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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.
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Adam Phillips (Going Sane: Maps of Happiness)
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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.
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Rick Riordan (The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1))
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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.
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Ramani Durvasula (Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist)
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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.
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Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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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.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
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Interesting that the ship didn’t automatically eject them as they became empty. I dismiss the window and return to the main ship map.
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Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
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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.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses)
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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.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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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.
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Jocelyn K. Glei (Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2))
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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.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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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.
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Vilém Flusser (Towards a Philosophy of Photography)
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Sparling’s projection had presented Ben with a map scanned in at a slightly crooked angle. His closeted OCD screamed internally.
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A.M. Shine (The Creeper)
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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.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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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?
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Geoff Nicholson (The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism)
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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.
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Obi Kaufmann (The State of Water: Understanding California's Most Precious Resource)
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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.
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Francis S. Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)
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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.
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Barbara Katz Rothman (Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are)
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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.
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Donna J. Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)
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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.
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Jeanne A. Estes (Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook)
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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.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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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.
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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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.
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Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
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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.
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Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
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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.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth)
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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.
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Carolyn Ives Gilman (Dark Orbit)
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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
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
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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.
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Seth Dickinson (Please Undo This Hurt)
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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.
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Dan Simmons (The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2))
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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.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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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.
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Murray B. Stein (Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction)
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Elections in America were also becoming less free and fair. In 2010, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, a plan to take control of statehouses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. Through the process of what is called gerrymandering, after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it), political parties could gain control of extra seats in a state by drawing districts to either “pack” or “crack” their opponents.
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Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
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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.
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Alice K. Turner (The History of Hell)
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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.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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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,
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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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.
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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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.
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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
“
Half way through life a thoughtful person must undertake an honest assessment of their life. I am now fifty years old. I am rapidly turning into a dry stalk, my breath is sour, and I am beginning to smell of the grave. I melancholy project that in all probability I have now existed about half the period of time that I shall remain in this sublunary world. Resembling the trajectory of other men reaching middle age, my upward ascent in life crested and now I am commencing the meteoric downhill descent. Distinct from Americas’ pioneers and other luminaries whom played an important role in expanding our knowledge and deepened our appreciation of nature, I have done nothing to advance the human condition. I have not mapped any new territory, contributed to the arts or sciences, or expanded our comprehension of mathematics or the natural sciences: astronomy, biology, chemistry, the Earth sciences, and physics. I did not contribute to medicine, cognitive science, behavioral science, social science, or the humanities. Unlike revered social leaders whom advocated peaceful relations with all people, I remained mute while domestic and international conflicts sundered communities. I created no historical existence; I exist only as an introspective being. I have not added one iota to the bank of knowledge of succeeding generations. I have not added any quarter of happiness to other people. My contribution to the human race is nil. In all probability, I will flame out without leaving a lasting trace of my mundane personal existence.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
It’s hard to think about the maps when Alec’s perfect face keeps flooding my thoughts. I keep trying to figure out what we are. Are we together? Boyfriend, girlfriend?
”
”
Rebecca Gober (Project ELE (ELE, #1))
“
Efferent impulses may be conducted along one of two major pathways of motor neurons as they pass from the brain through the cord and out to the muscles, and together these longitudinal pathways provide for the convergence of the influences from all levels of the central nervous system upon the motor units. The fastest of these descending routes is the direct corticospinal pathway. As the name suggests, the cell bodies of this path are in the cortex, and they send their long axons directly through the brain and down the spinal cord without any interruptions. These axons do not form any synapses until they reach their corresponding motor neurons in the cord, and thus they form direct connections between specific cells in the motor cortex and specific motor neurons at each level of the cord, making one-to-one relationships between cortical cells and peripheral motor units. This pathway bypasses most of the intermediate circuitry of the lower brain and the spinal cord. This gives it the advantage of speedy transmission. The axons which are bundled together within it maintain a constant spatial relationship throughout their length, faithfully reflecting the spatial relationships of the cell bodies in the cortex. The longest axons, reaching all the way to the end of the cord, lie the closest to the center of the cord, and the progressively shorter axons which synapse to motor neurons in progressively higher segments, are carefully laid down in layers progressively far from the center of the cord, so that a “map” of skeletal muscle relationships is projected onto the motor cortex. This gives a high degree of specificity to this direct corticospinal tract. This direct pathway is the mediator of fine, intricate movements, which require close conscious attention and constantly refined adjustment. When it is severed, actions become clumsier, because the sharp edge of delicate conscious control is missing.
”
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Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
“
This is not a book about the Human Genome Project — about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough first draft of the complete human genome. In just a few short years we will have moved from knowing almost nothing about our genes to knowing everything. I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history. Bar none. Some may protest that the human being is more than his genes. I do not deny it. There is much, much more to each of us than a genetic code. But until now human genes were an almost complete mystery. We will be the first generation to penetrate that mystery. We stand on the brink of great new answers but, even more, of great new questions. This is what I have tried to convey in this book.
”
”
Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
“
We do not know whether [Hipparchus] drew maps--perhaps he did--but the truth is that in his day he could not possibly have applied his projections to the globe because the necessary data, in the form of correct findings of latitudes and longitudes of a very large number of places over the known areas of the earth, were not available. This was the weakness of all Greek cartographic science. In Greek times mathematics was in advance of mechanical instrumentation: There was no instrument for easily and correctly determining the longitude of places. However, the Piri Re'is and the other maps we went on to study, seemed to suggest that such an instrument or instruments had once existed, and had been used by people who knew very closely the correct size of the earth. Moreover, it looks as if this people had visited most of the earth. They seem to have been quite well acquainted with the Americas, and to have mapped the coasts of Antarctica.
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Charles H. Hapgood (Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age)
“
Recently I met with the director of the London Ironstone railway," he said. For Kathleen's benefit, he explained, "It's a private company, owned by a friend. Tom Severin."
'We're in the same London club," West added.
Devon viewed the map critically before drawing a parallel line. "Severin wants to reduce distance on London Ironstone's existing Portsmouth route. He's also planning to relay the entire sixty-mile line, start to finish, with heavier rails to accommodate faster trains."
"Can he afford such a project?" West asked.
"He's already secured one million pounds."
West uttered a wordless exclamation.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
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)
“
Write Our Your Goals It’s important to have project goals, but life and career goals are essential too. Set up a calendar, or use your journal to map out your work schedule for the next few weeks, or for your entire project if you know what that will be.
”
”
Mark R. Morris Jr. (Creativity: Have More great ideas Do More Awesome Stuff)
“
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)
“
One of the worst disconnects of a business software development effort is seen in the gap between domain experts and software developers. Generally speaking, true domain experts are focused on delivering business value. On the other hand, software developers are typically drawn to technology and technical solutions to business problems. It’s not that software developers have wrong motivations; it’s just what tends to grab their attention. Even when software developers engage with domain experts, the collaboration is largely at a surface level, and the software that gets developed often results in a translation/mapping between how the business thinks and operates and how the software developer interprets that. The resulting software generally does not reflect a recognizable realization of the mental model of the domain experts, or perhaps it does so only partially. Over time this disconnect becomes costly. The translation of domain knowledge into software is lost as developers transition to other projects or leave the company. A different, yet related problem is when one or more domain experts do not agree with each other. This tends to happen because each expert has more or less experience in the specific domain being modeled, or they are simply experts in related but different areas. It’s also common for multiple “domain experts” to have no expertise in a given domain, where they are more of a business analyst, yet they are expected to bring insightful direction to discussions. When this situation goes unchecked, it results in blurred rather than crisp mental models, which lead to conflicting software models. Worse still is when the technical approach to software development actually wrongly changes the way the business functions. While a different scenario, it is well known that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will often change the overall business operations of an organization to fit the way the ERP functions. The total cost of owning the ERP cannot be fully calculated in terms of license and maintenance fees. The reorganization and disruption to the business can be far more costly than either of those two tangible factors. A similar dynamic is at play as your software development teams interpret what the business needs into what the newly developed software actually does. This can be both costly and disruptive to the business, its customers, and its partners. Furthermore, this technical interpretation is both unnecessary and avoidable with the use of proven software development techniques. The solution is a key investment.
”
”
Vaughn Vernon (Implementing Domain-Driven Design)
“
he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel.
”
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Gregory Benford (The Berlin Project)
“
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)
“
Template Zombie: The project team allows its work to be driven by templates instead of by the thought process necessary to deliver products.
”
”
Jeff Patton (User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product)
“
Here’s what isn’t public knowledge,” Annika said. “The government and U.S. tech giants have teamed up on a massive SLAM project to map the surface of Earth.” She paused to let the import of this sink in. “The newest Earth Station satellites can identify buildings and objects almost down to the centimeter. By using photogrammetry and long-range volumetric capture, the result is a continually updated 3D geospatial rendering of the physical world. Now, mind you, not everything on the planet is 3D mapped yet, but every island within five hundred miles of the U.S. coastline certainly is.
”
”
J.D. Lasica (Catch and Kill (Shadow Operatives, #2))
“
Charles Darwin “could be considered a professional outsider,” according to creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton. Darwin was not a university faculty member nor a professional scientist at any institution, but he was networked into the scientific community. For a time, he focused narrowly on barnacles, but got so tired of it that he declared, “I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject,” in the introduction to a barnacle monograph. Like the 3M generalists and polymaths, he got bored sticking in one area, so that was that. For his paradigm-shattering work, Darwin’s broad network was crucial. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals, wrote that Darwin only personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
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)
“
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))
“
In closing this chapter, I want to highlight the broad range of your responsibilities as the business development manager throughout the project development cycle. Your responsibility is not merely a function of identifying potential client projects, ’door opening’, introductory meetings and client entertaining, then moving on to the next potential client. Instead, today's business development manager is a versatile and highly trained professional who is entrepreneurial by nature, understands the client's drivers, and carries a broad base of capabilities and skills in their toolbox to manage multiple responsibilities throughout the business development cycle.
”
”
Mark Lamb (Compass and a Map: A Guide for the International Business Development Manager)
“
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 officials told Gehry that they wanted a building that could do for Bilbao and the Basque Country what the Sydney Opera House had done for Sydney and Australia: put them on the map and bring back growth.
”
”
Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
“
The mobile industry quickly developed, and lawyers, investment bankers, consultants and contractors offered their services. The feeling of ownership of the projects and the effort of getting networks up and running within the shortest possible time span was gigantic. Engineers slept in their cars to make sure that they could start early mornings, ‘war rooms’ were kitted out with huge maps, project timelines, pictures and milestone markers. Contests ongoing between different teams in the specific country regions where we were building. Employing a thousand people in no time and generating work for tenfold that number; network and other suppliers, construction companies, distributors, retailers and other often highly skilled third parties.
”
”
Ineke Botter (Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?)
“
He smiled. "This is all going into your book, isn't it?"
"I was not even thinking about my book," I said defensively--- I was only half lying. With my encyclopaedia complete, I have, as Wendell knows, turned my attention to another large project--- creating a mapbook of all the known faerie realms, as well as their doors. Such a book will be a patchwork thing, unavoidably so--- faerie realms are often attached to specific geographical locations in the mortal world, though only a few have been explored in a meaningful way--- but I wish to use it to argue Danielle de Grey's point: that the realms are more interconnected than previous scholarship has suggested. Finding evidence of the nexus would be the linchpin of the entire project.
”
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Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2))
“
The process of objectifying the world through the primordial intuition of "repetition in time" and "following in time" gains in generality by the construction of mathematics from the same primordial intuition, without reference to direct applicability. In this way man has a ready-made supply of unreal causal sequences at his disposal, just waiting for an opportunity to be projected into reality. One should bear in mind that in mathematical systems with no time coordinate, all relations in practical applications clearly become causal relations in time; e.g. Euclidean geometry when applied to reality shows a causal connection between the results of different measurements made by means of the group of rigid bodies. Needless to say, in the application of a mathematical system, in general, only a fraction of the elements and substructures finds their correspondence in reality; the remainder plays the role of and unreal "physical hypothesis." Similarly, even with a limited development of method, the observed sequences no longer consist exclusively of phenomena evoked by man himself (acts without any direct instinctive aim, but carried out solely to complete the causal system into a more manageable one). The simplest example is the sound image (or written symbol) of number as a result of counting, or the sound image (or written symbol) of number as a result of measuring (this example shows how infinitely many causal sequences can be brought together under the viewpoint of one single law of causality on the basis of a mapping the numbers through mathematical induction.)
”
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L.E.J. Brouwer
“
Things I might do to you," I said, "include, but aren't limited to: Staring at you a lot, peering at you, and leaning in close. Studying you. Asking you to describe your face to me while I'm painting it. Projecting a grid over your face and mapping it out mathematically. Measuring your features with a tape measure. And touching your face, neck, and shoulders. Is any of that objectionable?"
"As long as you don't put me in a Burt Reynolds toupee.
”
”
Katherine Center (Hello Stranger)
“
Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on? Once you’ve identified the scale, then find a corner of the market that can’t wait for your attention. Go to their extremes. Find a position on the map where you, and you alone, are the perfect answer. Overwhelm this group’s wants and dreams and desires with your care, your attention, and your focus. Make change happen. Change that’s so profound, people can’t help but talk about it.
”
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Seth Godin (This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See)
“
Here are several ways to try brain dumping: Task dump: Write down your to-do list to tidy your mind and prioritize tasks. Free-association dump: Write down all the thoughts in your mind, even if they are not connected to one another. Idea dump: Note all your creative sparks, big and small. Organization dump: Draft a mind map or concept map to systematically arrange your thoughts for a task or project. (See the Map Out Your Thoughts entry in this chapter for instructions.) Stress dump: List all the things stressing you out. This will help declutter your mind and clear mental fog. Gratitude dump: Write down everything you’re grateful for. This process shifts your focus from negative thoughts to more positive aspects of life. Emotional dump: Without judgment or analysis, note all the emotions you’re experiencing. This exercise can help you gain clarity about your emotional state and identify and release suppressed feelings. Nighttime dump: If a bustling mind is making it hard for you to sleep, consider writing down whatever is in your brain before bedtime.
”
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Megan Anna Neff (Self-Care for Autistic People: 100+ Ways to Recharge, De-Stress, and Unmask!)
“
I’ve already texted my grandma about the map, told her I needed it for a school project, and she promised to text me a pic when she gets back to her lair tonight.
”
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Tracy Wolff (Crush (Crave, #2))
“
Our experience in life, especially in the first half of life, like with the BTS members in their 20’s, is that we discover the Self in others and through others. We call it projection, but projection can be a kind of dismissive way of talking about finding the soul when you are in relationship to another person, let’s say a beloved. When you are in a relationship with a beloved, you are with your soul. That’s why it becomes so crucially dependent to be with her. She is your soul, or he is your soul. But that doesn’t mean it’s all out there. Inside and outside get mixed up, mixed together.
”
”
Murray B. Stein (Map of the Soul – Persona: Our Many Faces)
“
Voyagers,
I’ve always wanted to write about you.
And now, at 4:41 a.m. on an autumn morning,
Words have found their way into my mind.
I picture myself like you—
Distant from life,
Alone,
Yet moving towards an unknown destination!
Like you, in the early stages of my journey,
I could see,
I could gather knowledge and transmit it,
I was useful and efficient.
But sometimes, to keep connected to the world,
To be able to stay on course and conserve my energy,
I had to shut parts of myself down,
To survive,
To go blind, to be deaf, to be isolated, and just occasionally signal my existence to the world.
The same thing I do, that you do, that so many others do.
The boundless reaches of space
Have become somewhat more comprehensible through you,
Yet the depths of the human soul remain unfathomable,
And its pain incurable.
We live in an age surrounded by a torrent of information,
Yet somehow, we remain lonely and lost.
Language has advanced,
There are words for nearly everything,
Everyone can describe their own state of mind, yet we’re still at war with one another.
Earth has turned into a vast ship,
Perhaps like Noah’s Ark,
With maximum diversity and multiplicity,
Yet everyone on this ship plays their own tune, rallies their own cause!
Someone steps forward, claiming each individual’s thoughts and personal benefit are like rare pearls to be cherished,
While another insists that collective welfare takes precedence,
That the needs of the masses outweigh individual desires.
Some launch movements to claim their rights,
While others start movements to flaunt the rights they’ve acquired.
No one knows what they truly want;
We’re all still lost.
I don’t know how Earth looks from afar—
Perhaps like a blueberry-flavored lollipop,
A lollipop with a stick,
But Earth’s stick is an invisible one made of sorrow.
I find something common among all the passengers on this ship,
All the inhabitants of this blueberry lollipop: sorrow.
A fetus in its mother’s womb is also like a lollipop,
But connected by an umbilical cord.
As a fetus,
Growing in the mother’s womb,
Suffering, malnutrition, and physical ailments can be painful for us.
If the mother’s state is stable,
We may enjoy brief periods of security and calm, but after that,
We must endure the pain of separation,
Learn how to breathe,
And besides the sorrow of leaving security behind,
We face new emotions like fear and anger.
Later in life,
We each take our own path.
No matter how much they try to show humans as social creatures,
It’s always the individual who walks their own way, who has the freedom to choose,
Even if one finds the meaning of their path in joining a group or a collective, it’s their individual choice that put them on that path.
Today, people have countless options to join others who are like them,
And these options themselves bring confusion,
And when you join a group out of confusion,
You treat the other groups with hostility.
Science, philosophy, religion, politics…each of them has thousands of branches, and each branch
Wants to disprove the other, cleanse itself of its shameful past.
Freedom of speech has become an excuse for verbal assaults and psychological wounds,
Non-violence has become a breeding ground for new and emerging dictators,
For heartless sects and brutal factions.
Knowledge and science alone cannot save us,
Just as religion couldn’t.
I don’t want to write about chaos,
Life isn’t that disorganized,
In some corner of the world,
A lover is staring up at his beloved’s window,
A child is laughing joyfully.
But writing about sorrow,
Speaking of chaos and
Asking questions can reveal where we stand.
Now, we know so much about space,
And about the Sun, too.
The James Webb telescope has mapped out the cosmos for us, and countless projects are underway for the future, crafted with flawless precision and extraordinary coherence, but the rift between humans remains deep.
”
”
Arash Ghadir
“
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)
“
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)
“
As business consultants with many years’ experience working with CEOs and senior executives, we were convinced that character shapes leadership decisions, tactics, and workplace behavior—all of which play a direct role in business results. To map the connections between all of those factors, we structured a research project aimed at bringing crystalline clarity to our understanding of what constitutes character, how it’s formed, the role it plays in our self-concept, and how it shapes our interactions with the world. (See appendix A for a detailed description of the research design.) We may have been venturing into explosive territory, but we knew that beyond it lay the answer to the big question: Is the strength of a leader’s character an important driver of business success?
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”
Fred Kiel (Return on Character: The Real Reason Leaders and Their Companies Win)
“
too are better served by allowing projects to unfold as context demands.
”
”
Jim Benson (Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life)
“
Just as Audre Lorde warned against using patriarchal rhetoric, patriarchal structures of organization, and patriarchal privileging of solidarity over difference to dismantle patriarchy,40 I too am reluctant to wholeheartedly claim for the feminist cause a rhetorical mode so thoroughly steeped in male domination. On the other hand, if the goal is to dismantle patriarchal structures, and if feminist trolling helps accomplish those ends, then are the means, however problematic, retroactively justified? I look forward to further research that tackles these questions, including the question of how best to theorize the relationship between trolling and global activism. For now, I remain simultaneously intrigued by and wary of the political potential of trolling—a fitting end to a project and behavioral practice steeped in ambivalence.
”
”
Whitney Phillips (This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture)
“
If a product milestone or project succeeds in delivering the expected business goal, it is a success from a business perspective, even if the delivered scope ends up being different from what was originally envisaged. On the other hand, if it delivers exactly the requested scope but misses the business goal, it is a failure.
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Gojko Adzic (Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects)
“
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
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”
Anonymous
“
Caroline’s project faces extreme uncertainty: there had never been a volunteer campaign of this magnitude at HP before. How confident should she be that she knows the real reasons people aren’t volunteering? Most important, how much does she really know about how to change the behavior of hundreds of thousand people in more than 170 countries? Barlerin’s goal is to inspire her colleagues to make the world a better place. Looked at that way, her plan seems full of untested assumptions—and a lot of vision. In accordance with traditional management practices, Barlerin is spending time planning, getting buy-in from various departments and other managers, and preparing a road map of initiatives for the first eighteen months of her project. She also has a strong accountability framework with metrics for the impact her project should have on the company over the next four years. Like many entrepreneurs, she has a business plan that lays out her intentions nicely. Yet despite all that work, she is—so far—creating one-off wins and no closer to knowing if her vision will be able to scale. One assumption, for example, might be that the company’s long-standing values included a commitment to improving the community but that recent economic trouble had resulted in an increased companywide strategic focus on short-term profitability. Perhaps longtime employees would feel a desire to reaffirm their values of giving back to the community by volunteering. A second assumption could be that they would find it more satisfying and therefore more sustainable to use their actual workplace skills in a volunteer capacity, which would have a greater impact on behalf of the organizations to which they donated their time. Also lurking within Caroline’s plans are many practical assumptions about employees’ willingness to take the time to volunteer, their level of commitment and desire, and the way to best reach them with her message. The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment.
”
”
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success)
“
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)
“
One very interesting project she took up involved mapping the holdings and investments of politicians and their families in corporate India.
”
”
Rashmi Bansal (ARISE, AWAKE
THE INSPIRING STORIES OF
YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS WHO
GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE
INTO A BUSINESS OF THEIR OWN)
“
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.
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”
S.J. Scott (To-Do List Makeover: A Simple Guide to Getting the Important Things Done (Productive Habits Book 2))
“
Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. This
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”
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
“
Early July 2012 In one of my email response to Andy, I wrote: Hi beloved ex-Valet, I’m glad you expressed interest in co-writing one of the five A Harem Boy Saga books. The fourth book will be the best to commence our collaboration if you are serious about working on this joint project with me. I’ll be more than delighted to incorporate your valuable opinions and I’m positive your voice will add credence to the series. The first 3 books center on our first three Arab Household experiences and the numerous interesting and varied characters we encountered during our services. The fourth book is devoted solely to our loving relationship and functioning as a gay couple within the E.R.O.S. context in the late sixties and early seventies epoch. This will be “our” book; a tell-all about our love, our heartaches, our separation and our recent reconnection. This will also give us time to map-out and brainstorm the topics we’ll like to include in the manuscript. Are you are open to my suggestions? I have a few chapters left to complete A Harem Boy Saga – Book II that I had originally considered titling Passion. Recently a more appropriate word has manifested and that word is Unbridled. Maybe we can use Passion for the book we’ll co-write together? Tell me more about your life in New Zealand. As always I love to catch up on your news after our separation. I eagerly await your next correspondance. Forever Yours, Young.
”
”
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
Early July 2012 In one of Andy’s responses, my ex-lover wrote, Young, That sounds great! I look forward to co-writing the fourth book of A Harem Boy Saga with you. This will provide us time to map out the outline of our joint project during the course of our correspondence. As much as I’d love to work with you on this project, I want to be sure that Walter is okay with us going into this venture together. I have no desire to upset your loving relationship and certainly have no wish to be an unwelcome intruder into your lives. Let me know if he agrees. When I was in hospital recovering from my nervous breakdown, I met Jack, a 24-year-old nursing student. He cared for me during my recovery. We dated for several months before his transfer to a hospice in a different city. I did not have the courage to tell Toby that Jack and I were dating. I was afraid Toby would threaten suicide again, until the fateful evening when he discovered Jack and me making out in my flat. My caregiver and I had proceeded to my lodgings after a scrumptious dinner one evening. After several glasses of wine while watching television, Jack leaned his head against my shoulder. His dreamy, doe-like eyes looked adoringly at me, reminding me of your beautiful Asian eyes staring at me during our intimate moments together. Our kisses soon led to lingering sensual foreplay. Before long, our clothes were scattered all over. Jack went on his knees, eagerly caressing my growing hardness and wrapping his luscious lips around me under my briefs. Easing down my underwear, he went to work. His sweetness stirred my longing for you. Closing my eyes to savor his warm fallation, I reclined against the comfortable sofa and enjoyed the pleasurable sensation showered upon my erection. He engulfed my pulsating manhood, suckling away as if to satisfy his hunger. It was similar to the way you used to relish my hardness for hours on end. Like you, he pleasured me with deep, devotional worship; I was overwhelmed by his sexual imperativeness, wanting his warmth to wash over my entirety. His expert titillation did wonders for my soul, causing me to spasm involuntarily. He devoured my length as if deprived of nourishment while I nurtured my feed into Jack’s bobbing head, pressing him against my quivering palpitations.
”
”
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
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)))
“
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)
“
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!
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”
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)
“
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)
“
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)
“
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
“
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)
“
Chapter 2: The Blinders of the Senses: Awakening from the Sensory Dream Close your eyes and imagine standing in a garden. The air is fragrant with the scent of flowers, and the sun's warmth kisses your skin. You hear the rustle of leaves, the chirping of birds, and the distant hum of life. This sensory symphony envelops you, defining your experience of the world around you. But what if I told you that this symphony is both a blessing and a limitation? Welcome to the chapter where we pull back the curtain on the
senses—the windows through which we perceive reality. These senses are our gateways to the world, allowing us to touch, taste, hear, see, and smell. They are our connection to the external, the bridge that links us to the physical universe.
However, in their splendor lies a trap—a trap that keeps us tethered to the surface of existence. Picture this: you're in a theater, engrossed in a captivating movie. The screen and the story before you are so compelling that you forget you're sitting in a theater, watching a mere projection. In the same way, our senses project a vivid reality that captivates us, making us forget that they're just a means of perception, not the ultimate truth. Our senses act as both guides and misguides. They offer us a glimpse into the world, but they also distort reality. They're like a paintbrush in the hands of an artist, creating a beautiful but partial picture. We become so focused on this picture that we overlook the canvas on which it's painted—the canvas of consciousness. Consider the blind spots in your eyes. These are spots where you literally cannot see, yet your brain fills in the gaps seamlessly, creating a complete image. Similarly, our senses have "blind spots" when it comes to the inner world of thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. They excel at perceiving the external, but they struggle to illuminate the internal. Herein lies the paradox: while our senses are our windows to the world, they can also be our blinders, keeping us from seeing the whole picture. Just as a map provides information about the terrain but not the essence of a place, our senses provide data about the world but not the essence of our being. So, how do we escape this
sensory dream and peer beyond the blinders? The answer lies in a shift of focus. We must turn our attention inwards, away from the dazzling spectacle of the external world. It's here, in the quietude of introspection, that we can begin to untangle the threads of our
consciousness from the threads of sensation.
In the coming pages, we'll delve into the paradox of perception and introspection. We'll journey through the ways our senses illuminate the external and yet leave us in the dark about the internal. And most importantly, we'll explore the profound power of looking beyond the surface, awakening to a reality that transcends the sensory
landscape. So, get ready to peel back the layers of perception, to unveil the subtle dance between our senses and our consciousness. As we journey through this chapter, remember: just as a photograph captures a moment in time, our senses capture a moment in reality. But to grasp the essence of existence, we must go beyond the snapshot and embrace the living, breathing symphony of
”
”
Ajmal Shabbir (How To Experience Nothingness: A Profound Exploration of Consciousness and Reality)
“
Several realities have become clear in the course of exploring complex work cycles inside large companies. First, rarely do managers know the interaction map of the company. They know the organization chart and the critical path of projects, especially review dates. In other words, they know how long it takes and who’s involved, but they don’t know how to approach fixing
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George Stalk Jr. (Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Mar)
“
Map projections distort five geographic relationships: areas, angles, gross shapes, distances, and directions. Although
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Mark Monmonier (How to Lie with Maps)
“
The Perception Census, a citizen-science project in the United Kingdom led by cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth and philosopher Fiona Macpherson, seeks to map the heterogeneity of ways of seeing via interactive tasks everyone can do on their own computer.
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Christof Koch (Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It)
“
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.
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Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
“
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.
”
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Gene Kim (The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data)
“
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.
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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.
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Colin Dickey (The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained)