a few seconds for a pause in the whingeing or arguing. Then you can say, ‘You’re not whingeing now,’ or ‘You stopped saying you want another ice cream.’ He might start whingeing or complaining or pestering again straightaway because he knows that usually gets a rise out of you, and he’s thinking there’s a chance you might give in. These annoying habits have been his way of getting your attention and, up until now, it has been pretty foolproof. So it is understandable that he may test you for a while before he realises that the old way of getting your attention is no longer working. If you have accepted my challenge and are making a point of Descriptively Praising your son ten or more times a day, he will soon see, probably within the first week, that now he is getting attention for the sensible behaviour. Here are some examples of Descriptive Praises for little bits of self-control: You were so brave at the doctor’s. You didn’t make a fuss. You just sat there quietly while she gave you the injection. I can see you’re upset, but you’re remembering not to shout. You’re waiting patiently. (Say this after one or two minutes of waiting patiently. If you delay this praise, he will probably reach the end of his tether and start misbehaving; then you won’t be able to praise him for being patient.) The Descriptive Praises will sink in and start to change how your son views himself. So whenever your son is doing something annoying, think ‘I’ll wait for a pause and then Descriptively Praise the absence of the negative.’ Parents report that at first they focused their Descriptive Praises on their son’s three or four most annoying habits. Within a few weeks or months, those habits had improved so much that they hardly happened any more.
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Noel Janis-Norton (Calmer, Easier, Happier Boys: The revolutionary programme that transforms family life)
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Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty
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Anonymous
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The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
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Eric S. Raymond (The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary)
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The programmer at wit's end for lack of space can often do best by disentangling himself from his code, rearing back, and contemplating his data. Representation is the essence of programming.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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Making use of AJAX in your application design removes this potential logjam and can lead to a great end-user experience.
The crux of the problem is that automated test tools are by default designed to work in
synchronous fashion.
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Ian Molyneaux (The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance)
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Moreover, the spread of cable and satellite television, beaming programmes like Baywatch and The Bold and the Beautiful in to millions of ordinary mofussil towns and villages, has made vast numbers of Indians aware for the first time of how the other half lives, inevitably generating resentment that others are enjoying a lifestyle that to them is totally inaccessible. An Inspector General of Police told me that towards the end of the 1980s, as satellite dishes and cable began to reach the remoter parts of his state, the crime in his area rose exponentially. The poor had become aware for the first time of what they were missing.
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William Dalrymple (The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters)
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Is it not fair to say, “The program learned from experience”? Your immediate objection is that there was a program telling the machine how to learn. But when you take a course in Euclidean geometry, is not the teacher putting a similar learning program into you? Poorly, to be sure, but is that not, in a real sense, what a course in geometry is all about? You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. Think it over carefully. If you deny the machine learns from experience because you claim the program was told (by the human programmer) how to improve its performance, then is not the situation much the same with you, except you are born with a somewhat larger initial program compared to the machine when it leaves the manufacturer’s hands? Are you sure you are not merely “programmed” in life by what chance events happen to you?
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Richard Hamming (The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn)
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generally having an address on the Labour Block. There are things out in the wilds that will kill you so they can experiment with just how indigestible Earth biomass is, but honestly that’s a marginal cause of death. On that first day virtually nothing tried to eat me at all. I felt almost rejected. But on Kiln you need to sweat the little things, the microscopic elements. Once Kiln gets into you… well, we’ve all seen the example tank. I’d noted to Primatt, before, that you weren’t keeping the camp clean if you didn’t scrub Excursions down every time. And then, not being on Excursions right then, promptly forgot all about it. And now I’m the newest Excursionista and about to get the final object lesson in my current crash course in the Use of Carrots and Sticks in the Extrasolar Carceral Programme. On returning, I expect us to be stopped at the gate but they just let us in. There’s no airlock, no gas chamber, as the Excursionistas refer to decontamination. We just… walk straight in. I actually then expect a firing squad because this seems the only plausible alternative, and even that’s unhygienic. Gas us, then shoot us, surely. Except we go into the Labour Block and get right on with dismantling the tables and turning them into our bunks. Our bunks which are now all down one end of the Block, with everyone else keeping their distance. I discover that I, subcommittee man as I am, have missed a whole underground conspiracy that’s been going on behind my back. Sure, I’d noted before that Keev and the Excursions crew all bunked together. But then they all worked together. I’d guessed it was by choice. And sure, I’d been given a quick spritz with the decontaminator every week or so, even though I’d never been near a piece of Kiln biology that hadn’t been thoroughly prepared for the scalpel rig, but that seemed just good practice on a world like Kiln. It was good practice. But here we were in Excursions, having come back from a day out in the woods wearing paper suits, and nobody has sprayed us down. I timorously raise this with Keev and he looks like he wants to thump me. “You get decontaminated after the third day,” he tells me. “Full heavy gassing. You’ll love it. Not the light mist of piss everyone else gets.” “That’s mad,” I protest. “Costs saving, they say,” Keev explains. I pick up on his tone and expression, the whole thousand-yard stare of him. He is, after all, a man who has been on Excursions for years, measured out in those three-
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Adrian Tchaikovsky (Alien Clay)
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Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore’s PET. These would become our direct competitors. But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one. I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high-resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was—and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer. At first that mode didn’t mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic. The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.
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Steve Wozniak (iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon)
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We can’t control our environment everywhere we go, of course, but we have more control than we usually choose to exercise. Distractions literally make you stupid. Students whose classroom was situated near a noisy railroad line ended up academically a full year behind students with a quiet classroom. When the noise was dampened, the performance difference vanished. Offices aren’t much different. Research shows that the most productive computer programmers have one thing in common. It’s not experience, salary, or hours spent on a project. They had employers who gave them an environment free from distraction.
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Eric Barker (Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
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I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.
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Ellen Ullman (Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology)
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Während der Vorbereitung auf den Start in New Jersey hat bet365 im vergangenen April eine Partnerschaft mit dem australischen Prepaid Payments Provider 우리카지노 EML Payments Limited angekündigt. Nach dem mehrjährigen Abkommen zwischen dem Betreiber und dem Anbieter würde die US-Tochterin EML in New Jersey ein bet365-Marke-Reladable Card Programm anbieten. Der Vertrag könnte sich auf andere Staaten ausweiten.
New York könnte die nächste US-Stop von bet365 sein. Der Betreiber gebildet Ende letzten Jahres "eine strategische Allianz" mit Empire Resorts für die Entwicklung und den Betrieb eines 우리카지노 physischen und Online-Sportbuchs bei Resorts World Catskills in Nordstate New York.
website homepage : savewcal.net
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savewcal.net/
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In the end, the Gospel of Technology is the survival of the fittest. It has winners and losers, the users and the used, the adept and the naïve, the programmers and the programmed. And while equality may be an ideal, inequality is inevitable.
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Tony Reinke (God, Technology, and the Christian Life)
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Mess With A Scientist (The Sonnet)
Mess with a police officer,
You may end up in prison.
And you may end up dead,
If you mess with a politician.
Mess with a bureaucrat,
You may end up exploited.
Mess with a programmer,
You may end up humiliated.
If you offend a teacher,
Your children might suffer.
If you offend a preacher,
You'll be deemed a blasphemer.
But mess with a scientist, that’s your ticket to hell.
Neither dead nor alive, you'll dangle in the middle.
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Abhijit Naskar (Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers)
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It is a week since I arrived in Mecco, and for the first time I have leisure to write up my journal. The life of a Foreign Observer is very strenuous, for the Meccanian method of seeing everything according to programme and timetable is very fatiguing. Already I feel that a holiday will be welcome at the end of my tour. In the whole of this vast city of Mecco there is nothing casual, nothing incidental, nothing unprovided for. Although I am only a spectator, I feel like a little cog in the huge complicated machine. The machine seems to absorb everything; the individual counts for nothing. That is perhaps the reason why it seems impossible to get into contact with any human being other than the officials who instruct me and conduct me every moment of my time. I begin to wonder whether the individual Meccanian really exists, or whether his personality is merged in the official personality which is all that is visible to me.
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Owen Gregory (Meccania, the Super-State)
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What kinds of Work will You do in Freelancing?
What kind of work will you do in Freelancing? And to understand the type of work in freelancing, You need to have a clear idea of what freelancing is. There is no specific type of freelancing, it can be of many types, such as -
Freelance Photography, Freelance Journalism, Freelance Writer, Freelance Data Entry, Freelance Logo Designer, Freelance Graphics Designer etc. There's no end to the amount of work you can do with freelancing.
The most interesting thing is that you are everything in this process. There is no one to twirl over your head, you are the boss here. Even here there is no obligation to work from 9-5.
Today I discuss some freelancing tasks that are popular in the freelancing sector or are done by many freelancers. For example:
Data Entry: It wouldn't be too much of a mistake to say that data entry is the easiest job. Rather, it can be said without a doubt that data entry is more difficult than any other job. Data entry work basically means typing. This work is usually provided as a PDF file and is described as a 'Word type work'.
Any employee can take a data entry job as a part-time job for extra income at the end of his work.
Graphics Design: One of the most popular jobs in the freelancing world is graphic design. The main reasons for the popularity of this work are its attractiveness and simplicity. Everything we see online is contributed by graphics.
For example, Cover pages, Newspaper, Book cover pages, advertisements and Photographs, Editing or changing the background of a picture or photo, Creating banners for advertising, Creating visiting cards, Business cards or leaflets, Designed for webpages known as (PhD), T-shirt designing, Logo designing, Making cartoons and many more.
Web Design and Development: 'Web design' or 'Site design' are used interchangeably. The most important job of freelancing is web design. From the simplest to the most difficult aspects of this work, almost all types of work are done by freelancers.
There are many other themes like WordPress, Elementor, Joomla, and DV that can be used to create entire sites. Sometimes coding is required to create some sites. If the web designer has coding experience or skills then there is no problem, and if not then the site creation should be done by programmers.
Programming: Programming means writing some signals, codes, or symbols into a specific system. And its job is to give different types of commands or orders to the computer.
If you give some command to the computer in Bengali or English, the computer will not understand it. For that want binary code or number. Just as any book is written in English, Hindi, Japanese Bengali, etc. every program is written in some particular programming language like C++, Java, etc.
The written form of the program is called source code. A person who writes source code is called a programmer, coder, or developer. While writing the program, the programmer has to follow the syntax or grammar of that particular programming language.
Other work: Apart from the above jobs, there are various other types of jobs that are in high demand in the freelancing sector or market. The tasks are:
Writing,
Article or blog post writing
SEO Marketing,
Digital marketing,
Photo, Audio, Video Editing,
Admin jobs,
Software development,
Translation,
Affiliate marketing,
IT and Networking etc.
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Bhairab IT Zone
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I think that hackers—dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution . . . No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy . . . The quietest of all the ’60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful. —Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog
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Steven Levy (Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution)
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dating question
-What do you want from this world?
-To have a wardrobe.
In his first meeting with Katrina, she asked him a dating question, and his answer was unconventional, he wished he could buy a wardrobe, in which he put his belongings, a metaphor for the instability in his life, so how does he do this, while he is without a homeland, without a home, moving from place to another, carrying a bag containing a few of his personal belongings.
About to cheat on Khadija, the curiosity in the intelligence man’s mind overpowered him, the desire for knowledge, exploration, information, and a thirst for more details, the smallest details.
Plan the process with the mentality of a computer programmer, “I will leave them a loophole in the system, they will hack me through it, and to do this they have to open their doors to send their code, and at this very moment, I am sending my code in the opposite direction.
The most vulnerable account devices to hack are the hackers themselves. They enter the systems through special ports, which are opened to them by the so-called Trojan horse, a type of virus, with which they target the victim, open loopholes for them, infiltrate through them, and in both cases, they, in turn, have to open ports on their devices to complete the connection, from which they can be hacked backward.
Katrina is a Trojan horse, he will not close the ports in front of her, she must succeed in penetrating him, and she will be his bridge connecting them, he will sneak through her, to the most secret and terrifying place in the world, a journey that leads him to the island of Malta, to enter the inevitable den.
This is how the minds of investigators and intelligence men work, they must open the outlets of their minds to the fullest, to collect information, receive it, and deal with it, and that is why their minds are the most vulnerable to penetration, manipulation, and passing misleading information to them.
It is almost impossible to convince a simple man, that there is life outside the planet, the outlets of his mind are closed, he is not interested in knowledge, nor is he collecting information, and the task of entering him is difficult, they call him the mind of the crocodile, a mind that is solid, closed, does not affect anything and is not affected by anything, He has his own convictions, he never changes them.
While scientists, curious, intellectuals, investigators, and intelligence men, the ports of their minds are always open.
And just as hackers can penetrate websites by injecting their URL addresses with programming phrases, they can implant their code into the website’s database, and pull information from it. The minds of such people can also be injected, with special codes, some of them have their minds ready for injection, and one or two injections are sufficient to prepare for the next stage, and for some, dozens of injections are not enough, and some of them injected their minds themselves, by meditation, thinking, and focusing on details, as Ruslan did.
Khadija did not need more than three injections, but he trusted the love that brought them together, there is no need, she knew a lot about him in advance, and she will trust him and believe him. Her mind would not be able to get her away, or so he wished, the woman’s madness had not been given its due.
What he is about to do now, and the revenge videos that she is going to receive will remain in her head forever, and will be her brain’s weapon to escape, when he tries to get her out of the box.
From an early age, he did not enjoy safety and stability, he lived in the midst of hurricanes of chaos, and the heart of randomness. He became the son of shadows and their master.
He deserved the nickname he called himself “Son of Chaos.
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Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
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Unskilled programmers often ended up writing assembly-language programs that wandered aimlessly, like some hapless Arctic expedition in a blizzard.
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Katie Hafner (Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet)
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It is said that on that same day, primitive androids all around the globe shut down. They decided to end their existence because scientists and programmers made them act like human beings, which was the only thing they could not do.
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Chaque Batul
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time. Up in the air, above the situation, he asks if it is really the end of the world if he doesn’t get the job. The answer is ‘No, it isn’t’ and although it is very disappointing, he can deal with the disappointment and consequences because he is an adult Human and not a Chimp or child. He also knows logically that he may still be able to do something about the situation and must not allow the Chimp to think catastrophically. Step 5: He now goes into Human mode and asks himself, ‘What can I do about the situation?’ He answers: ‘I can choose the emotions I want and I can choose to act like an adult. Being emotional isn’t going to help anything, least of all me. I can’t think of anything practical to do at this point in time – this I must accept. I can choose to accept the situation rather than keep on saying “what if” or “this shouldn’t have happened” or even worse, “life should be fair”.’ Step 6: Eddie decides to put his Human in charge and decides to actively change his emotional approach to the situation. On a practical point he considers his options to either wait in the hope that another bus appears or to go home and phone the interview organiser. Step 7: Despite his disappointment he might manage a smile and be thankful that the sun will still rise tomorrow. He remains focused on the solution and not the problem. Of course, you may want to react differently or deal with the situation differently if you were in his position. It is just an example of how it might go. Clearly there are endless possibilities. The main point is that he has decided to act as a Human and not as a Chimp and to choose positive emotions despite the setback. Choice despite seriousness The scenario above was not so serious but what happens if a real crisis occurs? Imagine a young man who has had an accident on a motorbike and has been left paralysed from the waist down. Sadly this is not an uncommon event. How does he deal with this type of crisis? This time when he gets up into the helicopter and tries to gain perspective the answer is not so good. His whole life has just changed and not for the better. It would be totally unreasonable for anyone to say to him get a perspective and smile. He will need to go through a grieving process. All of us respond differently to the same situation, so there are no rights or wrongs when responding to a severe crisis. It is about understanding your response and making choices about how you want to manage it. The simple steps described are helpful for minor crises and immediate and transient stress but they need modifying
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Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness)
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The Ballad of John Axon was the first of a series created by MacColl, Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker that shone the microphone like a searchlight into obscure or overlooked sectors of British society: fishermen, teenagers, motorway builders, miners, polio sufferers, even the nomadic travelling community. Gathered on the spot, their oral histories were reworked as intelligent and dynamic folk anthropology, attuned to their era’s nuanced tug-of-war between conservatism and progress. The eight programmes, broadcast by the BBC between 1958–64, were experiments conducted on the wireless, splicing spoken word, field recordings, sound effects, traditional folk song and newly composed material into audio essays that verged on the hypnotic. They were given a name that elegantly fused tradition and modernity: radio ballads. Until the mid-1950s standard BBC practice in making radio documentaries involved researchers visiting members of the public – ‘actuality characters’ – and talking to them, perhaps even recording them, then returning to headquarters and working out a script based on their testimonies. The original subjects would then be revisited and presented with the scripted version of their own words. That’s the reason such programmes sound so stilted to modern ears: members of the public are almost always speaking a scriptwriter’s distillation of their spontaneous thoughts. When MacColl and Charles Parker drove up to Stockport in the autumn of 1957 with an EMI Midget tape recorder in their weekend bags, they planned to interview Axon’s widow and his colleagues for information, then turn their findings into a dramatic reconstruction featuring actors and musicians. In fact, they stayed in the area for around a fortnight and ended up with more than forty hours of voices and location recordings. The material, they agreed, was too good to tamper with.
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Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
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One of the arguments often made in response to weak public understanding of technology is a call to increase technological education - in its simplest formulation, to learn to code. Such a call is made frequently by politicians, technologists, pundits and business leaders, and it is often advanced in nakedly functional and pro-market terms: the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future. This is a good start, but learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, aging infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?
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James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)