Ripley Series Quotes

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

Rip ran a hand through his dusty brown hair and tried to imagine what Larsen had found. Larsen’s words “a Cosega find” had been playing over in his mind almost constantly since he’d heard them. Cosega was the reason that Rip became an archaeologist. The Jeep’s motor whined as it pushed over the unmaintained road. Rip’s thoughts drifted to the past. They always did when he was in the mountains. Fifteen years earlier he had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with honors after publishing a series of papers on the prehistory of man. His first break came when billionaire Booker Lipton, a Penn alumnus who had amassed a fortune through brutal corporate takeovers and a variety of other business dealings, immediately offered him funding. Rip had skipped the “cap and gown nonsense,” as he called it, and was already in Africa when his degree caught up with him. His first human origins digs were featured in an eight-page layout for National Geographic. Within a few years Archaeology Magazine had twice detailed his findings for cover stories. He taught courses at three different universities, and often shared his expertise on news and talk shows. Then, four years ago, he published a paper on the creation stories of all known Native American tribes entitled: Cosega. The controversy that erupted after had almost ended his career. Not yet forty, Ripley had already achieved more than the greats

When college students were asked to tap out the rhythm of any of twenty-five well-known songs, they predicted that the people listening would correctly guess about half of them. After all, the person doing the tapping could “hear” the melody, the instruments, and even the lyrics in her head. It was so obvious! Out of 120 tapped-out songs, the listeners guessed just under 3 percent correctly. This is the illusion of communication. We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate. We lack empathy for what it is like to be outside our own heads. The listener occupies a different reality, hearing only a series of dull, barren taps, one after the other. It sounds like nothing at all. “The biggest problem in communication,” as the saying goes, “is the illusion that it has taken place.

Talking,” as he called it, leading conversations for adults on the spiritual topics that had gotten him into trouble in the classroom—and getting paid for it. Margaret determined to try the same with a class of adult women in Boston. Her aim was more practical than spiritual, however: to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action,” as she wrote in a letter to Sophia Ripley, proposing a series of weekly “Conversations” to begin in the fall of 1839 and continue through the spring, if interest remained strong. She asked both Sophia Ripley and Elizabeth Peabody to help her gather a “circle” of women “desirous to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Too often, Margaret observed, thinking perhaps of her mother or the aged women in the Groton cabin, it is only when “their best years are

Some people do the world a favor when they decide to leave it early. It's not necessarily my job or yours to stop that

Engineers were regarded as the heroes of the new millennium, and Galveston’s board of commissioners voted to put its problem in the hands of three of the best known—Colonel Henry M. Robert, Alfred Noble, and H. C. Ripley. Robert, who had recently retired from the Army Corps of Engineers (and was famous for having drafted Robert’s Rules of Order), knew Galveston well. He had been instrumental in deepening the harbor, and had recommended constructing a dike between Pelican Island and the mainland, to redirect the current and prevent sedimentary deposits from clogging the channel. He had also recommended building a breakwater along the beach, a recommendation that, had it been approved, might have saved thousands of lives in the 1900 storm. But it had been rejected, beaten back by the argument that such a construction would obscure the view and play hell with the tourist trade.

Alfred Noble had built bridges across the Mississippi, constructed the breakwater across the lakefront at Chicago, and helped build the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. Ripley had served with the Corps of Engineers in Galveston—he had designed the wagon bridge across the bay—and was considered an expert on Island pecularities like tides, winds, currents, and the workings of storm tides on sand and subsoil. This latter field of expertise was especially vital since the 1900 storm had drastically rearranged the Island’s topography.

We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate. We lack empathy for what it is like to be outside our own heads. The listener occupies a different reality, hearing only a series of dull, barren taps, one after the other.