Projection Mapping Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Projection Mapping. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
Adam Phillips (Going Sane: Maps of Happiness)
Hello, Olympus! Aeolus, master of the winds here, with weather every twelve! We‘ll have a low-pressure system moving over Florida today, so expect milder temperatures since Demeter wishes to spare the citrus farmers!‖ He gestured at the blue screen, but when Jason checked the monitors, he saw that a digital image was being projected behind Aeolus, so it looked like he was standing in front of a U.S. map with animated smiley suns and frowny storm clouds. ―Along the eastern seaboard—oh, hold on.‖ He tapped his earpiece. ―Sorry, folks! Poseidon is angry with Miami today, so it looks like that Florida freeze is back on! Sorry, Demeter. Over in the Midwest, I‘m not sure what St. Louis did to offend Zeus, but you can expect winter storms! Boreas himself is being called down to punish the area with ice. Bad news, Missouri! No, wait. Hephaestus feels sorry for central Missouri, so you all will have much more moderate temperatures and sunny skies.
Rick Riordan (The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1))
Many people in narcissistic relationships find that they start becoming more anxious and even less able to regulate their own moods, because they feel as though they are living in chaos—and there was nothing they could do about it, because they were unable to soothe, comfort, or cheer up their partner. Interestingly, because of the narcissist’s tendency to blame other people for their difficulties and engage in projection, they will often blame you for being unreliable and inconsistent, when it is in fact their moods that are all over the map.
Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
To see what Times Square looked like before a city was there, we turn to a remarkable project called Welikia, which grew out of a smaller project called Mannahatta. The Welikia project has produced a detailed ecological map of the landscape in New York City at the time of the arrival of Europeans. The interactive map, available online at welikia.org, is a fantastic snapshot of a different New York. In 1609, the island of Manhattan was part of a landscape of rolling hills, marshes, woodlands, lakes, and rivers.
Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
I even have a welcoming speech prepared for fear, which I deliver right before embarking upon any new project or big adventure. It goes something like this: “Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting—and, may I say, you are superb at your job. So by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must. But I will also be doing my job on this road trip, which is to work hard and stay focused. And Creativity will be doing its job, which is to remain stimulating and inspiring. There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still—your suggestions will never be followed. You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote. You’re not allowed to touch the road maps; you’re not allowed to suggest detours; you’re not allowed to fiddle with the temperature. Dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio. But above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Interesting that the ship didn’t automatically eject them as they became empty. I dismiss the window and return to the main ship map.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun's glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun, a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway, a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses)
For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped to develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on more huge projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
When we are working with intention, we toil away endlessly—often through the wee hours of the morning—on projects we care about deeply. Whether it’s building an intricate model of an ancient ship, writing a song, or mapping out an idea for your first business, you do it out of genuine interest and love.
Jocelyn K. Glei (Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2))
Sturtevant’s rudimentary genetic map would foreshadow the vast and elaborate efforts to map genes along the human genome in the 1990s. By using linkage to establish the relative positions of genes on chromosomes, Sturtevant would also lay the groundwork for the future cloning of genes tied to complex familial diseases, such as breast cancer, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In about twelve hours, in an undergraduate dorm room in New York, he had poured the foundation for the Human Genome Project.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create. Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world 'out there', which meanwhile itself becomes like an image - a context of scenes, of states of things. This reversal of the function of the image can be called 'idolatry'; we can observe the process at work in the present day: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our 'reality' and turning it into a 'global image scenario'. Essentially this is a question of 'amnesia'. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination.
Vilém Flusser (Towards a Philosophy of Photography)
It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn't have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real walking, with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me what I'd really known all along, that walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it. And in that respect--stay with me on this--it's not entirely unlike a martini. Sure you can add things to martinis, like chocolate or an olive stuffed with blue cheese or, God forbid, cotton candy, and similarly you can add things to your walks--constraints, shapes, notions of the mapping of utopian spaces--but you don't need to. And really, why would you? Why spoil a good drink? Why spoil a good walk?
Geoff Nicholson (The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism)
01. The Klamath River (see map 02.03). Beginning in 2020, the Klamath will see the dismantling of four dams in its upper basin, representing the largest salmonid habitat restoration project in American history.
Obi Kaufmann (The State of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource)
As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House... Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift." Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph. When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.
Francis S. Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)
Race is not, as I have often been reminded while working on this project, a system of classification: it is a system of oppression. There has never been, and I can't imagine how there could ever be, a way of classifying the peoples of the world that isn't also a way of controlling people.
Barbara Katz Rothman (Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are)
No matter what your reason for wanting to start your own business, developing the foundation is the same. Laying a solid foundation for you business will provide you with a road map to follow as you build your business. As you work through the Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook you will define the company’s mission, decide what business entity is right for your business, name your business, determine the pricing for your products or services, formulate your financial projections, define your competitors, survey consumers regarding your products or services, determine the marketing methods right for your business and more.
Jeanne A. Estes (Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook)
Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
In August 2018, Yamal LNG dispatched its first cargo to China, going east along the Arctic coast, through the ice of the Northern Sea Route. Yamal LNG had come in on time and on budget. The Financial Times observed another noteworthy aspect of the project. “No other business venture,” it said, “better illustrates Russia’s resilience in the face of international sanctions.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Since then, several other conjectures have been resolved with the aid of computers (notably, in 1988, the nonexistence of a projective plane of order 10). Meanwhile, mathematicians have tidied up the Haken-Appel argument so that the computer part is much shorter, and some still hope that a traditional, elegant, and illuminating proof of the four-color theorem will someday be found. It was the desire for illumination, after all, that motivated so many to work on the problem, even to devote their lives to it, during its long history. (One mathematician had his bride color maps on their honeymoon.) Even if the four-color theorem is itself mathematically otiose, a lot of useful mathematics got created in failed attempts to prove it, and it has certainly made grist for philosophers in the last few decades. As for its having wider repercussions, I’m not so sure. When I looked at the map of the United States in the back of a huge dictionary that I once won in a spelling bee for New York journalists, I noticed with mild surprise that it was colored with precisely four colors. Sadly, though, the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, which share a border, were both blue.
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States)
The camera pulls back to include Peeta, off to one side in front of a projected map of Panem. He’s sitting in an elevated chair, his shoes supported by a metal rung. The foot of his prosthetic leg taps out a strange irregular beat. Beads of sweat have broken through the layer of powder on his upper lip and forehead. But it’s the look in his eyes — angry yet unfocused — that frightens me the most. “He’s worse,” I whisper.
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
Thanks to the Human Connectome Project, which will map every neuron in the human brain, one day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel. I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
We’re all inadequate,” David answered. “Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there’s a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall.
Carolyn Ives Gilman (Dark Orbit)
They came up with that number because genes manufacture (and supervise the production of) proteins—and the human body manufactures 100,000 different proteins, plus 40,000 regulatory proteins needed to make other proteins. So the scientists mapping the human genome were anticipating that they’d find one gene per protein, but by the end of the project, in 2003, they were shocked to discover that, in fact, humans have only 23,688 genes. From
Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn’t it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours—getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn’t make them, they’re not your fault. So you might as well play to win.
Seth Dickinson (Please Undo This Hurt)
When I glanced back up, a holoed globe of Hyperion ceased spinning and unwound itself into a series of flattened projections: oblique equirectangular, Bonne, orthographic, rosette, Van der Grinten, Gores, interrupted Goode homolosine, gnomonic, sinusoidal, azimuthal equidistant, polyconic, hypercorrected Kuwatsi, computer-eschered, Briesemeister, Buckminster, Miller cylindrical, multicoligraphed, and satplot standard, before resolving into a standard Robinson-Baird map of Hyperion.
Dan Simmons (The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2))
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection 'frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero's birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.' The real psychic purpose of the conventional man's affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self. The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.
Murray B. Stein (Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction)
Theologically, Hell is out of favor now, but it still seems more "real" to most people than Fairyland or Atlantis or Valhalla or other much imagined places. This is because of the sheer mass and weight and breadth of ancient tradition, inventive fantasy, analytic argument, dictatorial dogma, and both simple and complex faith employed over a very long time- thousands of years- in the ongoing attempt to map the netherworld. The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants- Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more.
Alice K. Turner (The History of Hell)
Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.
Donna J. Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)
The activity of a commander-in-chief does not at all resemble the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in our studies examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of troops on this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our plans from some given moment. A commander-in-chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event—the position from which we always contemplate it. The commander-in-chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted shaping of events the commander-in-chief is in the midst of a most complex play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, projects, counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged to reply to innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly conflict with one another.
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out. The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong. The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form. The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive. The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020. History,
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There has always been an Egyptian navy – it used to import cedar from Lebanon to build ships at huge expense – but it has never been a Blue Water navy. Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 97 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 per cent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 per cent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the USA, with concurrent costs. Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile. Two of the continent’s oldest countries, with the largest armies, have at times edged towards conflict over the region’s major source of water.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners. For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results, certain conclusions have emerged. (1) These substances do alter consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless to talk more specifically about the “effect of the drug.” Set and setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of reaction. There is no “drug reaction” but always setting-plus-drug. (3) In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about the potentialities—for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The drug is just an instrument. In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked first to the conventional models of modern psychology—psychoanalytic, behavioristic—and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects—philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals, alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported over and over by these persons.
Alan W. Watts (The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness)
People have traditionally talked about civilization “spreading” from place to place and not happening by other means. This is the result, I think, of two forms of self-deception. First of these is self-congratulation. If we suppose—as people throughout history have regularly supposed—that the way we live represents the climax of human achievement, we need to represent it as unique or, at least, rare: when you find a lot of examples of something that you expect to be unique, you have to explain the effect as the result of diffusion. Yet, in reality, civilization is an ordinary thing, an impulse so widespread that it has again transformed almost every habitable environment. Peoples modest enough in the faceof nature to forgo or severely limit their interventions are much rarer than those, like us, who crush nature into an image of our approving. The attitude of these reticent cultures should therefore be considered much harder to explain than that of the civilized. The second self-deception is belief in what might be called the migrationist fallacy, which powerfully warped previous generations’ picture of the remote past. Our received wisdom about prehistoric times was formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe was enjoying her own great imperial age. The experience of those times convinced self-appointed imperial master-races that civilization was something which descended from superior to inferior peoples. Its vectors were conquerors, colonists, and missionaries. Left to themselves, the barbarians would be mired in cultural immobility. The self-perception of the times was projected, almost without utterance, onto the depiction of the past. Stonehenge was regarded as a marvel beyond the capabilities of the people who really built it—just as to white beholders the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (see page p. 252 ) seemed to have been left by intruders, or the cities of the Maya (see page 158 ) to have been erected under guidance from afar. Early Bronze Age Wessex, with its chieftainly treasures of gold, was putatively assigned to a Mycenean king. The sophistication of Aegean palace life (see page 292 ) was said to have been copied from the Near East. Almost every development, every major change in the prehistoric world was turned by migrationist scholarship into a kind of pre-enactment of later European colonialism and attributed to the influence of migrants or scholars or the irradiation of cultural superiority, warming barbaric darkness into civilized enlightenment. Scholars who had before their eyes the sacred history of the Jews or the migration stories of Herodotus had every reason to trust their own instincts and experience and to chart the progress of civilization on the map. The result was to justify the project of the times: a world of peoples ranked in hierarchical order, sliced and stacked according to abilities supposed to be innate.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature)
PROFITS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID | Idea in Brief 105 words THE PROBLEM Multinational firms’ socially beneficial ventures in low-income markets need to earn profits if they’re to command corporate resources, but operating in the black is harder than it looks. THE SOLUTION Companies can use the authors’ “opportunity map” to design and undertake ventures at the bottom of the pyramid that match their capabilities and financial expectations. THE DETAILS The map sorts ventures according to cost and complexity by analyzing two key challenges in selling to the poor: changing consumers’ behavior and changing the way products are made and delivered. The map can encourage companies to forgo overly ambitious, unsustainable projects and start with smaller ones that generate steady profits.
Anonymous
Solidarity with local communities lies at the heart of culture-centered public relations because it seeks to co-create local narratives that have otherwise been erased from the mainstream public spheres (de Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, 2008). Local voices offer entry points for co-creating narratives that have otherwise been erased. It is through the re-appropriation of the community as a site of resistance as opposed to a site of neoliberal governance that new meaning structures are articulated (Beverly, 2004a,b; Spivak, 1988a,b; Tihuwai Smith, 2006). It is through these new meanings narrated at local community levels that the scientific modernist discourses of neoliberalism are disrupted. For instance, to the large-scale funding of the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) with the goal of mapping
Krishnamurthy Sriramesh (Culture and Public Relations)
We may be grown-up biologically, but in terms of a spiritual journey, we are children. When you were a child, you probably felt much more grown up with each year that passed. But with hindsight, it is easy to see that at each age we were still immature in ways that we did not suspect. The same thing with our spiritual maturity: it is a lifetime-project!
Dana Williams (The Lord’s Prayer, The Seven Chakras, The Twelve Life Paths: the prayer of Christ Consciousness as a light for the auric centers and a map through the archetypal paths of astrology)
In the culture of The Icarus Project some years ago we developed a rough prototype of a document we call a Wellness Map (or affectionately a “Mad Map”). It’s a very practical document to be written in good health and shared with friends and loved ones and it starts with the simple (yet not always easy to answer) question: How are you when you’re well? What does wellness look like to you? This question is followed by: What are the signs that you’re not so well? and eventually: What are the steps that you and your community need to take to get you back to wellness?
Seth Farber (The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement)
If she possessed a genius—and a growing number of us think she did—it was a capacity for understanding and trusting the improvisational nature of her will. This might seem a contradictory state, and for most of us it would be. We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different. As we have come to realize, she was not one to hold herself back. Or to be fettered. In this way she startles us, inspires us. She was someone who pursued her project as a genuine artist might, following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed.
Chang-rae Lee (On Such a Full Sea)
product road map should state for each version the projected launch date, the target customers and their needs, and the top three to five features.
Roman Pichler (Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)))
positive and helpful effects on you and the society as a whole!). True leaders—teenage to middle-age—are committed and act in ways that take into consideration purposeful outcomes or a vision, with focus, passion, and resilience. They develop and then follow a clear road map to get from where they are to where they desire to be. What does pragmatic psychology mean to you, specifically? Allow me to expand a bit on what I mean when I talk about pragmatic psychology, if it hasn’t yet begun to crystallize for you. Your psychology comprises (1) your belief system, which projects your character and narrative about yourself and is the glue
Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
But mapping time in any network, as computer scientist Chaomei Chen recognizes, "is one of the toughest challenges for research in information technology....[It is] technically challenging as well as conceptually complex." Due to the extremely demanding nature of charting the passage of time within a network, most scientists and designers feel apprehensive about incorporating this dimension in many of their executions, which in part explains the lack of projects in this realm. There is no doubt that when we embrace time, the difficulty of the task at hand increases tenfold, but if visualization is to become a fundamental tool in network discovery, it needs make this substantial jump. Most networked systems are affected by the natural progression of time, and their depiction is never complete unless the critical dimension becomes part of the equation.
Manuel Lima (Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information)
When creating a project list, use specific, actionable goals. Think of this action like you’re trying to explain it to someone who has a limited understanding of your language. Be precise and describe exactly what needs to be done. In addition, chunk everything down into short-term achievable goals. The more you can turn a project into a daily process, the more consistent action you’ll take on it. If you’re having trouble figuring out all the steps in the process, use a creative tool such as a mind map to diagram every task. Keep asking “What’s the next step?” and writing things down. Do this exercise for an hour to fully flesh out a project. Finally, once you have a list of tasks, prioritize them in order of importance and immediacy. You’ll use this information when scheduling weekly tasks.
S.J. Scott (To-Do List Makeover: A Simple Guide to Getting the Important Things Done (Productive Habits Book 2))
Any postcapitalist project will necessarily require the creation of new cognitive maps, political narratives, technological interfaces, economic models, and mechanisms of collective control to be able to marshal complex phenomena for the betterment of humanity. OUTDATED
Nick Srnicek (Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work)
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.
Kevlin Henney (97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts)
Summary Gaining insight from massive and growing datasets, such as those generated by large organizations, requires specialized technologies for each step in the data analysis process. Once organizational data is cleaned, merged, and shaped into the form desired, the process of asking questions about data is often an iterative one. MapReduce frameworks, such as the open-source Apache Hadoop project, are flexible platforms for the economical processing of large amounts of data using a collection of commodity machines. Although it is often the best choice for large batch-processing operations, MapReduce is not always the ideal solution for quickly running iterative queries over large datasets. MapReduce can require a great deal of disk I/O, a great deal of administration, and multiple steps to return the result of a single query. Waiting for results to complete makes iterative, ad hoc analysis difficult. Analytical databases
Anonymous
did you know that way back in the 1980s some scientists proposed an ambitious effort called the Human Protein Project to map all human proteins? It never happened. Instead, the NIH backed the Human Genome Project for one big reason: Proteins were tough to study, while genes were far easier to sequence. The tools dictate the science.
Deborah Blum (A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers)
The second is external, in our environment, such as other people, groups, physical spaces, nature, emotions, objects, and subtle realms often called psychic or spiritual. Subtle energy awareness is a normal human ability to internally and externally feel or perceive people, spaces, and things. I include this second type of subtle energy awareness of people, places, things, and other dimensions because it has historically been omitted from our Western psychological map or dismissed as if it were imagination or projection. Studies on highly sensitive people, mirror neurons, and what Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLA and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, calls “attunement”2 in interpersonal neurobiology are beginning to validate this category of awareness within the paradigm of scientific materialism. When I ask a group of students, “How many of you have ever walked into a room and felt that someone is upset without looking at their body language?” usually three quarters of them will raise their hands. (It’s important to note that without the grounding of awake awareness—type five—many highly sensitive people can get overwhelmed by subtle energy because, without awake awareness, we are still experiencing sensations and events from the view of a small self within a separate physical body.)
Loch Kelly (The Way of Effortless Mindfulness: A Revolutionary Guide for Living an Awakened Life)
Already very challenging, the project became even more so in 2014, when Ukraine-related sanctions cut off Novatek’s access to Western finance. In order to survive, the $27 billion LNG project needed a new injection of money, and quickly. The Chinese came through with a $12 billion loan and also became partners in the project, along with the French supermajor Total, which had joined earlier. The Russians had historically been reluctant to allow large-scale Chinese ownership of upstream assets. But now there was no choice.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
will face a new competitor in Europe—Russian LNG. LNG projects for Russia’s Arctic gas make clear that Russia will become the fourth major pillar for LNG supply in the 2020s, along with the United States, Qatar, and Australia. These Arctic projects will give Russia the same advantage that Qatar achieved earlier this century—the flexibility, as Putin put it, to go either “eastward” or “westward.” And Yamal LNG, said Putin, “is one more confirmation of the status of Russia as one of the world’s leading energy powers.”16
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
announcement of the big deal—valued at $400 billion over thirty years. The contract would make China the second-largest market for Russian gas, after Germany. The Chinese would also provide the financing for a massive new $45 billion, thirteen-hundred-mile “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline. “This will be the biggest construction project in the world for the next four years, without exaggeration,” Putin said after the signing.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Shortly after Cheniere, Freeport put its application in to the government to transform its import facility into an export facility. But unlike Cheniere, it did not get a quick approval. Nothing seemed to be happening. Someone explained to a frustrated Smith, “In Washington, the first application is an application. The second application is public policy.” What had taken Cheniere nine months would take Freeport almost four years. The same proved true for another first-mover project, Sempra LNG at Cameron, Louisiana, as well as other newer projects. They would all have to wait.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
the revelations about this actual (sort of) Lemuria are a reminder of how much wonder there is left in the natural world, how much we’re still discovering about our planet, and how much mystery remains in the actual landscape and soil. For many of us, this is enough: the wonders of the natural world fascinate and inspire in a myriad of ways. Many more, though, will look and turn away disappointed, finding no proof of utopia or God in fragments of zircon. The main and central difference hinges on the question of what you expect out of the natural world: do you see it as a wondrous and strange thing unto itself, or do you expect it to reveal humanity back to itself? The problem with geologic samples is that the place revealed by them has no direct symbolic value. The crime of mainstream science, for too many, is the revelation that the world owes us nothing. The need for imagined marginal worlds populated with monsters and enlightened humans is a deep-seated one that’s going to persist, but it’s at odds with the world of strange wonder that’s all around us. Like Atlantis, the geologic underpinnings of Lemuria have always been beside the point. Lemuria is a perpetual edgeworld—a place to exist in the mind and on the map but never to be glimpsed or realized. It’s a vast unknown onto which you can project your own theories, biases, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes—all without fear that you’ll ever have to provide evidence one way or another. Lemuria, if it exists at all, exists now in my pocket, in a small triangle of wood polished with belief.
Colin Dickey (The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained)
I helped Bridget with a project about the Civil War, which of course she enhanced by making an interactive map, complete with pop-up paper cannons. It was a pretty good representation of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. She had facts and figures written behind pull tabs on the map. And right at the Union line she had written “The high-water mark of the Confederacy.” That was the exact phrase I had been taught as a child in school—it means the farthest north Robert E. Lee had led his army.
James Patterson (Haunted (Michael Bennett #10))
Spatial mapping of switches is not always appropriate. In many cases it is better to have switches that control activities: activity-centered control. Many auditoriums in schools and companies have computer-based controls, with switches labeled with such phrases as “video,” “computer,” “full lights,” and “lecture.” When carefully designed, with a good, detailed analysis of the activities to be supported, the mapping of controls to activities works extremely well: video requires a dark auditorium plus control of sound level and controls to start, pause, and stop the presentation. Projected images require a dark screen area with enough light in the auditorium so people can take notes. Lectures require some stage lights so the speaker can be seen. Activity-based controls are excellent in theory, but the practice is difficult to get right. When it is done badly, it creates difficulties. Activity-centered controls are the proper way to go, if the activities are carefully selected to match actual requirements. But even in these cases, manual controls will still be required because there will always be some new, unexpected demand that requires idiosyncratic settings.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
Not unlike personal perspectives," Siwash said, "we rarely understand map projections that are not our own.
Timothy Taylor (Stanley Park)
Now, you need to draw a mind map of different projects branching out from the center in a way that you could draw out various sub-branches as well. For example, your branches could be:
Som Bathla (Think Out of The Box: Generate Ideas on Demand, Improve Problem Solving, Make Better Decisions, and Start Thinking Your Way to the Top)
In 1973, Eleanor Coppola carried out a public art project called Windows, which materially speaking consisted only of a map with a date and a list of locations in San Francisco. Following Steinbeck’s formula, the windows at each location were the bottle, and whatever happened behind them were the stories that “crawled in.” Coppola’s map reads: Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, where it is found, without being altered or removed to a gallery situation.3 I like to consider this piece in contrast with how we normally experience public art, which is some giant steel thing that looks like it landed in a corporate plaza from outer space. Coppola instead casts a subtle frame over the whole of the city itself, a light but meaningful touch that recognizes art that exists where it already is.
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
THESE LAST FEW projects have something important in common. In each, the artist creates a structure—whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area (or even a lowly set of shelves!)—that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it. This attention-holding architecture is something I frequently think about at the Rose Garden.
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
MERCATOR MAP PROJECTION (1569)
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
Never aim to implement the whole map. Instead, find the shortest path through the map to the goal!
Gojko Adzic (Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects)
Take, for instance, a parody project that begins by subverting the anti-Black logics embedded in new high-tech approaches to crime prevention (Figure 5.2). Instead of using predictive policing techniques to forecast street crime, the White-Collar Early Warning System flips the script by creating a heat map that flags city blocks where financial crimes are likely to occur.
Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
We know the future only by the past we project into it.
John Lewis Gaddis (The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past)
There is nothing wrong with projecting this false self to the outside world during these early striving years, so long as it isn’t too distant or disconnected from who we really are. Later, in the forties and fifties, it becomes imperative to find our way back to the truest things we know and to compose a more authentic self. Now
Gail Sheehy (New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time)
He offers what is no longer a map, but a strange projection of the entire globe from the point of view of the Pole, the mystic Pole, naturally, and therefore from the point of view of an ideal Pendulum suspended from an ideal keystone. This is a map specially conceived to be placed beneath a Pendulum! It’s obvious, undeniable; I can’t imagine why somebody hasn’t already seen—
Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)
You’ve begun to master several techniques for controlling your anxiety. You’re learning the finer points of interaction and studying ways to apply your interactive skills. The next step is to add community resources—relevant agencies, groups, and organizations—to your self-help program. As you consider your particular needs, look to your own community for ways to enhance your social system: Parks and recreation departments, churches and synagogues, singles groups, self-help groups, clubs, volunteer organizations, business associations—there is an infinite array of resources to choose from. Contact your local chamber of commerce, consult newspapers for upcoming activities, and even inquire at area shops about any clubs or groups that share an interest (for example, ask at a garden center about a garden club, at a bookstore about a book club, and so on). Working through the exercises in this book is merely one component of a total self-help program. To progress from background knowledge to practical application, you must venture beyond your home and workplace (and beyond the confines of a therapist’s office, if you are in counseling). For people with social anxiety an outside system of resources is the best place to work on interactive difficulties. Here are three excellent reasons to use community resources: 1. To facilitate self-help. Conquering social anxiety necessitates interaction and involvement within the community, which is your laboratory. Using community resources creates a practical means of refining your skills and so moving forward on your individual map for change. 2. To diminish loneliness. Becoming part of the community provides the opportunity to develop personal and professional contacts that can enhance your life in many ways. 3. To network. Community involvement will not only give you the chance to improve your interactive skills, but will allow you to promote your academic or work life as well as your social life. Building connections on different levels can be the key. Any setting can provide a good opportunity for networking. In fact, I met the writer who helped me with this book in a fairly unlikely place—on the basketball court! A mutual friend introduced us, and when the subject of our professional interests came up, we saw the opportunity to work together on this project. You never know!
Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
The familiar Mercator projection used in maps of the earth gives a good idea of distances and directions near the equator, but produces horrible dostortions near the poles, with Greenland swelling to many times its actual size. In the same way, it is one sign of being in a gravitational field that there is no one freely falling frame of reference in which gravitational and inertial effects cancel everywhere.
Steven Weinberg (Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature)
Soovee?” I ask. “Did Mom make it so you can drive yourself?” “Correct.” “This is so cool!” says Trip. “Yesterday, Dr. Hayes mounted a range finder to my roof housing a 64-beam laser.” So that’s what she was doing when she was too busy to look at my rotten Spanish homework. “This laser allows me to generate a detailed 3-D map of my environment,” Soovee continues. “I will take that map and instantaneously overlay it on top of high-resolution, real-time traffic maps and produce all the data models I need to drive myself, and you, safely to school.” “But what if the police see me not driving?” asks Dad. “No worries,” purrs the car. “Mom also tinted the windshield. You can see out, but no one can see in. Why, you could fully recline your seat and take a quick nap.” Okay. I know what I want our new science project to be: Soovee—the self-driving electric car!
James Patterson
If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be accurately specified in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must take a radically different approach. Let us turn to nature and study complexity in living things, instead of just the dead works of man. Here we find constructs whose complexities thrill us with awe. The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built. So it must be with our software systems. Some years ago Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development.[11] That is, the system should first be made to run, even though it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit it is fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below. I have seen the most dramatic results since I began urging this technique on the project builders in my software engineering laboratory class. Nothing in the past decade has so radically changed my own practice, or its effectiveness. The approach necessitates top-down design, for it is a top-down growing of the software. It allows easy backtracking. It lends itself to early prototypes. Each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there. The morale effects are startling. Enthusiasm jumps when there is a running system, even a simple one. Efforts redouble when the first picture from a new graphics software system appears on the screen, even if it is only a rectangle. One always has, at every stage in the process, a working system. I find that teams can grow much more complex entities in four months than they can build.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
seven fundamental principles of design: 1.​Discoverability. It is possible to determine what actions are possible and the current state of the device. 2.​Feedback. There is full and continuous information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After an action has been executed, it is easy to determine the new state. 3.​Conceptual model. The design projects all the information needed to create a good conceptual model of the system, leading to understanding and a feeling of control. The conceptual model enhances both discoverability and evaluation of results. 4.​Affordances. The proper affordances exist to make the desired actions possible. 5.​Signifiers. Effective use of signifiers ensures discoverability and that the feedback is well communicated and intelligible. 6.​Mappings. The relationship between controls and their actions follows the principles of good mapping, enhanced as much as possible through spatial layout and temporal contiguity. 7.​Constraints. Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides actions and eases interpretation.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
As the scientific forester may dream of a perfectly legible forest planted with same-aged, single-species, uniform trees growing in straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush and poachers,85 so the exacting state official may aspire to a perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to the designated formula and in the official language. This caricature of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn, but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we will examine later.86 The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission.” The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.
James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed)
Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.
Robert Caro
Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east—the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World)
Each of us, perhaps, holds the idea of such a place, the one we long to see more than anywhere else - and for this reason we should avoid ever going there. It thus remains a zone of desire and enigma, a space on the map onto which we project our capacity for enchantment.
Rob Doyle (Autobibliography)
found some correlation between elements that I identified from the music of my NDE and similar music she has identified among other NDE-ers in her “Dead Symphony” project.I
Eben Alexander (The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife)
DARPA—the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers riding in tanks and trucks were being maimed and killed by IEDs. In response, the Defense Department was determined to develop vehicles that would not need drivers—what would become known as autonomous vehicles.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
In breaking with history, art has broken with all primitivism. Art may still seek plenitude and participation, therapies and ceremonies, a repeal of the dissociation of sensibility, but not routed through the past. Today the challenge to an obtuse and callous classicism is no longer mapped onto a rejection of tradition, nor does it ironically re-embrace traditions previously rejected. Now classicism, or intellectual vassalage, is internal to the present. The ancien régime targeted by modernism is no longer found in the past but rather embedded within our own society: mass culture, entertainment, the superstitions and stupidities, the half-hearted democracy, the disguised cruelty of the modern economy. It is just as in the era of religious conflict: content provides the resistance. Art is a struggle against false content. This struggle gives history its shape. Since the content of contemporary art is often topical, basically current events, there is a constant obligation to keep up the pace. This is consistent with the overall project of Enlightenment, whose successor is modernism. Within the project of emancipation, there is finally no tolerance for relativism. The Enlightenment was antirelativist; we saw that with Diderot, who did not allow historical perspective to deflect his present-tense opinions. Historicist relativism was allied instead with the neo-Christian reaction to Enlightenment. The Enlightenment critiques itself, of course, pointing out that the Enlightenment of the philosophes, or last year's enlightenment, was not enlightened enough. Ongoing self-castigation is the very shape of the Enlightenment project. However, anyone today who dares to revive the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, namely, to take up again the illiberal call for remystification and recovery of trust in myth an ritual - anyone who dares to exit the Enlightenment - is vilified.
Christopher S. Wood (A History of Art History)
Eliade argued that until the arrival of the Hebrew prophets, time was universally understood as cyclical, and was bound through ritual to the sacred. Regularly recurring religious ceremonies enacted, and reenacted, the creation of the cosmos, allowing their participants to play a direct role in the “regeneration of the world,” “projecting” themselves into “mythical time.” Only after the prophets, for Eliade, did history enter the picture.
Ben Ehrenreich (Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time)
It was a map. A heart-shaped map. “A cordiform projection,” Thomas told her. She looked up at him excitedly. “It does not distort area. Look how small Greenland is.” He smiled. “I will confess that I purchased it more for its heart-shaped properties.” She turned toward her family. “Is this not the most romantic gift you have ever seen?
Julia Quinn (Mr. Cavendish, I Presume (Two Dukes of Wyndham, #2))
Genomics has transformed the biological sciences. From epidemiology and medicine to evolution and forensics, the ability to determine an organism’s complete genetic makeup has changed the way science is done and the questions that can be asked of it. Far and away the most celebrated achievement of genomics is the Human Genome Project, a technologically challenging endeavour that took thousands of scientists around the world thirteen years and ~US$3 billion to complete. In 2000, American President William Clinton referred to the resulting genome sequence as ‘the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.’ Important though it was, this ‘map’ was a low-resolution first pass—a beginning not an endpoint. As of this writing, thousands of human genomes have been sequenced, the primary goals being to better understand our biology in health and disease, and to ‘personalize’ medicine. Sequencing a human genome now takes only a few days and costs as little as US$1,000. The genomes of simple bacteria and viruses can be sequenced in a matter of hours on a device that fits in the palm of your hand. The information is being used in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.
John M. Archibald (Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
As strange as it sounds, it is no longer possible to determine how many human genomes have been sequenced. At present the strategy of choice is whole-genome re-sequencing (Chapter 3) whereby next-generation sequence data are mapped onto a reference genome. The results have been breathtaking. The recently concluded (and aptly named) 1000 Genomes Project Consortium catalogued ~85 million SNPs, 3.6 million short insertions/deletions, and 60,000 larger structural variants in a global sampling of human genetic diversity. These data are catalysing research in expected and unexpected ways. Beyond providing a rich source of data for GWA-type studies focused on disease, scientists are also using the 1000 Genomes Project data to learn about our basic biology, something that proved surprisingly difficult when only a pair of genomes was available. For example, a recent GWAS taking advantage of the 1000 Genomes Project data identified ten genes associated with kidney development and function, genes that had previously not been linked to this critical aspect of human physiology. In 2016, Craig Venter’s team reported the sequencing of 10,545 human genomes. Beyond the impressively low cost (US$1,000–2,000 per genome) and high quality (30–40× coverage), the study was significant in hinting at the depths of human genome diversity yet to be discovered. More than 150 million genetic variants were identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the genome; each sequenced genome had on average ~8,600 novel variants. Furthermore, each new genome was found to contain 0.7 Mbp of sequence that is not contained in the reference genome. This underscores the need for methods development in the area of structure variation detection in personal genome data. Overall, however, the authors concluded that ‘the data generated by deep genome sequencing is of the quality necessary for clinical use’.
John M. Archibald (Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.” Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . . Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907, The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part. I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.
David Leavitt (The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer)
Sparling’s projection had presented Ben with a map scanned in at a slightly crooked angle. His closeted OCD screamed internally.
A.M. Shine (The Creeper)
Hallie maps out her three to five most important items for the week. During our weekly one-to-one meeting, we discuss these objectives and adjust if needed. From there, Hallie will front-load those high-priority projects into her calendar for the week (with the goal of completing those projects by Wednesday), working around all of her various recurring meetings.
Adam Hergenrother (The Founder & The Force Multiplier: How Entrepreneurs and Executive Assistants Achieve More Together)
For many perpetrators, this is a suicidal crisis. The rise in mass shootings in the United States over the past decade maps onto the dramatic rise among white men of “deaths of despair”—deaths by suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related conditions.
Jillian Peterson (The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic)
From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing! I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations. Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them. And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Phase 1: Discovery 1. Define the problem statement What is the challenge that will be solved? The problem statement is defined at this step and becomes the foundation of the project. Here is a sample problem statement: The company has more than one hundred thousand email addresses and has sent more than one million emails in the last twelve months, but open rates remain low at 8 percent, and sales attributed to email have remained flat since 2018. Based on current averages, a 2 percentage-point lift in email open rates could produce a $50,000 increase in sales over the next twelve months. It’s important to note that a strong and valid problem statement should include the value of solving the problem. This helps ensure that the project is worth the investment of resources and keeps everyone focused on the goal. 2. Build and prioritize the issues list What are the primary issues causing the problem? The issues are categorized into three to five primary groups and built into an issues tree. Sample issues could be: •​Low open rates •​Low click rates •​Low sales conversion rates 3. Identify and prioritize the key drivers. What factors are driving the issues and problem? Sample key drivers could include: •​List fatigue •​Email creatives •​Highly manual, human-driven processes •​Underutilized or missing marketing technology solutions •​Lack of list segmentation •​Lack of reporting and performance management •​Lack of personalization 4. Develop an initial hypothesis What is the preliminary road map to solving the problem? Here is a sample initial hypothesis: AI-powered technologies can be integrated to intelligently automate priority use cases that will drive email efficiency and performance. 5. Conduct discovery research What information can we gain about the problem, and potential solutions, from primary and secondary research? •​How are talent, technology, and strategy gaps impacting performance? •​What can be learned from interviews with stakeholders and secondary research related to the problem? Ask questions such as the following: •​What is the current understanding of AI within the organization? •​Does the executive team understand and support the goal of AI pilot projects?
Paul Roetzer (Marketing Artificial Intelligence: Ai, Marketing, and the Future of Business)
The lone exception was the Bureau of Reclamation, which had one enormous project already mapped out, with years of engineering and architectural studies behind it, all tied up neatly with the ribbon of congressional approval and bow of a presidential signature. This was, of course, the Boulder Canyon Project.
Michael A. Hiltzik (Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of the Hoover Dam)
I’m going to show you fate maps.” Despite myself, I was mesmerized by these huge pictures of fertilized eggs, so zoomed in, I could practically see the DNA strands waving like Tibetan prayer flags in the wind. Only these weren’t imprinted with prayers, but with prophecies. What would mine say? She’ll be great at snowshoeing. Shy in front of crowds. Obsessed with maps, yet perpetually lost. Stricken with wanderlust, but never allowed to go anywhere. (My parents considered Seattle, five hours away, an exotic locale.) “Weird, isn’t it? Someone’s destiny, right here?” Karin murmured to me. “. . . the genome mapping project will unlock DNA,” said Dr. Holladay, her face glowing with the promise of scientific discovery. “One day, we’ll be able to ascertain the genetic markers . . . for every disease.” But all maps lie, I wanted to tell Karin and the rest of the class and especially this geneticist. Even the best maps distort the truth. Something’s got to give when you take our three-dimensional world and flatten it down to a two-dimensional piece of paper: Greenland balloons; Africa stretches.
Justina Chen Headley
We have outdone all other animals in the range of our symptoms. And our relationship to these madnesses—these irrationalities that plague us—has been profoundly ambivalent. People have never been quite sure whether madness refers to the more bizarre forms of malfunctioning, of diseases, that human beings are prone to; or whether, in fact, human beings are intrinsically mad—an exaggeration, perhaps, even potentially a disability, but not essentially alien.Should the project be to attempt to cure ourselves, or to attempt to accept ourselves as we are?
Adam Phillips (Going Sane: Maps of Happiness)
And to survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. God, what do I know? Maybe it was all projection. My own broken heart mapped onto a newborn.
Gregg Andrew Hurwitz (Prodigal Son (Orphan X, #6))
The events of 1989 were a seismic upheaval. With the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, which opened up the prospect of enlarging the EC to the East, German unification also became possible. But Kohl needed Mitterrand’s support: both for formal reasons because France, as an occupying power, had the right to veto German unification; and, pursuing the policy initiated by Brandt, to ensure that new eastern relationships did not undermine the EC and the Franco-German partnership. Mitterrand saw the single currency as the way to anchor Germany irrevocably in the EC system, and hence as a condition for German unification; and this ensured for Kohl the necessary support in Germany to proceed with the project (Map 1
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
On the map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Tayegtus mountains, which from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length - seventy five miles on their western and forty five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across - projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani. As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre , subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold. Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of Greece. Nothing but the bleak Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the bare and waterless inferno of rock. The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony.
Patrick Leigh Fermor (Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese)
First as head of China’s “Key Electric Vehicle Project” and then as minister of science and technology, Wan led China’s EV drive.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
There were other surprises, as well. They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage. They used this exercise to methodically disposition their technology stacks, given the business context.
Gene Kim (The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data)
a plan is like a map, when following a plan, people can see how much they have progressed to their project goal and how far they are from their destinations
Anath Lee Wales (your life can be changed.: the true guide to become a change maker!)
Egypt was, arguably, a nation state when most Europeans were living in mud huts, but it was only ever a regional power. It is protected by deserts on three sides and might have become a great power in the Mediterranean region but for one problem. There are hardly any trees in Egypt, and for most of history, if you didn’t have trees you couldn’t build a great navy with which to project your power. There
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
In 2011 Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Renaissance Dam. In 2017 the dam was almost complete, but it will take several years to fill the reservoir with water. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the reservoir could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)