Random Famous Quotes

What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.

A grisly story, but one whose notoriety Malorie attributes to the seemingly senseless way the Internet has of making random occurrences famous.

In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

What the famous big blue Boy Scout told to a green Kryptonite? What?? YOU rock!

Eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it’s only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. She mocked me at length on that point: I untie the ribbon—Elena Greco—and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks.

Pasinating!!!

It was a computer repair man who taught Taylor Swift to play the 3 chords in the guitar when she was just 12. After that she wrote her famous song, Lucky You.

During The Empire Strikes Back, in the famous asteroid scene, one of the deadly asteroids is actually a potato.

There was a study done with minimally educated voters who, given a hypothetical ballot, picked the names of famous serial killers over randomly generated names as well as over those of actual, less well-known politicians.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

security team. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and there’s no way I could ever forget it. This is the kind of thing you tell random people at the nursing home when you’re old, senile, and have no idea what day it is or where you are. “I once toured with Eleven.

You're going to fuck up a million times. It doesn't make you bad at it. It doesn't make your career ugly. And it doesn't mean it's not what you're meant to do. You're going to make so many mistakes as a human being. You could become a doctor and fail at that too. You could fail at anything in life. So pick the thing that you love the most. And even though it's going to hurt more when you fail, it's better that you're doing something that you love with your life, rather than just picking something random or tolerable and going “if I fail, I don't care”. You should care. You've got one life. You should care.

The following morning, after those goals were met, Marcus and I were back on the road, off to the Potato State. “Gem State,” Marcus corrected when he heard me call it that on our drive. “What?” “Idaho’s the Gem State, not the Potato State.” “Are you sure?” I asked, making no attempt to hide my skepticism. “I hear about Idaho potatoes all the time. No one’s ever like, ‘Wow, my engagement ring has a rare Idaho diamond in it.’” A smile played on his lips as he kept his eyes on the road. “Pretty sure,” he said. I wasn’t masochistic enough to argue random trivia with a former Alchemist, but when we crossed the border into Idaho and started seeing license plates that said FAMOUS POTATOES, I felt pretty confident about who was in the right on this topic.

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism that he would begin an essay with a bold and bald statement designed to arrest attention—a tactic that, as Williams rightly notices, he borrowed in part from GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. No regular writer can re-read his own output of ephemera without encountering a few wince-making moments of this kind; Williams admits to ‘isolating’ them but has some fun all the same. The flat sentence ‘a humanitarian is always a hypocrite’ may contain a particle of truth—does in fact contain such a particle—but will not quite do on its own. Other passages of Orwell’s, on the failure of the Western socialist movement, read more convincingly now than they did when Williams was mocking them, but are somewhat sweeping for all that. And there are the famous outbursts of ill-temper against cranks and vegetarians and homosexuals, which do indeed disfigure the prose and (even though we still admire Pope and Swift for the heroic unfairness of their invective) probably deserve rebuke. However, Williams betrays his hidden bias even when addressing these relatively easy targets. He upbraids Orwell for the repeated use of the diminutive word ‘little’ as an insult (‘The typical Socialist ... a prim little man,’ ‘the typical little bowlerhatted sneak,’ etc.). Now, it is probable that we all overuse the term ‘little’ and its analogues. Williams does at one point—rather ‘loftily’ perhaps—reproach his New Left colleagues for being too ready to dismiss Orwell as ‘petit-bourgeois.’ But what about (I draw the example at random) Orwell’s disgust at the behaviour of the English crowd in the First World War, when ‘wretched little German bakers and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob’?

The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother, he replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

There are tiny mites living in our eyelashes. Hal Roach was a famous director who used to hire drunk and insane people to generate creative ideas. To attract female goats, Billy goats urinate on their own heads. Jewish people do not eat pork. Khazaria was a medieval Turkic kingdom that adopted Judaism as its official religion; it was the only non-Semitic state to become Jewish after Israel. The largest economy in the United States is California. More deer are killed by drivers than by hunters. The automotive center of the world is in Detroit. If the earth were ever to stop spinning, all the oceans would flow to the north and south poles. Around 16 to 20 percent of the terms searched on Google are said to have been never searched before. Bamboo can grow 35 inches per day making it the fastest growing woody plant in the world. The heaviest insect found on the earth is ‘Giant Weta’. It weighs more than a pound and is found in New Zealand. The CIA is expected to release the JFK assassination records to the public no later than 10/26/2017.

In another famous study, introverts and extroverts were asked to play a challenging word game in which they had to learn, through trial and error, the governing principle of the game. While playing, they wore headphones that emitted random bursts of noise. They were asked to adjust the volume of their headsets up or down to the level that was “just right.” On average, the extroverts chose a noise level of 72 decibels, while the introverts selected only 55 decibels. When working at the volume that they had selected—loud for the extroverts, quiet for the introverts—the two types were about equally aroused (as measured by their heart rates and other indicators). They also played equally well. When the introverts were asked to work at the noise level preferred by the extroverts, and vice versa, everything changed. Not only were the introverts over-aroused by the loud noise, but they also underperformed—taking an average of 9.1 trials rather than 5.8 to learn the game. The opposite was true for the extroverts—they were under-aroused (and possibly bored) by the quieter conditions, and took an average of 7.3 trials, compared with the 5.4 they’d averaged under noisier conditions.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

Such trait of absence of marriage to ideas is indeed rare among humans. Just as we do with children, we support those in whom we have a heavy investment of food and time until they are able to propagate our genes, so we do with ideas. An academic who became famous for espousing an opinion is not going to voice anything that can possibly devalue his own past work and kill years of investment. People who switch parties become traitors, renegades, or, worst of all, apostates (those who abandoned their religion were punishable by death).

Albert Einstein, who famously could not accept that God would be so unclassy as to turn His universe into a giant craps table. What seemed for all the world like randomness—blind chance—may really be the previously unseen influence of particles’ future histories on their present behavior. Retrocausation, in other words.

What some may not know is that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t originally arrested for killing the president. He was first arrested for shooting and killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald’s arrest came about on November 22, 1963, when a shoe store manager named John Brewer noticed him loitering suspiciously outside his store. Brewer noted that Oswald fit the description of the suspect in the shooting of Officer Tippit. When Oswald continued up the street and slipped inside the Texas Theater without paying for a ticket, Brewer called a theater worker, who alerted authorities. Fifteen Dallas police officers arrived at the scene. When they turned on the movie house lights, they found Lee Harvey Oswald sitting towards the back of the theater. The movie that had been airing at the time was War is Hell. When Lee Harvey Oswald was questioned by authorities about Tippit’s homicide, Captain J. W. Fritz recognized his name as one of the workers from the book depository who had been reported missing and was already being considered a suspect in JFK’s assassination. The day after he was formally arraigned for murdering Officer Tippit, he was also charged with assassinating John F. Kennedy. Today, the Texas Theater is a historical landmark that is commonly visited by tourists. It still airs movies and hosts special events. There’s also a bar and lounge.    The Texas Theater was the first theater in Texas to have air conditioning. It was briefly owned by famous aviator and film producer, Howard Hughes. Texas’s Capitol

The dots of our lives connect in ways we can scarcely comprehend. Outcomes and possibilities often unfold in unimaginable ways. It’s better to do our best in the moment and release personal attachment to any particular outcome. Trust. Let mysterious forces take care of the details for us while we focus on the work at hand. This notion is not random flagrancy toward the future, nor is it a recipe for irresponsibility. Strive to do the best work possible and trust it will work itself out. Examine your past; you’ll see this element at play and know it to be true.

Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

In November of 1997, the New Jersey–based independent radio station WFMU broadcast a live forty-seven-minute interview with Ronald Thomas Clontle, the author of an upcoming book titled Rock, Rot & Rule. The book, billed as “the ultimate argument settler,” was (theoretically) a listing of almost every musical artist of the past fifty years, with each act designated as “rocking,” “rotting,” or “ruling” (with most of the research conducted in a coffeehouse in Lawrence, Kansas). The interview was, of course, a now semi-famous hoax. The book is not real and “Ronald Thomas Clontle” was actually Jon Wurster, the drummer for indie bands like Superchunk and (later) the Mountain Goats. Rock, Rot & Rule is a signature example of what’s now awkwardly classified as “late-nineties alt comedy,” performed at the highest possible level—the tone is understated, the sensibility is committed and absurd, and the unrehearsed chemistry between Wurster and the program’s host (comedian Tom Scharpling) is otherworldly. The sketch would seem like the ideal comedic offering for the insular audience of WFMU, a self-selecting group of sophisticated music obsessives from the New York metropolitan area. Yet when one relistens to the original Rock, Rot & Rule broadcast, the most salient element is not the comedy. It’s the apoplectic phone calls from random WFMU listeners. The callers do not recognize this interview as a hoax, and they’re definitely not “ironic” or “apathetic.” They display none of the savvy characteristics now associated with nineties culture. Their anger is almost innocent.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

When people are deeply “in” a film, you’ll notice that nobody coughs at certain moments, even though they may have a cold. If the coughing were purely autonomic response to smoke or congestion, it would be randomly constant, no matter what was happening on screen. But the audience holds back at certain moments, and I’m suggesting blinking is something like coughing in this sense. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition during a flu epidemic in Bulgaria many years ago. It is just as plain as day what’s going on: While he was playing certain passages, no one coughed. At those moments, he was able to suppress, with his artistry, the coughing impulse of 1,500 sick people.

It is at times like these that I have a powerful perceptual shift about luck and fate and the chaotic randomness of life. Those of us who have so-called normal lives without undue stress and fear and worry and pain rarely know how fortunate we are. Then we see a man like Adam who’s famous even if unemployed and who lives at his sister’s house and struggles to manage, and we’re tempted to think he should snap out of it. He’s obviously intelligent, and he has no apparent disabilities. So we think, you’re smart, go out and get a job, and make yourself a normal life. Then we learn that the man has Traumatic Brain Injury and medical issues that can rip normalcy in two, and we realize that one of the main problems is in ourselves for failing to consider that not all other people have our good fortune of functioning bodies and brains, with emotional and psychological landscapes that are level and fertile and stable and predictable.

Why people like to be kicked and punched in the face. The game is famous as box?? What's the inspiring thing?? Do you know that every punch in the head you lose a cell or cells so it's possible in the near future all boxer to be stupid. Why?? Because of the punches! ... But still I don't see where is the Adrenaline in this sport?? There are random punches or kickes without thinking just dicide it to do it for fun. But in games like chess there is strategy + logic!

My cousins had told me dead people came back as Dracula. Draculas got thirsty at night and drank only blood, leaving the milk and juices in the refrigerator for the house owners. I thought Draculas were cool, they had some manners. Still I didn’t like the idea of anyone drinking blood.

In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California). As a derivatives trader I noticed that people do not like to insure against something abstract; the risk that merits their attention is always something vivid.

In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be available to posterity. To that the presiding judge famously replied, “The republic has no need of scientists.

Some of us just don’t feel comfortable with the status quo. If sitting around at night watching TV makes your brain boil, you’re probably a hustler. If you can’t bare the thought of being a cog in a wheel, you’re probably a hustler. If you want random people to know your name and what you stand for, you’re probably a hustler. It’s not about being famous or rich or powerful. It’s about making a difference in the world―doing something that matters.

At a broader level, cultivation theory has been and continues to be useful in understanding the influence of the media metaphorically. The very name of the theory—cultivation—is a metaphor drawing upon agriculture to help highlight the basic idea of the theory—that the media help to create an ordered homogenous reality instead of a disorganized random weed patch reality. There are other metaphors used to understand media’s influence. Gravity has been used to highlight the nonlinear nature of the theory; heavy uses of TV are drawn to the ‘TV reality’ as if TV had a gravitational force. Perhaps the most famous is the metaphor of story telling; TV is the great ‘story teller’ of the current era.

The largest, longest study of experts’ economic forecasts was performed by Philip Tetlock, a professor at the Haas Business School of the University of California–Berkeley. He studied 82,000 predictions over 25 years by 300 selected experts. Tetlock concludes that expert predictions barely beat random guesses. Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.

At school, Pablo found it hard to concentrate. Rather than completing classwork, he filled the margins of his notebook with pencil sketches of animals, birds, and people. His teacher grew exasperated with his lack of attention. She wrote a note to his mother saying: “Pablo should stop drawing in class and pay attention to his lessons.” It was clear that Pablo hated rules, and he took every opportunity to disobey them. When adults told him what to do, he did the opposite. He once got in trouble for coloring the sky a bright red instead of the “normal” blue. Pablo was often banished to the “calaboose,” a bare cell with white walls and a bench, which served as a holding pen for unruly students. “I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly,” Pablo later said. “I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.” He even began misbehaving on purpose so that he would be sentenced to detention and sent to the calaboose. The one person who understood that Pablo wasn’t acting out for no reason was his father. One day when Pablo’s mother caught him drawing on the wall with a nail, Don José took him to the beach to blow off steam. As Don José stretched out to take a nap, Pablo sat beside him and drew a dolphin in the wet sand. When Don José awoke, he was astonished by the beauty of his son’s drawing. “Could it be Pablo who drew this?” he wondered. That afternoon, Don José took a closer look at the image Pablo had drawn on their living room wall. What at first looked like random scratches soon took shape. Don José recognized a reindeer and a bison running away from a group of men on horseback who were armed with bows and arrows. At that moment, Don José knew what to do to get Pablo to stop misbehaving. He decided to take him into his studio and teach his son how to paint. From that day onward, Pablo and his father were inseparable art partners. In search of new subjects to portray, they began going to the bullfights. Pablo was mesmerized by the sight of the brave picadors as they charged ferocious bulls. He saw El Lagartijo—“The Lizard”—one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain, and he met Cara Ancha,

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

Too much success is the enemy (think of the punishment meted out on the rich and famous); too much failure is demoralizing. I would like the option of having neither.

In a now famous experiment they found that the majority of people, whether predictors or nonpredictors, will judge a deadly flood (causing thousands of deaths) caused by a California earthquake to be more likely than a fatal flood (causing thousands of deaths) occurring somewhere in North America (which happens to include California).

Optimism, it is said, is predictive of success. It can also be predictive of failure. Optimistic people take more risks, as they are overconfident about the odds. Those who win show up among the rich and famous. Others fail and disappear from the analysis.

One reason for this “dirty little secret” is the positive publication bias described in Chapter 7. If researchers and medical journals pay attention to positive findings and ignore negative findings, then they may well publish the one study that finds a drug effective and ignore the nineteen in which it has no effect. Some clinical trials may also have small samples (such as for a rare diseases), which magnifies the chances that random variation in the data will get more attention than it deserves. On top of that, researchers may have some conscious or unconscious bias, either because of a strongly held prior belief or because a positive finding would be better for their career. (No one ever gets rich or famous by proving what doesn’t cure cancer.)

Much of what we know about the ancient Athenian financial system comes from surviving judicial orations. The courts themselves were key elements in the financial system. The Athenian court system resolved disputes between plaintiffs and defendants through trial by jury. Jurors—typically 500 at a time—were chosen randomly and sat for a day, which was the maximum length of a trial. Plaintiff and defendant represented themselves, although famous orators were sometimes engaged to compose their speeches. Speaking time was regulated by a water-clock. Jurors did not deliberate together; rather they voted, and the ruling was determined by a majority vote.1 At the end of the day, the matter was settled.

You may very well not be aware of the sickness, but I guarantee you have got experienced it. The Builder’s Block psychological sickness has affected almost every Minecraft player at least once, which is quite typical. The illness is contagious, but in an odd manner; it is going to force anyone to give you the nausea publicly through a really uninformative and rushed forum thread. Humans are not susceptible to this as being a type of transmission, but, and sometimes are trying to help the victim by replying to the poorly created thread, frequently neglecting to achieve this. Happily, the nausea has perhaps not been proven deadly, nonetheless it is proven to mentally stress players which can be affected. Signs There's a obscure set of symptoms one might expect you'll feel. You might perhaps have Builder’s Block when you've got one thing such as the following: •​lack of ideas to help keep you busy in Minecraft •​The sudden disinterest of continuing a project in Minecraft •​Feeling bored •​The urge to hit one’s head against a nearby wall for a few ideas •​Uncontrollable urges to press [ESC] and [ALT]+[F4] The illness is famous to alter between players. It is extremely not likely that you will suffer from all of the aforementioned indications, and when you do have problems with them all at one period of time, please avoid calling any health-related doctor as it can cause undesired psychological treatment. Treatment Healing Builder’s Block is generally benign. First, attempt to ‘mine it off’. That is, mine for resources you may/may not want. If you are not willing to invest as much as 3 hours attempting to heal your illness, decide to try one of many following to get motivation: •​Bing: Look into random such things as your preferred video gaming level or let’s play person. •​Minecraft Forums: Search the forum for other people’s projects and prefer to assist them away. NEVER POST A THREAD; it'll oftimes be ignored or turn for the worst. •​Minecraft: Explore. See if something demands a structure or statue. That overhang is screaming at one to become a wonderful hanging city.

Cygnus Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and Travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or alive. This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.

One of the reasons Kay laughs so much now is because in the beginning, when Phil was drinking and they didn’t have much money, there wasn’t a lot of laughing going on. But now we laugh at almost everything together. On our birthdays, Kay likes to send us very random cards, like Earth Day or graduation cards. Her favorite thing to do at Christmas is to give us gag gifts. After we’ve exchanged gifts as a family, she’ll give everybody a joke gift. Kay will often forget why she thought it was funny when she bought it. She’ll give someone salt and pepper shakers and won’t even remember why she gave them! Of course, Kay’s gift always say they’re from her dogs. If you get a present from her rat terriers-or some random famous person whose name is on the tag-you know it’s actually one of Kay’s gag gifts. Every one of Kay’s rat terriers has been named Jesse James or some version of his name, because if one dies she’ll still have another one with her. Somehow, that helps her cope with the trauma of losing one of her pets. She’s had like twenty of those dogs and they’ve all been named Jesse, JJ, or Jesse James II. She calls one of her dogs Bo-Bo, but his real name is Jesse James.