“
A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox -- the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death... I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself... I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.
”
”
Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
“
Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.
”
”
Durga Chew-Bose (Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays)
“
The word “repurpose”
means to take an object
and give it amnesia.
It means to make something forget what
it’s been trained to do so you can
use it for a better reason.
I am learning that this body is not a shotgun.
I am learning that this body is not a pistol.
I am learning that a man is not defined by what he can destroy.
I am learning that a person
who only knows how to fight
can only communicate in violence
and that shouldn’t be anyone’s first language.
I am learning that the difference between
a garden and a graveyard is only what
you choose to put in the ground.
”
”
Rudy Francisco (Helium (Button Poetry))
“
...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Reamde)
“
In terms of business resilience, it's important to have the ability to repurpose inputs and redirect outputs. It's important to have a good amount of flexibility designed into the businesses operating systems. When a business can answer the if this then that question over and over again with different fill in the blanks, it's got resilience.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
I know you and your sister tease me for the repurposing but all I've been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I'm sorry if that's a bloody metaphor for everything.
”
”
Meg Mason (Sorrow and Bliss)
“
great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision.
”
”
Jake Knapp (Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)
“
The word “repurpose”
means to take an object
and give it amnesia.
”
”
Rudy Francisco (Helium (Button Poetry))
“
Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’
This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)
”
”
Frans de Waal (The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates)
“
It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.
”
”
Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
“
Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: "high tolerance for ambiguity"; "systems thinkers"; "additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains"; "repurposing what is already available"; "adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process"; "ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways"; "synthesizing information from many different sources"; "they appear to flit among ideas"; "broad range of interests"; "they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests"; "need to learn significantly across domains"; "Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.
”
”
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories)
“
So I take it you and Gansey get along, then?” Maura’s expression was annoyingly knowing.
“Mom.”
“Orla told me about his muscle car,” Maura continued. Her voice was still angry and artificially bright. The fact that Blue was well aware that she’d earned it made the sting of it even worse. “You aren’t planning on kissing him, are you?”
“Mom, that will never happen,” Blue assured her. “You did meet him, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure if driving an old, loud Camaro was the male equivalent of shredding your T-shirts and gluing cardboard trees to your bedroom walls.”
“Trust me,” Blue said. “Gansey and I are nothing like each other. And they aren’t cardboard. They’re repurposed canvas.”
“The environment breathes a sigh of relief.” Maura attempted another sip of her drink; wrinkling her nose, she shot a glare at Persephone. Persephone looked martyred. After a pause, Maura noted, in a slightly softer voice, “I’m not entirely happy about you’re getting in a car without air bags.”
“Our car doesn’t have air bags,” Blue pointed out.
Maura picked a long strand of Persephone’s hair from the rim of her glass. “Yes, but you always take your bike.”
Blue stood up. She suspected that the green fuzz of the sofa was now adhered to the back of her leggings. “Can I go now? Am I in trouble?”
“You are in trouble. I told you to stay away from him and you didn’t,” Maura said. “I just haven’t decided what to do about it yet. My feelings are hurt. I’ve consulted with several people who tell me that I’m within my rights to feel hurt. Do teenagers still get grounded? Did that only happen in the eighties?”
“I’ll be very angry if you ground me,” Blue said, still wobbly from her mother’s unfamiliar displeasure. “I’ll probably rebel and climb out my window with a bedsheet rope.”
Her mother rubbed a hand over her face. Her anger had completely burned itself out. “You’re well into it, aren’t you? That didn’t take long.”
“If you don’t tell me not to see them, I don’t have to disobey you,” Blue suggested.
“This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby,” Calla said.
Maura sighed. “Blue, I know you’re not an idiot. It’s just, sometimes smart people do dumb things.”
Calla growled, “Don’t be one of them.”
“Persephone?” asked Maura.
In her small voice, Persephone said, “I have nothing left to add.” After a moment of consideration, she added, however, “If you are going to punch someone, don’t put your thumb inside your fist. It would be a shame to break it.”
“Okay,” Blue said hurriedly. “I’m out.”
“You could at least say sorry,” Maura said. “Pretend like I have some power over you.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1))
“
I believe the bad parts of us always live inside of us. It's just up to us to take those flaws and repurposed them for good.
”
”
Julie Murphy (Puddin' (Dumplin', #2))
“
Technology, society, media: these are mutable forms, shape-shifting, forever re-purposing themselves. They sit within the wild, weird and wonderful frame of change. But there is a frame.
”
”
Simon Pont (The Better Mousetrap: Brand Invention in a Media Democracy)
“
My art is largely made up of my pain; re-framed, redesigned and re-purposed. It's a mutually beneficial experience for both the creator and the beholder. Transformative healing is a beautiful process.
”
”
Jaeda DeWalt
“
There are botany textbooks that contain pages and pages of growth curves, but it is always the lazy-S-shaped ones that confuse my students the most. Why would a plant decrease in mass just when it is nearing its plateau of maximum productivity? I remind them that this shrinking has proved to be a signal of reproduction. As the green plants reach maturity, some of their nutrients are pulled back and repurposed toward flowers and seeds. Production of the new generation comes at a significant cost to the parent, and you can see it in a cornfield, even from a great distance.
”
”
Hope Jahren (Lab Girl)
“
A team or organization that is both reliable and flexible, according to Weick, is like a jazz group. There are fundamentals—scales and chords—that every member must overlearn, but those are just tools for sensemaking in a dynamic environment. There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
It was a time of repurposing. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,” was the motto of the time.
”
”
Denise Kiernan (The Last Castle)
“
We are meant to be deeply affected and changed by motherhood. We are meant to be softened, humbled, reshaped, repurposed, and made wiser. We’re meant to grow, heal, and transform for the good of us all and toward the mother-led consciousness we’ve been blessed with the honor of birthing.
”
”
Beth Berry (Motherwhelmed)
“
Today, I'm drawn to repurposing for so many reasons: It allows me to live a more financially pared-down and simple life in which it's possible to work a little bit less and live a little bit more.
”
”
Amanda Blake Soule (Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures)
“
But, as you watch the sun rise again tomorrow morning, think to yourself: past performance is not a predictor of future results. And then force a smile, drink another cup of coffee, and try not to look down as you walk across the soil that will eventually fill your lifeless lungs and repurpose your corpse.
”
”
Joseph Fink (Mostly Void, Partially Stars (Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, #1))
“
The benefit of making your offers small and Modular is that it allows you to take advantage of a strategy called Bundling. Bundling allows you to repurpose value that you have already created to create even more value.
”
”
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
“
Of Ruin and Renewal
We are souls
Of ruin and renewal
Sorting through the rubble
Of our painful past.
We are souls
Of ruin and renewal
Waiting for the dust
To settle at last
We are souls
Of ruin and renewal
Searching for eyes that see us
And walk through the debris
We are souls
Of ruin and renewal,
We rebuild, we revive,
We repurpose our own story.
”
”
Liz Newman (Of Ruin and Renewal: Poems For Rebuilding)
“
This is a revolution: for millions of years, evolution had been content with fuzzy quantities. Symbol learning is a powerful factor for change: with education, all our brain circuits are repurposed to allow for the manipulation of exact numbers.
”
”
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
“
Rebrand is not just about buzzing brand words; it's about repurposing your lives, finding your true voice and building an authentic brand that impact lives. It's a call to reexamine our lives, our goals and dreams; to think about why we do what we do, to align lives back to source (God) and connect with the hearts of people. It's a movement, to help, to add value, to create meaning, to impact lives.
”
”
Bernard Kelvin Clive (REBRAND: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding)
“
My stove is old. My wallpaper is old. It's the same wallpaper from when I moved here and I never changed it. Why would I change it? I just keep it clean. If you take better care of things, you can hold onto them longer. That's how I still run things. If it works, I keep it. If it doesn't, I see if I can use it for something else. If I can't, and I usually can, I toss it.
”
”
Clara Cannucciari (Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression)
“
The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.
”
”
Simon S. Tam
“
Reusing and repurposing is one of the most effective ways to contribute to environmental sustainability.
”
”
Mohith Agadi
“
He has never won a game of Galactic Expansion against the repurposed interrogator droid. But he’s close now. It’s never been this close.
”
”
Chuck Wendig (Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath, #1))
“
Dewey didn’t create it. Nathan did. Mr. Green repurposed
”
”
Kevin Lee Swaim (The Chimera Strain (Project StrikeForce #2))
“
There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge. Even the most sacred tools
”
”
David Epstein (Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World / Messy / The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
determination and faith and deep, abiding love, and because of that we are capable and worthy of repurpose, of restoration. Nothing is lost. We can all be made good again.
”
”
Ben Napier (Make Something Good Today: A Memoir)
“
We could have saved millions of lives with repurposed and therapeutic drugs. But there’s no profit in it. It’s all got to be about newly patented antivirals and their mischievous vaccines.
”
”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
The curve seems to be imprinted on us as a way to repurpose us for a changing role in society as we age, a role that is less about ambition and competition, and more about connection and compassion.
”
”
Jonathan Rauch (The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Hard in the Middle, Then Gets Much Better)
“
The culture is in a pivotal season of decision between throwing the family model out altogether, or fighting to get back to ground zero...the vintage family, refashioned and repurposed, by reclaiming its origin.
”
”
Drenda Keesee (The New Vintage Family: A Vintage Look for the Modern-Day Family)
“
Either way, it's important that we all remember to play. Watching and being inspired by our uninhabited little ones can lead us in all manner of wonderful, creative, and different directions if we're open to following them.
”
”
Amanda Blake Soule (Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures)
“
Naan (the Persian word for "bread") at the table is not only a constant companion but a revered guest. Wheat is considered sacred, a symbol of life and the beginnings of civilization. Not a single crumb is ever to be wasted and should always be repurposed.
”
”
Naz Deravian (Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories)
“
Rather than waste or eliminate items which you don’t currently use, discover a new way to improve and enjoy their value. What strengths and talents can you repurpose for a new endeavor? How can you re-purpose your thoughts to ensure they help you rather than hinder?
”
”
Susan C. Young
“
Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.
”
”
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
“
Content repurposing is about getting the maximum return from every single piece of content you create. Content repurposing can take many forms, and there are lots of different and creative ways that you can repurpose your content, but every content creator must repurpose.
”
”
Amy Woods
“
there is any moral to this story, it’s that, when you are writing code, remember that someone may have to comb through it and check everything when it is being repurposed in the future. It could even be you, long after you have forgotten the original logic behind the code. For this reason, programmers can leave “comments” in their code, which are little messages to anyone else who has to read their code. The programmer mantra should be “Always comment on your code.” And make the comments helpful. I’ve reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is “Good luck, future Matt.
”
”
Matt Parker (Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors)
“
the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
New experiments reveal a multibillion-year history filled with cooperation, repurposing, competition, theft, and war. And that is just what happens inside DNA itself. With viruses continually infecting it, and its own parts at war with one another, the genome within each animal cell roils as it does its work in generation after generation.
”
”
Neil Shubin (Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA)
“
as soon as the war was over, the locals had picked the building apart and repurposed the materials to build a kindergarten in the village. And so from a slice of hell, a flower had blossomed. That was the lesson history taught. In time, nature always found a way to straighten out the perversions of the human spirit, burying them under new life.
”
”
Ilaria Tuti (The Sleeping Nymph)
“
A big birthday party, a family vacation, or other large-scale events like those are all wonderful, precious, and such a treat. But it's the day-to-day little things that we do - cleaning our home and our bodies, caring for ourselves in sickness and in health, nurturing a new baby - that carry the biggest impact in our lives and the lives of our children.
”
”
Amanda Blake Soule (Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures)
“
There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor.
”
”
Umberto Eco (Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics))
“
Of course, if I had my time again I probably wouldn’t touch a thing. I’d concentrate on the humans. I’d re-purpose them before they destroyed themselves.
”
”
Louise Candlish (Our House)
“
I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs “to provide superhuman strength” and the infrared and ultraviolet vision–bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to “allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness.
”
”
Mary Roach (Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War)
“
It began as a dollhouse. Over time, it has become more than that.
A dolltown. A dollworld. A dolluniverse.
Constantly expanding
Almost everyone who finds the room feels compelled to add to it. To leave the contents of their pockets repurposed as a wall or tree or temple. A thimble becomes a trash can. Used matchsticks create a fence. Loose buttons transform into wheels or apples or stars.
”
”
Erin Morgenstern (The Starless Sea)
“
I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but by luck or fate or design at some point it found the lighthouse keeper and did not let him go. How long he had as it remade him, repurposed him, is a mystery. There was no one to observe, to bear witness—until thirty years later a biologist catches a glimpse of him and speculates on what he might have become. Catalyst. Spark. Engine.
”
”
Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1))
“
With this warning, Mussolini demanded and was given authority to do just about whatever he wanted; but his initial priority, surprisingly, was good government. He knew that citizens were fed up with a bureaucracy that seemed to grow bigger and less efficient each year, so he insisted on daily roll calls in ministry offices and berated employees for arriving late to work or taking long lunches. He initiated a campaign to drenare la palude (“drain the swamp”) by firing more than 35,000 civil servants. He repurposed Fascist gangs to safeguard rail cargo from thieves. He allocated money to build bridges, roads, telephone exchanges, and giant aqueducts that brought water to arid regions. He gave Italy an eight-hour workday, codified insurance benefits for the elderly and disabled, funded prenatal health care clinics, established seventeen hundred summer camps for children, and dealt the Mafia a blow by suspending the jury system and short-circuiting due process. With no jury members to threaten and judges answerable directly to the state, the courts were as incorruptible as they were docile. Contrary to legend, the dictator didn’t quite succeed in making the trains run on time, but he earned bravos for trying.
”
”
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
“
Why can't the IRL people be more like the Internet people? This is maybe because real people aren't pixelated. Their mistakes and annoyingness can't be repurposed into a fantasy. I actually have to see the real people and be seen by them. If people never become real, it's harder for them to disappoint you. That's why the Internet is good for sad people. You can be with people without having to be with people.
”
”
Melissa Broder (So Sad Today: Personal Essays)
“
He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.
”
”
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
“
The rest goes to livestock or biofuels. The same is true for soy. We could simply repurpose that food, or repurpose that land to grow different crops. This all sounds very simple in principle but getting people to change behaviours is difficult. I don’t think that enough people will make this change based on the ethical pull alone. If we’re to change how people eat across the world we’re going to need some new, tasty, meat-like products
”
”
Hannah Ritchie (Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet)
“
A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.
”
”
Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
“
In nature, we find so may things. At the water's edge, atop a mountain, or in the middle of a park, I watch my children flourish in who they are. With all the distractions, toys, and walls out of the way, the essence of who they are just shines. When I remember to pay attention, I see it radiating so strongly that I can't help but be brought right into it myself. My children are experts on breathing, on living; they know how to do it. And the open air? Why, that's breath itself. When I find myself in the midst of unsettling chaos-full of more commitments and expectations that we can really handle-I need to look no further than my little ones for the answer to what I've forgotten: Stop. Breathe. Listen. Then we head straight to the beach, or right to the woods, and play until we find ourselves restored.
”
”
Amanda Blake Soule (Handmade Home: Simple Ways to Repurpose Old Materials into New Family Treasures)
“
This is a constraint of evolution. We weren’t built to acquire new cognitive abilities de novo. The only materials used for modern human cognition are these ancient structures that have to be commandeered to new purposes. Everything we do is built on the back of these apeish structures. Here we’re talking about the insular cortex, which receives the inputs from the viscera. You find rotting food disgusting—that’s the tale told by the insula. And the only way to build a mind that can find abstract ideas unacceptable is to repurpose, or extend the purpose, of those brain areas.
”
”
Sam Harris (Making Sense)
“
RACE AS WE KNOW IT IN THE US IS CLOSELY INTEGRATED with our economic system. The system of racism functioned primarily as a justification for the barbaric act of chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. You cannot put chains around the necks of other human beings or slaughter them wholesale, while maintaining social rules that prohibit such treatment, without first designating those people as somewhat less than human. And later, the function of racism was somewhat repurposed as a way of dividing lower classes, still with the ultimate goal of the economic and political supremacy of white elites.
”
”
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
“
Be wary of anyone who denies art its true complex and eternal nature, repurposing it for their own political contrivances. Art should not lecture or talk down to us or reprimand us. There is little left of the sacred in the modern world, but great art still offers us an opportunity to experience the hallowed, the mysterious and the reverential. For me, art of true significance chaffs against the prescribed modes of the day on its way to the transcendental. We are humbled by its power, as it reflects back to us something about the enigma of our own nature. We stand before it, quieted and awed, touched by the eternal.
”
”
Nick Cave
“
BEFORE THE TREE HOUSE WAS A RECORDING STUDIO FOR PODCASTS, IT WAS:* A grotto for mermaids and mermen. Piles of seashells. Buckets of sand from our old sand table. Fabric in shades of blue hanging everywhere. A fairy house. Shimmer fabric in shades of pink, yellow, and green. Tissue-paper flowers. Cutout butterflies with huge googly eyes. The boxcar from the Boxcar Children books. Spoons, tin plates, a knapsack, crackers, and plain cookies. Red-and-white-checked fabric for the windows. A keep. Cardboard swords wrapped in foil. Many, many of them. The Gryffindor common room. Red and gold, with wands made out of repurposed foil swords.
”
”
Carrie Firestone (Dress Coded)
“
By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn’t describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men, feeding, in particular, both longstanding resentment of African Americans and newly repurposed resentment of immigrants. Together, both Left and Right adopted both a politics and a cultural style animated by indictment and indignation.146
”
”
Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
“
How hard would it be to repurpose the old smoking lounges and designate a space where people can go to break down for whatever reason? A crying lounge could be stocked with cold beverages, soft chairs, windows to stare out of, large sunglasses in a range of sizes, fresh waterproof mascara, and friendly, quiet dogs of varying fluffiness. It could be centrally located but closed off, separate from the rest of the airport, just like time and space in the air are separate from time and space on the ground. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a place where we could privately fall to pieces and then get ourselves together? Instead, we have to do it out in the open.
”
”
Mary Laura Philpott (Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives)
“
For just a heartbeat I picture the life I could've had if I'd joined a sterile corporate law firm on the partner track. I imagined meeting my clients in paneled wood conference rooms instead of re-purposed storage closets that smell like bleach and pee. I imagine shaking the hand of a client whose hand isn't trembling from meth withdrawal or abject terror at a justice system he doesn't trust.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things)
“
They say in Zen, waking up to life requires three things: great faith, great doubt, and great effort. Faith isn’t a way of going to sleep. It’s the work of waking up. And, in order to wake up, you’ll need both great faith and great doubt. In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it. You can doubt what’s real in order to stay asleep or you can doubt your daydreams in order to wake up. You can use doubt to protect you from the truth or you can use doubt to leave you vulnerable to it. You’ll have doubts regardless. Repurpose them for the sake of faith. Saving doubt is a strong solvent that can burn holes in your [worldview] and lead you back to the work of being faithful to life and, thus, to God. Practicing doubt for the sake of faith is hard work and it demands great effort. Great faith, great doubt, great effort.
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Adam S. Miller
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We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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This region concentrates our learned knowledge of letter strings, to such an extent that it can be considered as our brain’s “letter box.” It is this brain area, for instance, that allows us to recognize a word regardless of its size, position, font, or cAsE, whether UPPERCASE or lowercase.39 In any literate person, this region, which is located in the same spot in all of us (give or take a few millimeters), serves a dual role: it first identifies a string of learned characters, and then, through its direct connections to language areas,40 it allows those characters to be quickly translated into sound and meaning. What would happen if we scanned an illiterate child or adult as she progressively learned to read? If the theory is correct, then we should literally see her visual cortex reorganize. The neuronal recycling theory predicts that reading should invade an area of the cortex normally devoted to a similar function and repurpose it to this novel task. In the case of reading, we expect a competition with the preexisting function of the visual cortex, which is to recognize all sorts of objects, bodies, faces, plants, and places.
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies. The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators would stop copying themselves, and start making material useful to the ASI that controlled them—programmable matter. The waste heat produced by the process would burn up the biosphere, so those of us some 6.9 billion humans who were not killed outright by the nano assemblers would burn to death or asphyxiate. Every other living thing on earth would share our fate. Through it all, the ASI would bear no ill will toward humans nor love. It wouldn’t feel nostalgia as our molecules were painfully repurposed. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Or would the roar of millions and millions of nano factories running at full bore drown out our voices?
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James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
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Dear Circle of Life,
The impression of you is so unique in the most exquisite ways. With you, there is a beginning and an end. You are the representation of birth and life. The in-between is survival, and the ending is death. The idea of life is just what it is when we arrive on the earth—our life is a circle, if you will, a 360. Once our wheels stop spinning, it rolls slowly until it completely stops. I believe there is a limitation to the circle of life—if there wasn’t, life would continue without end. Things are never certain, for there are always uncertain changes in the circle of life. In this universal symbol, there is repurpose in another life. You are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How can that be? I guess because you are energetic. We are wholeness in another world, but here on earth, we are here to play the game from the cards that we are dealt until our time runs out. A world without end—that is interesting. I guess it is true because when we go to a new dimension, there is no such thing as an ending. Once we pass over, we originate into our infinite perfection. The self sees and feels no more back- biting, hurt, pain, depression, despair, and all the bullshit that follows. The circle of life has no blame, solitude, or default. Everything is what it is ... because it is perfect!
I am aligned with the frequency and vibration of the moon and the stars.
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Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
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While the technosphere concept stresses that most humans lack the potential to influence the behavior of large technological systems, the ergosphere concept makes this possibility dependent on the existence of appropriate social and political structures and knowledge systems, and also on the individual perspectives of human actors. One cause for hope is that a knowledge economy produces and distributes not only the knowledge needs for its functioning (and often less) but, to varying degrees, an excess of knowledge (an 'epistemic spillover') that may trigger unexpected developments.
Humans must certainly maintain and preserve their tools, technologies, and infrastructures, but they also change them with each implementation. The material world of the ergosphere consists of borderline objects between nature and culture that may trigger innovations as well as unpredictable consequences. The ergosphere has a plasticity and porousness in which materials and functions are not so tightly interwoven as to exclude the repurposing of existing tools for new applications. In principle, each aspect of the ergosphere can be transformed from an end into a means, which is then available to emerging intentions and functions. Repurposing a given tool is, however, a double-edged sword - it may have disastrous consequences. Thus, the responsibility for using and developing technical systems must always be assumed anew.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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By collecting data from the vast network of doctors across the globe, they added dozens of new compounds to the arsenal—all proven effective against COVID-19. Dr. Kory told me that he was deeply troubled that the extremely successful efforts by scores of front-line doctors to develop repurposed medicines to treat COVID received no support from any government in the entire world—only hostility—much of it orchestrated by Dr. Fauci and the US health agencies. The large universities that rely on hundreds of millions in annual funding from NIH were also antagonistic. “We didn’t have a single academic institution come up with a single protocol,” said Dr. McCullough. “They didn’t even try. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, you name it. Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. As we shall see, these institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions,” says Kory. “It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.” Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Maybe you have already been writing, but never considered a book before. What you have contributed to websites, discussion groups, blogs and membership communities can lead to books. These are great places to flesh out ideas, get reader feedback, and sometimes even catch the attention of an agent, publisher or larger audience. If anything, a well branded presence on the internet positions you in a way where you have the opportunity to become the authority or expert. Do not let any of what you have written online go to waste. Make files and collect all of your information because you may have enough content already written to fill two books!
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Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing)
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Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.
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Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
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Blue Bottle wanted to help customers find coffee they’d love. But coffee beans all look alike, so photos wouldn’t be helpful. To find useful solutions, the team did Lightning Demos of websites selling everything from clothes to wine, looking for ways to describe sensory details such as flavor, aroma, and texture. In the end, it was a chocolate-bar wrapper that provided the most useful idea. Tcho is a chocolate manufacturer in Berkeley, California. Printed on the wrapper of every Tcho bar is a simple flavor wheel with just six words: Bright, Fruity, Floral, Earthy, Nutty, and Chocolatey. When Blue Bottle looked at that wheel, they got inspired, and when we sketched, someone repurposed the idea as a simple flavor vocabulary for describing Blue Bottle’s coffee beans: In Friday’s test, and later, at the new online store, customers loved the simple descriptions. It’s a prime example of finding inspiration outside your domain (and yet another reason to be grateful for chocolate).
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Jake Knapp (Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)
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We recommend that you repurpose your most popular blog posts and convert them into SlideShare presentations.
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Guy Kawasaki (The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users)
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Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.
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Steven Kotler (Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work)
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If you are looking to maximize your investment performance, find properties being sold as family weekend getaways and repurpose that asset into a 97 percent occupied short-term rental.
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Culin Tate (Host Coach: A Blueprint for Creating Financial Freedom Through Short-Term Rental Investing)
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Praying to a god she only acknowledged before the results of exams and pregnancy sticks,
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Meaghan Curley (Girl: Repurposed)
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A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past.
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Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
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A single content asset can be repurposed and reshaped to create massive value and expand your reach.
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Becky Robinson (Reach: Create the Biggest Possible Audience for Your Message, Book, or Cause)
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Conversion means that people change their direction, not their character or their history. Desire, that constant reminder that there is something beckoning beyond any immediate horizon, is there to be re-purposed; it is not there to be torn out or thrown away or violently bent out of shape. The flowering of desire in the human soul is a herald for God‘s presence, because desire points towards something we have not made for ourselves and cannot encompass. It speaks God’s truth: that the perfectly regulated and performed self is not, in fact, available to anyone. Neither the religious nor the secular closed self can thrive.
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Jessica Martin (Holiness and Desire)
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In a letter of advice to the Augustinian mission, Gregory counselled them to treat conversion as a process of adaptation, telling them to offer the newly converted Anglo-Saxons Christian feasts in exchange for their existing festivals and to repurpose the sites of pagan shrines as Christian churches. The idea was that it would be easier for people to accept the new religion if they were allowed to keep aspects of their old festivals:
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Eleanor Parker (Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year)
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University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin has made it her work to study modern Thomas Edisons—“serial innovators,” she and two colleagues termed them. Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: “high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources”; “they appear to flit among ideas”; “broad range of interests”; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.” Get the picture?
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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And we don’t have what you humans call a ‘break room’ per se, but we do have this lovely spot just beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death that has a microwave.
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Meaghan Curley (Girl: Repurposed)
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While her eyes traveled down its belly in an attempt to count how many teats it possessed, she was alarmed to learn, “Cerberus is a female?” Hermes nodded. “Only a mighty bitch can keep the innumerable souls of Hades in check.
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Meaghan Curley (Girl: Repurposed)
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Superheroes are the story of America. They are the means America uses to tell its story, and it sees itself as the ultimate superhero. America is the most mythical country in the world because, ironically, it has the least myths of its own. America isn’t an inventive country, it’s a re-inventive country. It’s always stealing from everywhere else and repurposing it. Why is Hollywood in the USA and not in Europe? It’s because America is a laboratory for reinventing and representing old stories, for continually mythologizing itself, in order to establish for itself a set of myths such as other, much more historical nations, have naturally. But America is now running out of stories, and is plundering its own stories that it has already told so often. How many times do we need to see Spiderman’s Origin Story, or Superman’s, or Batman’s? The same old material is being endlessly recycled. America has run out of stories, and that’s why it’s going into a steep decline. It can’t inflate itself any more. The wells of its imagination have run dry.
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David Sinclair (Superheroes and Presidents: How Absurd Stories Have Poisoned the American Mind)
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If reframing by dint of repertoire or repurposing fails, we need to devise a new frame altogether, an act of reinvention. This is exemplified by Charles Darwin. He is popularly associated with the idea of survival of the fittest. But the frame he invented is more fundamental: that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors. That basic concept—literally a diagram of the tree of life—transformed how humans understood the origin of life on Earth and how species evolved. In this way, the reframing was not a matter of applying a new frame from one’s repertoire or finding and adapting a new frame from another context to a new problem. Rather, it can be seen as inventing a new frame altogether.
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Kenneth Cukier (Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil)
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the idea of repurposing a frame from elsewhere. We do this when we need to reframe but have no ready alternative at our disposal, so we look to other domains for an existing frame that could be adjusted to our current circumstances. It won’t be a ready template and so may require substantial cognitive work to shape it appropriately, but at least having something to play with can get us started.
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Kenneth Cukier (Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil)
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The key to IKEA’s initial success was its use of an alternative mental frame of what furniture represents and is used for: not timeless but timely. Yet that frame wasn’t entirely new. It had been in the air. Other sectors were undergoing a transition from the durable to the disposable. Luckily for IKEA’s founder, the furniture sector had not yet, so his repurposed frame gave IKEA an edge.
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Kenneth Cukier (Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil)
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Weekend getaway places in these areas make the best investments. Unlike downtown city properties, getaway locations have the potential to be scooped at a low price and repurposed into successful full-time, short-term rentals.
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Culin Tate (Host Coach: A Blueprint for Creating Financial Freedom Through Short-Term Rental Investing)
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Sometimes the kitchen would bring out large plates piled high with fries or grilled cheese cut into tiny pieces. If Frank, the line cook, was working and in a good mood (which usually meant he was stoned), he'd sometimes repurpose the specials into amazing creations---leftover short ribs stuffed into tortillas or mini turkey sliders with cranberry sauce.
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Jennifer Close (Marrying the Ketchups)
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In 2019, Dr. A. Luciano et al. reported a list of drugs repurposed for colorectal cancer treatment currently in clinical trials. This list includes: aspirin, celecoxib, doxycycline, etodolac, indomethacin, mebendazole, metformin, niclosamide, propranolol, simvastatin, and valproate. (35)
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Jeffrey Dach (Cracking Cancer Toolkit: Using Repurposed Drugs for Cancer Treatment)
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The Victorian sketches that have come to define Trader Joe’s merchandizing were cost control: books published before 1906 were pre-copyright and so free for Joe to repurpose with a funny caption. He spent hours cutting them out himself at his home easel.
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Benjamin Lorr (The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket)
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We can repurpose pain into valuable silver linings. We can create futures that don't resemble our pasts.
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Franco Cardiello (Love Is a Mental Illness)
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and she’d repurposed the photos,
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Prince Harry (Spare)
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We are social animals and any honest assessment of how sex actually functions in our lives would lead us to conclude that while its original purpose was purely reproductive, we long ago—eons ago—repurposed it in ways that conferred evolutionary advantages that weren’t solely about passing on our genes. You were likelier to survive and your offspring were likelier to survive if you were liked, and you were likelier to be liked if you gave good head.
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Dan Savage (Savage Love from A to Z: Advice on Sex and Relationships, Dating and Mating, Exes and Extras)
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A ‘new start’ is where I tediously reconstruct everything I’ve spent most of my life destroying. A ‘fresh start’ is where God hands me something I’ve haven’t had the chance to destroy. And while I am free to choose either one, the former is a life repurposed while the latter is a life reborn.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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In short, I have spent much of my career working on vaccine development. I have also had extensive experience in drug repurposing for infectious disease outbreaks. My contributions to science and industry are outstanding. I am proud of my contributions. My friendships and connections with professional colleagues have persisted for years. So, when I am defamed by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, or others, I know that there is more driving their character assassination attempts than efforts to report actual truth. These attacks are not about “me” personally, but rather about me speaking outside of the approved government and WHO/WEF narrative concerning COVID-19 policies.
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Robert W. Malone (Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming)
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Hold on to your childhood imagination. Ideas, characters, and concepts that you came up with when you were young can be repurposed for newer stories.
We are all creatives, in one way or another, so don't lose your sense of childhood wonder and imagination.
Persevere, work hard, and never stop dreaming
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Alex Galassi