Reverse Engineered Quotes

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

Copying is about reverse-engineering.

Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.

As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it." I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally, I would have given for that one which I had wrested from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence ...

Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. There has been a certain amount of reverse engineering that has allowed some of these craft, or some components, to be duplicated. And there is some group of people that may or may not be associated with government at this point that have this knowledge. They have been attempting to conceal this knowledge. People in high level government have very little, if any, valid information about this. It has been the subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and create confusion so the truth doesn’t come out.

Allan Dulles said it best: "Any intelligence service worth its salt can make the other fellow's currency." In other words, every nation needs to have its own airtight security measures, while at the same time be actively working in secret to reverse engineer those of the enemy faster than they can invent them.

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.

There are no inherent barriers to our being able to reverse engineer the operating principles of human intelligence and replicate these capabilities in the more powerful computational substrates that will become available in the decades ahead. The human brain is a complex hierarchy of complex systems, but it does not represent a level of complexity beyond what we are already capable of handling.

Plagiarism is trying to pass someone else's work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering.

Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.

The only thing I knew was that I would give myself permission to imagine anything, and reverse engineer my way from there.

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.

The user experience design of a product essentially lies between the intentions of the product and the characteristics of your user.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Where some see a new world disorder, others see the opportunity to bring organization.

It’s never one thing that leads to a tragic accident, she was sure she’d read once—though she couldn’t say where. It’s usually seven things—seven mistakes, or errors in judgment, or acts of negligence. If you reverse engineer any major disaster—oil spill or train derailment or airplane crash—there are usually seven things that had to go wrong in order for them to occur. Claudia

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.

Engineers naturally tend to focus first on the product and then on its users. For an anthropologist, it’s the exact reverse: people come first, then the product.

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product.

UX DESIGN IS MBA REVERSE ENGINEERED.

Decisions and actions are best when reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Start with what you want and work backward. Think and act from your goal, rather than toward your goal.

ONCE YOU LEARN HOW TO SEE HOW YOUR INNER TURMOIL MANIFESTS ITSELF THROUGH YOUR SURROUNDINGS, YOU CAN REVERSE ENGINEER THIS, MASTERING YOURSELF BY MASTERING THE SPACE IN WHICH YOU LIVE.

Feelings are the shadows of thoughts. When we have negative thoughts, our emotions mirror them with anxiety. You can often see what you are thinking by reverse engineering and studying your feelings.

The value system at Intel is completely the reverse. The Ph.D. in computer science who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.

I learned years later that my gratitude practice actually helped me form new neural pathways. The hippie rituals of positive affirmations are not just baloney. Gratitude doesn’t exist only in your mind—you have to feel it in your whole being. Feelings are the shadows of thoughts. When we have negative thoughts, our emotions mirror them with anxiety. You can often see what you are thinking by reverse engineering and studying your feelings.

if you are stuck somewhere small in your mind, somewhere unhappy or afraid or paralyzed or heartbroken, all of which are a kind of claustrophobic circling and circling, you might be able to reverse-engineer an expansion, shove yourself through into some larger mind place by putting yourself in the way of some vaster spaces in the world.

This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy.

Successful entrepreneurs also excel at something else: pattern recognition. They possess an extraordinary capacity for identifying profitable opportunities by linking successes they’ve observed in the past with changes now taking place in the market.

A change of oil…yes, that was what we all needed from time to time, whether we were an engine or a person. And there were other similarities to be explored. Engines had to be handled gently, as did people. Forward gears were better than reverse gears—for people as well as engines.

Ford and Arthur talking: "This is very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's been bought out." Arthur leapt up. "Oh, very serious," he shouted. "Please fill me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!" "You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!" "Oh!" shouted Arthur again. "Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please, can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?" Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is what you call sarcasm, isn't it?" "Do you know," bellowed Arthur, "I think it is? I really think it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia to assail me with next?" ... "Temporal reverse engineering." Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from side to side. "Is there any humane way," he moaned, "in which I can prevent you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?" ... "I leaped out of a high-rise office window." This cheered Arthur up. "Oh!" he said. "Why don't you do it again?" "I did." "Hmmm," said Arthur, disappointed. "Obviously no good came of it." ... "What was the self-sacrifice?" "I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes." "Why was that self-sacrifice?" "Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly. "I think we have different value systems." "Well, mine's better.

But the engine started, eventually, after a bunch of popping and churning, and then it idled, wet and lumpy. The transmission was slower than the postal service. She rattled the selector into reverse, and all the mechanical parts inside called the roll and counted a quorum and set about deciding what to do. Which required a lengthy debate, apparently, because it was whole seconds before the truck lurched backward. She turned the wheel, which looked like hard work, and then she jammed the selector into a forward gear, and first of all the reversing committee wound up its business and approved its minutes and exited the room, and then the forward crew signed on and got comfortable, and a motion was tabled and seconded and discussed. More whole seconds passed, and then the truck slouched forward, slow and stuttering at first, before picking up its pace and rolling implacably toward the exit gate.

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain).

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.

Carnot’s theorem: The most efficient heat engine is one that operates reversibly.

Any metric that seizes your attention but doesn’t contribute to your health, well-being, or career is ultimately a distraction.

How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization.

Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).

For Zuk and the other woman boycotters, this endeavor was not about escaping the confines of being working class, but about protecting the rights of the working class. What this strategy innately relies on is the foremost recognition that poor and working-class people have and deserve rights in the first place—and aren’t plagues on society who are lazy, unwilling to apply themselves, or should, through some elaborate matrix and suspension of systemic blockades, simply not be working class. Existing in this socioeconomic bracket with these intrinsic financial realities was a legitimate life, across their families as well as their neighbors. And this communal approach to understanding their needs and successes was anchored deeply in protecting food prices for everyone rather than reverse engineering their individual lives to accommodate the price hike.

It was common, back then," said Vikram, rolling his tea glass between his palms. "Living books. Alchemists were always trying to create them. There was the Quran, which shattered language and put it back together again in a way no one had been able to replicate, using words whose meanings evolved over time without the alteration of a single dot or brushstroke. As above, so below, the alchemists reasoned-they thought they could reverse-engineer the living word using chemical compounds. If they could create a book that was literally alive, perhaps it would also produce knowledge that transcended time." "That's pretty blasphemous," said the convert. "Oh, very. Heretics, my dear. They made the hashisheen look orthodox.

Besides the changes in technology, we’re told to believe in our uniqueness above all else. We’re told to think big, live big, to be memorable and “dare greatly.” We think that success requires a bold vision or some sweeping plan—after all, that’s what the founders of this company or that championship team supposedly had. (But did they? Did they really?) We see risk-taking swagger and successful people in the media, and eager for our own successes, try to reverse engineer the right attitude, the right pose.

A useful first step is to reverse engineer the situation back to the triggering event and to define the specific problem you are facing. You can then determine options for handling it. The various manifestations of anger reflect a sense that something is “not fair,” which is related to a should statement, such as “this should not happen.” Dealing with “shoulds” involves acknowledging that you obviously are not happy that something happened, but that you must still face the fact that it did happen. Thus, the task then turns to dealing with the situation.

Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one's least attractive, that sometimes it's just easier not to do anything. Writing--I can really only speak to writing here--always, always only starts out as shit" an infant on monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.

all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I’m also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that’s a nasty one--tectonic inversion--

Earth Defense Alliance ships were outfitted with reverse-engineered alien technology, including a Trägheitslosigkeit Field Generator, which created a small inertia-cancellation field around a spacecraft, by “harnessing the aligned spin of gyromagnetic particles to alter the curvature of space-time” or something.

Copyright © 2008 by Working Partners Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. ePub edition November 2007 ISBN 9780061757396

So, when I read of a recent study that found that children are significantly more inclined to eat “difficult” foods like liver, spinach, broccoli—and other such hard-to-sell “but-it’s-good-for-you” classics—when they are wrapped in comfortingly bright packages from McDonald’s, I was at first appalled, and then … inspired. Rather than trying to co-opt Ronald’s all-too-effective credibility among children to short-term positive ends, like getting my daughter to eat the occasional serving of spinach, I could reverse-engineer this! Use the strange and terrible powers of the Golden Arches for good—not evil! I plan to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and then wrap it carefully in McDonald’s wrapping paper. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but something that a two-and-a-half-year-old will find “yucky!”—even upsetting—in the extreme. Maybe a sponge soaked with vinegar. A tuft of hair. A Barbie head. I will then place it inside the familiar cardboard box and leave it—as if forgotten—somewhere for my daughter to find. I might even warn her, “If you see any of that nasty McDonald’s … make sure you don’t eat it!” I’ll say, before leaving her to it. “Daddy was stupid and got some chocolate … and now he’s lost it…” I might mutter audibly to myself before taking a long stroll to the laundry room. An early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.

I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.

One person looks around and see a universe created by a God who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no greater difference between each other, for neither set of beliefs makes us kinder or wiser. William the Bastard forcing Harold to swear over the bones of Saint Jerome, the Church of Rome rent asunder by the King's Great Matter, the twin towers folding into smoke. Religion fueling the turns and reverses of human history, or so it seems, but twist them all to catch a different light and those same passionate beliefs seem no more than banners thrown up to hide the usual engines of greed and fear. And in our single lives? Those smaller turns and reverses? Is it religion which trammels and frees, which gives or withholds hope? Or are these, too, those old base motives dressed up for a Sunday morning? Are they reasons or excuses?

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. “If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it,” von Neumann admitted in 1948.

Edward was walking past the front of my truck, looking straight forward, his lips pressed together. I yanked the door open and jumped inside, slamming it loudly behind me. I revved the engine deafeningly and reversed out into the aisle. Edward was in his car already, two spaces down, sliding out smoothly in front of me, cutting me off. He stopped there—to wait for his family; I could see the four of them walking this way, but still by the cafeteria. I considered taking out the rear of his shiny Volvo, but there were too many witnesses.

Driving up to the convent, the reflection of Furlong’s headlights crossed the windowpanes and it felt as though he was meeting himself there. Quietly as he could he drove past the front door and reversed down the side, to the coal shed, and turned the engine off. Sleepily, he climbed out and looked over the yews and hedges, the grotto with its statue of Our Lady, whose eyes were downcast as though she was disappointed by the artificial flowers at her feet, and the frost glittering in places where patches of light from the high windows fell.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

As soon as we formulate a hypothesis that we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done. Remember that although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

The main ones are the symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers. Each tribe has a set of core beliefs, and a particular problem that it cares most about. It has found a solution to that problem, based on ideas from its allied fields of science, and it has a master algorithm that embodies it. For symbolists, all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols, in the same way that a mathematician solves equations by replacing expressions by other expressions. Symbolists understand that you can’t learn from scratch: you need some initial knowledge to go with the data. They’ve figured out how to incorporate preexisting knowledge into learning, and how to combine different pieces of knowledge on the fly in order to solve new problems. Their master algorithm is inverse deduction, which figures out what knowledge is missing in order to make a deduction go through, and then makes it as general as possible. For connectionists, learning is what the brain does, and so what we need to do is reverse engineer it. The brain learns by adjusting the strengths of connections between neurons, and the crucial problem is figuring out which connections are to blame for which errors and changing them accordingly. The connectionists’ master algorithm is backpropagation, which compares a system’s output with the desired one and then successively changes the connections in layer after layer of neurons so as to bring the output closer to what it should be. Evolutionaries believe that the mother of all learning is natural selection. If it made us, it can make anything, and all we need to do is simulate it on the computer. The key problem that evolutionaries solve is learning structure: not just adjusting parameters, like backpropagation does, but creating the brain that those adjustments can then fine-tune. The evolutionaries’ master algorithm is genetic programming, which mates and evolves computer programs in the same way that nature mates and evolves organisms. Bayesians are concerned above all with uncertainty. All learned knowledge is uncertain, and learning itself is a form of uncertain inference. The problem then becomes how to deal with noisy, incomplete, and even contradictory information without falling apart. The solution is probabilistic inference, and the master algorithm is Bayes’ theorem and its derivates. Bayes’ theorem tells us how to incorporate new evidence into our beliefs, and probabilistic inference algorithms do that as efficiently as possible. For analogizers, the key to learning is recognizing similarities between situations and thereby inferring other similarities. If two patients have similar symptoms, perhaps they have the same disease. The key problem is judging how similar two things are. The analogizers’ master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions.

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

So what exactly is HOW? For many, business and life has always been about the pursuit of What: “What do we do? What’s on the agenda? What do we need to accomplish?” Whats are commodities; they are easily duplicated or reverse-engineered and delivered faster and at a lower cost by someone else. How is a philosophy. It's a way of thinking about individual and organizational behavior. And How we do what we do – our behavior – has become today’s greatest source of our advantage. In this world, How is no longer a question, but the answer to what ails us as people, institutions, companies, nations. How we behave, how we consume, how we build trust in our relationships and how we relate to others provides us with the power to not just survive, but thrive and endure.

hotbed of radicalism in the capital, the campus and its adjacent streets were jammed with students. Just finished with their midday prayers, they were now chanting and marching. Some were firing machine guns into the air. Charlie could feel the same violent spirit that had pervaded the scene around the embassy, and he immediately slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt. Jamming the car into reverse, he gunned the engine and began to back up but was cut off by a VW van filled with students that had come up behind them. The VW’s driver suddenly began screaming something about their American car, and six young men jumped out, carrying wooden sticks and metal pipes. “Lock your doors, Claire,” Charlie ordered, doing the same on his side. Wild-eyed, the students surrounded the Buick, taunting and cursing them.

Islamic societies in the Middle East are relatively conservative and not at the forefront of technology. But medieval Islam in the same region was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than contemporary Europe; it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical Greek books are now known to us only through Arabic copies; it invented or elaborated windmills, tidal mills, trigonometry, and lateen sails; it made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering, and irrigation methods; and it adopted paper and gunpowder from China and transmitted them to Europe. In the Middle Ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe, rather than from Europe to Islam as it is today. Only after around A.D. 1500 did the net direction of flow begin to reverse.

Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. “Hi, uh. I’m Jack.” Kim took it. “Jack what?” “Huh?” “Your last name, silly.” “Jackson.” She blinked at him. “Your name is Jack Jackson?” He blushed. “No, uh, my first name’s Rhett, but I hate it, so…” He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. “Well, Jack, what’s your field of study?” “Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I’m working on a research project at the institute.” “Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini’s getting a little low.” “I’ve got that, one second.” He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well. “What do you want to do after you’re done with the project?” Kim continued. “Depends on what I find.” She sent him a simmering smile. “What are you looking for?” Immediately, Jack’s eyes lit up and his posture straightened. “I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, or one with a similar ancestry that could hopefully lead to rebuilding extinct animals via surrogate birth or in-vitro fertilization. We’re on the edge of breaking that code, and if we do, it would mean that we could engineer all kinds of life and reverse what damage we’ve done to the planet’s ecosystem.” Kim stared. “Right. Would you excuse me for a second?” She wiggled off back to her pack of friends by the bar. Judging by the sniggering and the disgusted glances he was getting, she wasn’t coming back. Jack sighed and finished off his beer, massaging his forehead. “Yes, brilliant move. You blinded her with science. Genius, Jack.” He ordered a second one and finished it before he felt smallish hands on his shoulders and a pair of soft lips on his cheek. He turned to find Kamala had returned, her smile unnaturally bright in the black lights glowing over the room. “So…how did it go with Kim?” He shot her a flat look. “You notice the chair is empty.” Kamala groaned. “You talked about the research project, didn’t you?” “No!” She glared at him. “…maybe…” “You’re so useless, Jack.” She paused and then tousled his hair a bit. “Cheer up. The night’s still young. I’m not giving up on you.” He smiled in spite of himself. “Yet.” Her brown eyes flashed. “Never.

De Grey describes his goal as “engineered negligible senescence”—stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease-prone as it grows older.18 As he explains, “All the core knowledge needed to develop engineered negligible senescence is already in our possession—it mainly just needs to be pieced together.”19 De Grey believes we’ll demonstrate “robustly rejuvenated” mice—mice that are functionally younger than before being treated and with the life extension to prove it—within ten years, and he points out that this achievement will have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Demonstrating that we can reverse the aging process in an animal that shares 99 percent of our genes will profoundly challenge the common wisdom that aging and death are inevitable. Once robust rejuvenation is confirmed in an animal, there will be enormous competitive pressure to translate these results into human therapies, which should appear five to ten years later.

Instead, I gave them the only salute I could think of. Two middle fingers. Held high for emphasis. The six fiery orbs winked out at once. Hopefully, they’d died from affront. Ben eyed me sideways as he maneuvered from shore. “What in the world are you doing?” “Those red-eyed jerks were on the cliff,” I spat, then immediately felt silly. “All I could think of.” Ben made an odd huffing sound I couldn’t interpret. For a shocked second, I thought he was furious with me. “Nice work, Victoria.” Ben couldn’t hold the laughter inside. “That oughta do it!” I flinched, surprised by his reaction. Ben, cracking up at a time like this? He had such a full, honest laugh—I wished I heard it more. Infectious, too. I couldn’t help joining in, though mine came out in a low Beavis and Butthead cackle. Which made Ben howl even more. In an instant, we were both in stitches at the absurdity of my one-finger salutes. At the insanity of the evening. At everything. Tears wet my eyes as Sewee bobbed over the surf, circling the southeast corner of the island. It was a release I desperately needed. Ben ran a hand through his hair, then sighed deeply. “I love it,” he snickered, steering Sewee through the breakers, keeping our speed to a crawl so the engine made less noise. “I love you, sometimes.” Abruptly, his good humor cut off like a guillotine. Ben’s body went rigid. I felt a wave of panic roll from him, as if he’d accidently triggered a nuclear bomb. I experienced a parallel stab of distress. My stomach lurched into my throat, and not because of the rolling ocean swells. Did he just . . . what did he mean when . . . Oh crap. Ben’s eyes darted to me, then shot back to open water. Even in the semidarkness, I saw a flush of red steal up his neck and into his cheeks. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Shifted again. Debated going over the side. Did he really mean to say he . . . loved me? Like, for real? The awkward moment stretched longer than any event in human history. He said “sometimes,” which is a definite qualifier. I love Chinese food “sometimes.” Mouth opened as I searched for words that might defuse the tension. Came up with nothing. I felt trapped in a nightmare. Balanced on a beam a hundred feet off the ground. Sinking underwater in a sealed car with no idea how to get out. Ben’s lips parted, then worked soundlessly, as if he, too, sought to break the horrible awkwardness. A verbal retreat, or some way to reverse time. Is that what I want? For Ben to walk it back? A part of me was astounded by the chaos a single four-word utterance could create. Ben gulped a breath, seemed to reach a decision. As his mouth opened a second time, all the adrenaline in creation poured into my system. “I . . . I was just saying that . . .” He trailed off, then smacked the steering wheel with his palm. Ben squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head sharply as if disgusted by the effort. Ben turned. Blasted me with his full attention. “I mean it. I’m not going to act—

Patients tend to assume that their generic drugs are identical to brand-name drugs, in part because they imagine a simple and amicable process: as a patent expires, the brand-name company turns over its recipe, and a generic company makes the same drug, but at a fraction of the cost, since it no longer has to invest in research or marketing. But in fact, generic drug companies fight a legal, scientific, and regulatory battle, often in the dark, from the moment they set out to develop a generic. Mostly, their drugs come to market not with help from brand-name drug companies, but in spite of their efforts to stop them. Brand companies often resort to “shenanigans” and “gaming tactics” to delay generic competition, as the exasperated FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it. They will erect a fortress of patents around their drugs, sometimes patenting each manufacturing step—even the time-release mechanism, if there is one. They may make small alterations to their drugs and declare them new, to add years to their patents, a move known as “evergreening.” Rather than sell samples of their drugs, which generic makers need in order to study and reverse-engineer them, brand-name companies will withhold samples, which in 2018 led the FDA to begin publicly shaming the companies accused of such practices by posting their names on its website.

After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

There is no fault that can’t be corrected [in natural wine] with one powder or another; no feature that can’t be engineered from a bottle, box, or bag. Wine too tannic? Fine it with Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (granulate from fish bladders), gelatin (often derived from cow bones and pigskins), or if it’s a white, strip out pesky proteins that cause haziness with Puri-Bent (bentonite clay, the ingredient in kitty litter). Not tannic enough? Replace $1,000 barrels with a bag of oak chips (small wood nuggets toasted for flavor), “tank planks” (long oak staves), oak dust (what it sounds like), or a few drops of liquid oak tannin (pick between “mocha” and “vanilla”). Or simulate the texture of barrel-aged wines with powdered tannin, then double what you charge. (““Typically, the $8 to $12 bottle can be brought up to $15 to $20 per bottle because it gives you more of a barrel quality. . . . You’re dressing it up,” a sales rep explained.) Wine too thin? Build fullness in the mouth with gum arabic (an ingredient also found in frosting and watercolor paint). Too frothy? Add a few drops of antifoaming agent (food-grade silicone oil). Cut acidity with potassium carbonate (a white salt) or calcium carbonate (chalk). Crank it up again with a bag of tartaric acid (aka cream of tartar). Increase alcohol by mixing the pressed grape must with sugary grape concentrate, or just add sugar. Decrease alcohol with ConeTech’s spinning cone, or Vinovation’s reverse-osmosis machine, or water. Fake an aged Bordeaux with Lesaffre’s yeast and yeast derivative. Boost “fresh butter” and “honey” aromas by ordering the CY3079 designer yeast from a catalog, or go for “cherry-cola” with the Rhône 2226. Or just ask the “Yeast Whisperer,” a man with thick sideburns at the Lallemand stand, for the best yeast to meet your “stylistic goals.” (For a Sauvignon Blanc with citrus aromas, use the Uvaferm SVG. For pear and melon, do Lalvin Ba11. For passion fruit, add Vitilevure Elixir.) Kill off microbes with Velcorin (just be careful, because it’s toxic). And preserve the whole thing with sulfur dioxide. When it’s all over, if you still don’t like the wine, just add a few drops of Mega Purple—thick grape-juice concentrate that’s been called a “magical potion.” It can plump up a wine, make it sweeter on the finish, add richer color, cover up greenness, mask the horsey stink of Brett, and make fruit flavors pop. No one will admit to using it, but it ends up in an estimated 25 million bottles of red each year. “Virtually everyone is using it,” the president of a Monterey County winery confided to Wines and Vines magazine. “In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.

Five minutes later he was out of there. About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds. The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything. It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office. The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one. He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to deny knowledge of and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake. He was impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves when questioned, and so on. He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all. He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realized that the reason he couldn’t find them was that they were working already. He grinned with satisfaction. He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number thirteen. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.

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Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it. You can begin to trust yourself and play with mystery and big questions without the need for a crutch of an answer to lean on and sell to others (“Here you go, this crutch worked for me.”). And you then begin to see these big words, like imagination, fearlessness and truth as signposts to more fun, instead of the reverse as you do now. To start the engine, just follow what you yearn for, make a contract with that which compels you, and fulfill the trust of that contract through choice and action.

In an editorial, the journal Nature warned that one of the dangers of winning the Nobel Prize is that people attempt to enlist you for all sorts of causes.' It particularly cited Scientists and Engineers for America and its opposition to Bush science policies, though "there is little doubt that US federal science has suffered under Bush," the editors wrote. By engaging in partisan behavior, the journal warned, scientists risk "seeming to be self-interested, grant-obsessed, and out of touch." Actually, I think the reverse is true. It is remaining at the bench when times call for action that defines researchers as self-obsessed. As Burton Richter, a Stanford physicist, Nobel laureate, and founder and board member of SEA wrote in response to the Nature editorial, the organization's aim "is to make available to society at large the evidence-based science relating to critical issues facing us all." He added, "We hope both to draw attention to underappreciated science issues and provide the advocacy necessary to get things done-not along party-political lines but scientifically."4

reverse-engineer the faulty plates and fill their

By shifting the empirical emphasis from the search for mental faculties as unified neurobiological categories towards developing a more componential, constructionist functional architecture of the human brain, the overlap in empirical findings across psychological domains is not a problem for reverse inference, but becomes the engine that drives a more valid approach to reverse inference.

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You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product. Can you figure out who reigns supreme at Apple when you open the box for your new iPhone? Yes. It’s you, the customer; not the head of software, manufacturing, retail, hardware, apps, or the Guy Who Signs the Checks. That is exactly as it should be.

NEVER start sketching screens and then try to reverse-engineer a CM from them. This is a rookie mistake that can get you ejected from the Jedi academy.

Blue Brain Project, an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.

One of the crew shouted, “Man overboard!” Seeing what had happened, I instantly threw the engines into reverse, attempting to stop the vessel’s headway without backing over my floundering steward. As the ship shuttered from the unexpected reverse thrust of her engines, now running full speed astern and fighting the current, I watched helplessly as a large prehistoric reptile slithered into the muddy river. Instinctively he was followed by others. Within an instant they were underwater and out of sight, but I knew they were heading in our direction hoping for a tasty dinner. It took a while for me to actually stop the ship’s headway and start to back down. The bosun already had a ladder over the side and yelled to him to stop trashing around, but Henry was panicking and we all expected him to get pulled under. Henry quickly became aware of the imminent danger he was in and stopped floundering, thus allowing the current to carry him in our direction. Now with the ship stopped, we were at the mercy of the current. Henry, with fear painted on his face, would never be closer to us than now. This was the time for him to swim the last short distance, but his fear and knowing that splashing would attract the crocodiles caused him to freeze. With everyone shouting instructions it became confusing, so calculating the risk, I dove in and with just a few powerful strokes was next to Henry. The water was cool compared to the moist air and I thought it felt refreshing, but the only thing I should have been thinking about was getting the two of us out of there! Reaching out, I grabbed his already torn shirt and in what seemed less than a nanosecond towed him back to the ship. A push by me and a pull by the ship’s bosun landed the hapless steward on the deck like a fish out of water. Not wasting any time, I was up the ladder and onto the main deck in a shot. Looking back I half expected to see the huge mouth and glistening white teeth of a fearsome crocodilian. However, nothing stirred as we drifted with the current. Looking back to the now empty river bank I knew that just beneath the surface, they were in the murky water looking for us. Firing the engines up again, I turned the ship away from the bank and back on course in the channel. Handing the helm over to the Quartermaster, I went below to get changed since we would be approaching the treacherous sand bar in about a half hour.

Today, a hack isn’t something you want to be. A hack reverse-engineers all the work, barely getting by. The hack has no point of view, no assertions to be made. It’s simply “what do you need?” and “how little do I have to charge to get this gig?” (or “how much can I get away with?”).

Knowing how to change your habits means knowing how to confidently own and manage your days, focus on the behaviors that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want.”6

There are thousands of recipes online. I recommend starting with Ann Esselstyn’s recipe on her son Rip’s website, Engine2Diet.com.16 With kale chips, the more you snack, the healthier you are.

The rocks are craggy/unmanageable without sufficiently lacerating my Self ~ scarcely solid ground, but more accurately a foothold. Yet in smoothness, the rocks are even less effective against the sweep of the tides than the sands of the shore. I sit here, not terribly concerned about the bruises and scrapes the jagged rocks lend in the moment, but concerned nevertheless by the waves that sweep back so effortlessly over the catchstones and eternally beyond reach—evading capture, leaving only a dissipating froth upon the black ridges to signal, at the very least, that 'it' happened: for whatever 'it' is worth. There is a distinctive tenor to this declaration of presence, this collapsing flow—Something that reminds me of...?—the reverberations of which remain beyond the span of cognition. Reverberations: there exists a memory of a memory of a dream I had once, but never an authentic rendering of the essential Moment. Still I can hear it in dreams of memories of memories of dreams. In dreams: a faint voice. A persona, a belief system distinctly its own, yet for now, the roar of the tides are a whisper ears strain to grasp. Seemingly a clue to a memory locked within. Or it’s all imagination: perhaps the sound of the ocean causes me to assume I’m remembering something. Gives the memory a sentience of its own and a vessel allowing it to surge in and ebb out. Yes, I’ve heard such things mentioned before: the stimulus that reverse engineers the very memory it is presumed to trigger. Still, it bothers me: this evasive, timeless notion.

Once a diverse set of possibilities is established, the team then needs to reverse engineer the logic of each possibility. That is, it needs to specify what must be true for the possibility to be a terrific choice. Notice, this step is decidedly not for arguing about what is true, but rather for laying out the logic of what would have to be true for the group to collectively commit to a choice.

This process is a form of reverse engineering because the starting point is the (tentative) assumption that the conclusion is valid—namely, that this is a great possibility. The team then works to understand the conditions under which that assumption is correct. It works backward to declare the various conditions that would have to hold for this to be a great possibility.

At this reverse-engineering stage, there is absolutely no interest in opinions as to whether the conditions pertaining to a given possibility are true. In fact, expressing such opinions is counterproductive.

The process of reverse engineering is complete only when each group member understands the logic of the possibility and can say, “Yes, if all of those conditions were true, this would be a great possibility. And if any single condition weren’t true, this would not be a good possibility.

Again, for your organization, have you used the tools to help you think through your potential choices? Have you used the strategy logic flow framework to understand the industry, channel, and customer values, your own relative capability and cost positions, and competitive reactions in a way that can underpin sustainable where-to-play and how-to-win choices? Have you reverse engineered the strategic possibilities and asked what would have to be true to ensure that this possibility is the one that gives you the best chance to win?

Values are not arbitrary. They are reverse-engineered from the future you seek to build.

You're a lot, you know?" Max tilted his head. "What do you mean?" "Well, for one thing, why do you still have your sunglasses on?" He removed them from his face, and hung them on the V-neck of his T-shirt. "I guess I'm just used to-" "Do you really think no one recognizes you as long as you keep your sunglasses on? I promise you that poor thing knew who you were." Max started to argue but Hadley continued. "So there you are, the great Max Cavanagh, asking her to reverse engineer a pancake with you in her second week of work. Yeah. That's a lot.

Purified water is water that is mechanically filtered or processed to be cleaned for consumption. Distilled water and deionized water have been the most common forms of purified water, but water can also be purified by other processes including Reverse osmosis, carbon filtration, microfiltration, ultrafiltration, ultraviolet oxidation, or electrodialysis. In recent decades, a combination of the above processes have come into use to produce Purified water of such high purity that its trace contaminants are measured in parts per billion or parts per trillion. Purified water has many uses, largely in science and engineering laboratories and industries, and is produced in a range of purities. Purified water in colloquial English can also refer to water which has been treated to neutralize, but not necessarily remove contaminants considered harmful to humans or animals. Call us at- (510) 556-4380

Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can’t know.

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much—but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.

But it’s worth seeing what happens.” Jules pointed at Flow and Cheeks. “Work with engineering to reverse polarity on the positron matrix generator.

At the bar—I don’t drink either, but I’m told that at the bar—they serve honey oatmeal vodka. I reverse engineered the recipe, and it’s not a still, but I make it in my basement. The recipe, for those who are interested, is you take a bottle of vodka—you don’t want the supercheap stuff but you don’t want the expensive stuff because that’s a little bit of a rip-off—you pour it over a pound of just plain old oatmeal, uncooked, and half a jar of honey. You let it sit in the fridge for 2 weeks, stirring it now and then. Then you strain it back into the original bottle and you’re done.” *

I’ll focus on two of these patents, both issued in 2018,” I said to Mark Russell’s audience. “The first is entitled, Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device. This one involves an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. A vehicle capable of flying just as well in space, air, or water without leaving a heat signature. “Sound familiar? If you’re thinking this patent has to have come from the reverse engineering of an alien craft, you aren’t alone.” I paused for effect as I put the title pages of both patents on the screen. “The how of it all is quite interesting, taking me back to my grad school days. The invention involves the creation of a quantum vacuum around a vehicle using a dense, spinning, electromagnetic energy field. Such a quantum vacuum would repel matter that would otherwise impede the craft, greatly reducing the ship’s inertia, decreasing resistance, and leading to extreme speeds.” I smiled. “Let me read you a sentence from the actual, issued patent. I’m a science fiction writer, and even I wouldn’t have been crazy enough to write a sentence this bold. Here it is: this invention would also enable us to ‘engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level.’ “That’s in the actual patent. Really! You can find the patent and read it for yourself. All you have to do is Google its official USPTA number, which is US10144532B2.

Humanity’s escape was a five-step process. First, the Earth Engines would generate thrust in the opposite direction of the Earth’s movement, halting its rotation. Second, operating at full capacity, the engines would accelerate the Earth until it reached escape velocity, flinging it from the solar system. Third, the Earth would continue to accelerate as it flew through outer space toward Proxima Centauri. Fourth, the engines would reverse direction, restarting the Earth’s rotation and decelerating gradually. Fifth, the Earth would enter into orbit around Proxima Centauri, becoming its satellite. People called these five steps the ‘Braking Era’, the ‘Deserting Era’, the ‘First Wandering Era’ (during acceleration), the ‘Second Wandering Era’ (during deceleration), and the ‘Neosolar Era’. The entire migration process was projected to last 2,500 years, over one hundred generations.

His response captures what might be the ideal formula for popular appeal: “It’s derivative with a twist. That’s what they’re looking for.” In other words, if outright mimicry leads us nowhere and absolute novelty is met with scorn, the solution is to steer clear of both extremes. What gets noticed is the generally familiar with a minor variation. Karim Lakhani, one of the Harvard Business School professors who conducted the grant study, has another term for this: optimal newness.

I retrieved the guys’ guns, plus a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses. “I doubt the cavalry will arrive any time soon. But we should still get out of here.” “Where to?” “Somewhere private. We have a lot to talk about.” “OK.” Fenton made her way around to the driver’s side of her Jeep and flipped up the windshield. “My hotel.” She fired up the engine and shifted into Reverse, then sat with one foot on the brake and the other pressing down on the clutch. Both her hands were on the wheel. At the top. Pressed together at the twelve o’clock position. She was hanging on tight. Her knuckles were white. Veins and tendons began to bulge. She closed her eyes. Her chest heaved, like she was having trouble catching her breath. Then she regained control. Slowly. She relaxed her grip. She opened her eyes, which dislodged a couple of tears. “Sorry.” She brushed her cheeks then switched her right foot to the gas pedal and raised the clutch. “I was thinking of Michael. I can’t believe he’s gone.

Switching over Entire Networks Part of why cherry picking can be dangerous for the incumbent is that the upstart networks can reach over and directly acquire an entire set of users who have been conveniently aggregated on your network. It’s just software, after all, and users can spread competitors within an incumbent’s network by using all the convenient communication and social tools. Airbnb is again an example of this. The company not only unbundled Craigslist and turned the shared rooms idea into an entire product, but they actually used Craiglist users to advertise Airbnb to other users. How? Early on, Airbnb added functionality so that when a host was done setting up their listing, they could publish it to Craigslist, with photos, details, and an “Interested? Got a question? Contact me here” link that drove Craigslist users back to Airbnb. These features were accomplished not by using APIs provided by Craigslist, but by reverse-engineering the platform and creating a bot to do it automatically—clever! I first wrote about this in 2012 on my blog, in a post titled “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing” with this example in mind. By the time Craigslist decided it didn’t like this functionality and disabled it, months had passed and Airbnb had formed its atomic network. The same thing happened in the early days of social networks, when Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, and others grew on the back of email contacts importing from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mail clients. They used libraries like Octazen—later acquired by Facebook—to scrape contacts, helping the social networks grow and connect their users. At the time, these new social networks didn’t look like direct threats to email. They were operating within niche parts of messaging overall, focused on college and professional networks. It took several years for the email providers to shut down access after recognizing their importance. When an incumbent has its network cherry-picked, it’s extra painful along two dimensions: First, any network that is lost is unlikely to be regained, as anti-network effects kick back in. And second, the decline in market share hits doubly hard, which has implications for being able to raise money.

You cannot reverse-engineer a recipe for an instance of fear from a feeling of fear.

Our brains are engaged full time in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about what will be experienced next in every domain. This time-pressured, unsupervised generation process has necessarily lenient standards and introduces content—not all of which can be properly checked for truth—into our mental spaces. If left unexamined, the inevitable errors in these vestibules of consciousness would ultimately continue on to contaminate our world knowledge store. So there has to be a policy of double-checking these candidate beliefs and surmisings, and the discovery and resolution of these at breakneck speed is maintained by a powerful reward system—the feeling of humor; mirth—that must support this activity in competition with all the other things you could be thinking about.